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3 Tips for Navigating the April PAD Challenge

Last week, I posted the guidelines for the 2017 April PAD Challenge, which will start at the end of this week. This will be my 10th time through, so I thought I’d share some tips on how to get through a month of daily poeming.

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Re-create Your Poetry!

Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!

In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.

Click to continue.

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Consider Different Approaches

For each prompt, there’s a new poem to write. In fact, several poets over the years have shown there are often dozens of poems they can write from just one day’s prompt. So the first thing I like to do after encountering a new prompt is to consider different approaches I could take for the prompt.

For instance, the prompt might be to write a scary poem. Of course, I could write a straight up scary poem, and that would be fine. But it’s possible to write a humorous poem that includes horror elements. Or write a poem that’s scary, but maybe not in the traditional sense of zombies, vampires, or killer clowns. Instead, it might be food safety or a strange phobia.

Outside of considering different subject approaches, I also like to consider form for a moment. Do I want to write a poem that rhymes? Or would I rather go all free verse (or even prose) and figure out structure later? Sometimes when I’m not sure, I’ll just pick a traditional poetic form and use the constraints of the form to help me figure out which direction to take my poem.

Just Write

I like to take a minute or three to consider different approaches, because I’m a busy guy. After that, I just write. No worrying about publication, what everyone’s going to think when they open the day’s prompt and poem example, or really anything other than writing until the first draft is done.

For me, the goal is not to write a Best American Poem each time I sit down; it’s merely to create and see where that takes me. Often, I come to a poem with certain ideas and through the process of creating I find myself somewhere new. And it’s not unusual for those first drafts to kick me into a new poem that’s going somewhere else completely.

I firmly believe that poems beget poems. So don’t worry about being perfect; just write!

Have Fun

And yes, have fun. Let me say it again: Have fun!

If you miss a day or three of the challenge, that’s fine. Don’t stress out. If your poem isn’t highlighted as a top poem of the month, that’s fine. Hundreds (if not thousands) of poems written specifically for the April PAD Challenge have been published over the past 9 years; not all of them were named top poems of the month.

Instead of stressing over that stuff, seriously, just have fun. Write. Create. Experiment. Enjoy the process of writing and writing with others who are enjoying the process of writing.

One last time: Have fun!

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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). He’s a featured poet at the 2017 Austin International Poetry Festival (April 6-9) and is about to start his 10th year of prompting poets to poem on Poetic Asides beginning on Saturday morning.

Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.

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Chris Colfer: The First Time I Braved New York (and a Taxi!)

“You’re going to New York City … by yourself?” my mom was shocked to learn. “But Christopher, you’ve never even been to the doctor by yourself.”

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“Mom, life is about stepping outside your comfort zone,” I replied — or maybe I said: “Cut the umbilical cord, Mrs. Bates! I’m going to see my friends!” I can’t remember.

I fully expected Lea or Jenna would greet me when I arrived at Kennedy International Airport — but I quickly learned that’s not how it worked in a big city in 2008. Getting into the taxi of a complete stranger was the most terrifying experience of my life up to that point. I was convinced that I would be whisked away and murdered like one of the victims in “The Bone Collector.” I was too afraid to look my driver in the eye or try pronouncing his foreign name (it was Gerald, by the way). The taxi’s door locks were broken and clicked loudly whenever the vehicle accelerated, so naturally, I thought gangsters were shooting at us.

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Mr. Colfer on his first visit to New York.

Suddenly, everything changed as the Manhattan skyline came into view. My fears of being murdered faded away and were replaced with a wave of wonder. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t feel — all I could do was stare in bewilderment at the towering buildings in the distance. I had seen “The Wizard of Oz” a million times, but until that moment on the bridge, I never knew how Dorothy felt when seeing the Emerald City. It was as bittersweet as it was magical, because I knew I’d never see New York for the first time again.

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At 3 in the morning on my first night, a garbage truck rumbled down the narrow street outside and rattled the whole building. I leapt from a deep slumber on the couch and ran into the kitchen. After some reassurance, the girls tucked me back in, but I couldn’t sleep another wink.

My mission for the week was to see as many Broadway shows as possible. My first New York theater experience was a preview of “Shrek the Musical,” and boy, did all the families from the Midwest and I love it! I also saw “Gypsy,” with Patti LuPone; “Hairspray,” with Harvey Fierstein and Marissa Jaret Winokur; “Mary Poppins”; “Avenue Q”; and “Spring Awakening” three times. But nothing compared with the musical number in “Shrek” when Sutton Foster tap danced with the rats. It just tickled me.

Jenna was still in “Spring Awakening” during my visit, so I spent a lot of time backstage at the Eugene O’Neill Theater with her fellow cast members. Playing it cool and pretending I didn’t know every detail about their personal lives and theater credits was my best performance to date. When I wasn’t being a creepy groupie, Jenna would kindly walk me to the theater of my selected performance before her call time, drop me off and then pick me up after our shows. It was the closest thing to adult day care I hope to ever experience.

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The night I saw “Hairspray,” however, disaster struck! When the show was over, Jenna texted me and asked if I could catch a cab and meet her back at the apartment. My palms became clammy at the very thought of hailing a taxi on my own. The task was nearly impossible as all the shows in the theater district were letting out at that exact same time. I finally managed to snag a cab, but it was swiped by a stealth family in foam Lady Liberty crowns.

Just as I worried I’d be stranded in Times Square forever, I was hit by what I thought was a stroke of total genius. I sneaked inside a hotel lobby, hid in the bathroom for 45 minutes, pretended to be a guest as I re-emerged, and had the doorman hail me a cab. I was so relieved, I tipped him 15 bucks.

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As I rode back to Lea and Jenna’s apartment that night, I was beaming with more pride than I had ever felt. Apparently the cruel streets of New York City were no match for the cunning farm boy from Clovis.

“Well, how was New York?” my mom asked later as she sprayed my shoes and luggage with Lysol.

I told her how the Bone Collector had driven me into the city, how I was awakened by a deafening garbage truck, how I had braved the crowded theaters on Broadway, and how I had conned my way into a cab after a taxi was taken from me at knife point. Admittedly, I may have exaggerated a few things.

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“Oh my,” she said. “I guess you won’t be going back to New York City anytime soon.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “It was amazing!”

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Julio Cortázar Teaches a Class on His Own Short Story

The following is from Literature Class, a collection of eight lectures Julio Cortázar delivered at Berkeley in 1980. Translated by Katherine Silver.

We are all punctual to an exasperating degree; it’s exactly two o’clock. I’m not sure, but I think the custom is to start a little late in case people arrive late, so we can wait a little.

To start off I’d like to talk about something here that has delighted me. Throughout the time we’ve been in contact, besides one-on-one conversations with many of you and some casual encounters, I’ve received a number of letters, some of which contain questions; others express a point of view about something I might have said here. This is very touching, and I want to publicly express my gratitude, because it’s a sign of trust in me and above all, a sign of friendship. Every single one of those letters has a purpose, points to a path or sometimes asks questions about one. I don’t want to ignore this because it feels to me like an immediate continuation of what is happening here among us once a week that then continues on other levels. It’s very beautiful to me, and in any case very useful, because it allows me to see into some of your personal worlds and to live and feel more fully what I have come here to say.

In some of the letters there are also critiques, and perhaps those are the best. I’d like to clarify one thing that is the source of a very friendly and polite critique I received in a letter from someone. It was about something I had said about fantasy and the imagination in response to a question. It seems I didn’t respond with sufficient breadth, and probably not with sufficient clarity. The person who wrote me that letter thought that I tended to see a writer’s fantasy and imagination as somewhat secondary, an accessory. I have the impression that those of you who have listened to all my previous classes must think — ​as I do — ​that it’s exactly the contrary. I believe that a fiction writer’s most basic weapon is not his subject matter, not even how he writes about it, whether better or worse, but rather that capacity, that way of being that determines his devotion to fiction rather than, say, chemistry; this is the basic, dominant element in any literature throughout the history of humanity.

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I use the word fantasy as a general term; within fantasy we can include everything that is imaginary, fantastic, and we have discussed this a lot during these talks . . . I don’t think I need to elaborate further, you all know very well how important it is, not only for what I have written but also for what I personally prefer in literature. What I wanted to say — ​and perhaps this is the reason for the misunderstanding — ​and what I will repeat now perhaps more clearly, is that at this time, above all, and very especially in Latin America considering the current circumstances, I never accept the kind of fantasy, the kind of fiction or imagination, that spins around itself and only itself, where you feel that the writer is creating a work of only fantasy and imagination, one that deliberately escapes from the reality that surrounds and confronts him and asks him to engage with it, have a dialogue with it in his books. Fantasy — ​the fantastic, the imagination that I love so dearly and that I’ve used to try to construct my own work — ​is everything that helps to expose more clearly and more powerfully the reality that surrounds us. I said so at the beginning and I repeat it now as we leave the realm of the fantastic and enter realism, or what is called realism. I’ve now clarified something that I think is important because it would never occur to me to diminish the importance of everything that is fantasy for a writer, for I still believe it is a writer’s most powerful weapon, the one that finally opens doors onto a much richer and often more beautiful reality.

I’ve written several stories in which I think this is shown and exemplified perfectly, stories like “The Southern Expressway.” There are others I could name that have unusual elements with no value in and of themselves, no independent importance, but they are signals, pointers, used to increase the sensation of the reality of the action, the plot. For this reason, I would like us to spend a little time with one of those stories, which I wrote about six years ago and is called “Apocalypse at Solentiname.” It’s one of the most realistic short stories imaginable because it’s based almost entirely on something I experienced, something that happened to me, that I tried to write about with as much fidelity and clarity as possible. At the end of that story, there appears a totally fantastic element, but it’s not an escape from reality; on the contrary, it’s a little like carrying things to their ultimate consequences so that what I want to express in a way that reaches readers more powerfully, which is a Latin American vision of our times, explodes in their faces and obliges them to feel implicated and present in the story.

Since it’s not very long, I’ve decided to read it because I think this is more valuable than any extraneous explanation I could give. I want to clarify one or two things of a technical nature before reading it, to avoid any difficulties. As you know, the people of Costa Rica are called ticos, and the people of Nicaragua are called nicas: ticos and nicas are mentioned a few times. Toward the end there’s reference to a great poet and great resistance fighter from Latin America named Roque Dalton, a Salvadoran poet who fought for many years for what a large part of the Salvadoran people are fighting for right now, and he died under dark and painful circumstances that one day will be revealed, but we still don’t have enough information about it. There’s mention of Roque Dalton, whom I loved very dearly as a writer and a comrade in many things.

The story — ​I’ll say this again so it’s very clear — ​is absolutely true to the events it recounts, except what happens at the end. I’ll also explain — ​I guess you all know this — ​that Solentiname is the name of a community that the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal ran for many years on one of the islands in Lake Nicaragua, a community I visited under the circumstances recounted here and that was then destroyed by Somoza’s National Guard before the last offensive that finished Somoza off. In that very impoverished community of fishermen and peasants, which Cardenal led spiritually, very great artistic and intellectual work was carried out among the mostly illiterate and disadvantaged. Ernesto Cardenal — ​by the way — ​told me the last time we talked that he intends to build his community again now that Nicaragua is free and there’s the possibility of doing that. I hope he goes through with it, because the work he did in that community for years — ​while being hounded, persecuted, and threatened all the time — ​is one of those efforts that gives me more and more hope and faith in our people.

Apocalypse at Solentiname

That’s just how ticos are, quiet but full of surprises, you land in San José, Costa Rica, and there waiting for you are Carmen Naranjo and Samuel Rovinski and Sergio Ramírez (who’s from Nicaragua and not a tico but what’s the real difference anyway it’s all the same, what’s the difference in me being Argentine, though out of politeness I should call myself tino and the others nicas or ticos). It was so hot and even worse, everything started right away, the usual press conference, why don’t you live in your country? Why was the movie Blow-Up so different from your story? Do you think a writer has to be politically engaged? By now I know that my last interview will take place at the gates of hell and they’ll ask the same questions, and if by some chance it’s chez Saint Peter, nothing will change, don’t you think that down there you wrote too hermetically for the common folks?

Then on to Hotel Europa and the shower that crowns a trip with a long monologue of soap and silence. Except that at seven o’clock when it was finally time to take a walk through San José and find out if it was as modest and uniform as I’d been told, a hand grabbed my coat and behind it was Ernesto Cardenal, and what a hug, poet, so glad you’re here after that conference in Rome, after so many times over the years we’ve met on paper. It always surprises me, always touches me when someone like Ernesto comes to see me, to pick me up, you might say I’m overflowing with false modesty but just come out with it, old man, the jackal howls but the bus still runs, I’ll always be an amateur, someone who looks up to certain people from way down below with so much love, and then one day it turns out those people love him back, these things are beyond me, but let’s change the subject.

The new subject was that Ernesto knew I’d arrived in Costa Rica and, what do you know, he flew from his island because the little bird who brings him news told him that the ticas had planned for me to go to Solentiname and he found the idea of coming to get me irresistible, so two days later Sergio and Oscar and Ernesto and I crammed ourselves into the much too crammable cabin of a Piper Aztec aircraft, whose name will always remain a riddle to me but that flew with ominous hiccups and burps while the blond pilot played some countervailing calypsos and seemed completely nonchalant about my idea that the Aztec was carrying us straight to a pyramid to be sacrificed. That didn’t happen, as you can see, we landed in Los Chiles and from there the equally wobbly jeep dropped us off at the country house of the poet José Coronel Urtecho, whom more people should read and in whose house we rested and talked about so many other poet friends, about Roque Dalton and about Gertrude Stein and about Carlos Martínez Rivas, until Luis Coronel arrived and we set out for Nicaragua in his jeep and in his launch that reached alarming speeds. But first there were keepsake pictures taken with one of those cameras that right then and there spits out a small piece of sky-blue paper that slowly and miraculously and polaroiderly starts filling up with gradual images, at first disturbing ectoplasms then little by little a nose, a tuft of hair, Ernesto’s smile with his Nazarene headband, Doña María and Don José outlined against the veranda. It seemed totally normal to them because they were used to using that camera, but I wasn’t, for me seeing something emerge out of nothing, out of that little sky-blue square of nothing, those goodbye faces and smiles, filled me with wonder and I told them, I remember asking Oscar what would happen if after taking a family portrait the little sky-blue piece of paper started filling up out of nowhere
with Napoleon on his horse, and a roar of laughter from Don José Coronel, who as usual had been listening to everything, the jeep, come on, let’s drive to the lake.

We reached Solentiname as night was falling, there waiting for us were Teresa and William and a gringo poet and other people from the community; we went to bed almost immediately but not before I saw the paintings in a corner, Ernesto was talking with his people and he took the supplies and gifts he’d brought from San José out of a bag, somebody was sleeping in a hammock, and I saw the paintings in a corner and started to look at them. I don’t remember who explained to me that they were painted by the peasants in that region, that one was painted by Vicente, this is Ramona’s, some were signed and others weren’t, but they were all so beautiful, once again a primal vision of the world, the clean gaze of someone who depicts their surroundings as a song of praise: dwarf cows in fields of poppies, sugar shacks people are pouring out of like ants, the green-eyed horse against a background of sugarcane, a church baptism that doesn’t believe in perspective and trips and falls over itself, the lake with little boats like shoes, and in the background an enormous laughing fish with turquoise-colored lips. Then Ernesto came and explained to me that the sale of the paintings helped them carry on, in the morning he’d show me the work the peasants do in wood and stone and also his own sculptures; we were already nodding off but I kept looking through the pictures piled up in the corner, pulling out of the jumble of canvases cows and flowers and that mother with her two children on her lap, one in white and the other in red, under a sky so full of stars that the only cloud stood as if mortified in one corner, pressing against the frame, so afraid it had already scooted off the canvas.

The next day was Sunday and eleven o’clock Mass, a Solentiname Mass where the peasants and Ernesto and visiting friends discuss a chapter of the Gospels, which on that day was the arrest of Jesus in the garden, a subject the people of Solentiname discussed as if it were about them, the threat that they would be attacked at night or in the middle of the day, lives led in permanent uncertainty on the islands and on the mainland and everywhere in Nicaragua and not only in Nicaragua but almost everywhere in Latin America, a life surrounded by fear and death, life in Guatemala and life in El Salvador, life in Argentina and in Bolivia, life in Chile and in Santo Domingo, life in Paraguay, life in Brazil and in Colombia.

Later came thoughts about leaving, and it was then that I thought again about the paintings, I went to the community room and started to look at them under the dazzling noon light, the heightened colors, the acrylics and oils facing off against one another from horses and sunflowers and fiestas in the meadows and symmetrical palm groves. I remembered I had a roll of color film in my camera and I went out onto the veranda with an armful of pictures; Sergio, who had just arrived, helped me prop them up in the light, and one by one I carefully photographed them, centering each so it would fill the entire frame. Chance is sometimes like that: I had as many shots left as there were paintings, not a single one was left out, and when Ernesto came to tell us that the launch was ready I told him what I’d done and he laughed, painting thief, image smuggler. Yes, I told him, I’m taking all of them with me, I’ll project them onto my screen and they’ll be bigger and brighter than these, tough luck for you.

I returned to San José, went to Havana and hung around and did a few things there, then back to Paris, my fatigue so full of nostalgia, Claudine quietly waiting for me at Orly, once again the life of the wristwatch and merci monsieur, bonjour madame, committee meetings, films, red wine and Claudine, Mozart quartets and Claudine. Among all the things those tell-all suitcases had spewed out onto the bed and the rug, among the magazines, clippings, scarves, and books by Central American poets, were the grey plastic film canisters, so many over a two-month period, the sequence from the Lenin School in Havana, the streets of Trinidad, the silhouette of the Irazú volcano and its crater full of boiling green water where Samuel and Sarita and I imagined already roasted ducks floating in the sulfurous fumes. Claudine took the rolls of film to get them developed; one afternoon while walking through the Latin Quarter I remembered and since I had the ticket in my pocket I picked them up and there were eight. I immediately thought about the paintings from Solentiname and when I got home I opened the boxes and looked at the first slides in each group, I remembered that before taking pictures of the paintings I had shot the Mass with Ernesto, children playing among the palm trees just like in the paintings, children and palm trees and cows against a violently blue sky and a lake just a tiny bit greener, or maybe the other way around, I wasn’t quite sure anymore. I put the slides of the children and the Mass in the tray, knowing that the paintings would come next and continue to the end of the roll.

Night was falling and I was alone, Claudine would come over after work to listen to music and spend the night; I set up the screen and poured myself a glass of rum with a lot of ice, the slide projector with its tray loaded and the button of its remote control; no reason to close the curtains, the obliging night was already there igniting the streetlamps and the perfume of the rum; it was so pleasant to think that everything would appear once again a little at a time, after the paintings from Solentiname I would show the rolls from Cuba, but why the paintings first, why that occupational hazard, art before life, and why not, that one asked this one in a continuation of their everlasting never-to-be-disassembled fraternal and spiteful dialogue, why not look at the paintings from Solentiname first, for they are also life, for it’s all the same.

First came the pictures of the Mass, pretty bad due to wrong exposures, the children, though, were playing in the bright light and such white teeth. I pushed the forward button without much enthusiasm, I could have kept looking for a long time at each slide so laden with memories, that small fragile world of Solentiname surrounded by water and henchmen, surrounded like the boy I was looking at without understanding, I’d pressed the button and the boy was there against a very clear background, his broad smooth face of surprised disbelief as his body pitched forward, the neat hole right in the middle of his forehead, the officer’s pistol still indicating the path of the bullet, the others on either side with their machine guns, a jumble of houses and trees behind.

Whatever you think, it always gets there first and leaves you so far behind; stupidly I told myself they’d made a mistake at the photo shop, they’d given me another customer’s slides; but then the Mass, the children playing in the meadow, so how? Nor did my hand obey when it pressed the button and there was an endless saltpeter field at noon with two or three lean-tos built of rusty sheet metal, a crowd of people on the left looking at the bodies lying face up, their arms spread wide against a gray and naked sky; you had to look very closely to make out the group of soldiers walking away in the background, the jeep waiting at the top of the hill.

I know I kept going; faced with this that defied all sanity the only thing possible was to keep pushing the button, seeing the corner of Corrientes and San Martín streets in Buenos Aires and the black car with the four men aiming at the sidewalk where somebody wearing a white shirt and tennis shoes was running, two women trying to take shelter behind a parked truck, someone staring straight ahead, an expression of horrified disbelief, bringing his hand to his chin as if to touch himself and feel that he is still alive, and suddenly an almost dark room, dirty light falling from the tall latticed windows, the table with the naked girl supine and her hair falling all the way to the ground, the shadow with its back to the camera sticking a wire between her open legs, two men facing the camera talking to each other, a blue tie and a green pullover. I never found out if I kept pushing the button or not, I saw a clearing in the jungle, in the foreground a hut with a thatched roof and trees, up against the trunk of the closest one a thin man looking to his left at a disorderly group of five or six people standing very close together pointing machine guns and pistols at him; the man with the thin face and a lock of hair falling over his brown forehead looked at them, one hand half raised, the other possibly in his pants pocket, it was as if he were telling them something calmly, almost offhandedly, and even though the picture was blurry I felt and I knew and I saw that he was Roque Dalton, and so I pressed the button as if by doing so I could save him from the infamy of that particular death, and then I saw a car exploding right in the middle of a city that could be Buenos Aires or São Paulo, I kept pushing and pushing past flashes of bloody faces and pieces of bodies and woman and children running down a Bolivian or a Guatemalan hillside, suddenly the screen filled with mercury and nothing and Claudine entering quietly, her shadow filling the screen as she leaned over to kiss my hair and ask me if they were lovely, if I was happy with the photographs, if I wanted to show them to her.

I pushed the tray and started it from the beginning, you can’t know how or why you do things once you’ve passed a boundary you also don’t know. Not looking at her, because she would have understood or simply been frightened by how my face must have looked; not explaining anything because everything was one big knot from my throat to my toenails, I got up and slowly sat her down in my armchair, and I must have said something about going to get her a drink and that she should have a look, she should have a look while I went to get her a drink. In the bathroom I think I vomited, or maybe I only cried and later vomited, or I didn’t do anything and just sat on the rim of the bathtub letting time pass until I could make it to the kitchen and prepare Claudine’s favorite drink, fill it with ice and then hear the silence, realize that Claudine was neither shouting nor running to question me, only the silence and for moments that saccharine bolero from the apartment next door. I don’t know how long it took me to get from the kitchen to the living room, to see the back of the screen when she reached the end and the room filled with the sudden reflection of the mercury and then the semi-darkness, Claudine turning off the projector and leaning back in her armchair and picking up her glass and smiling at me slowly, happy and sexy and so pleased.

“They turned out beautifully, that one of the smiling fish and the mother with her two children and the little cows in the field; wait, and that other one of the baptism in the church, who painted them, tell me, I couldn’t see the signatures.”

Sitting on the floor, without looking at her, I picked up my glass and drank it all down. I wasn’t going to say anything, what could I tell her now, but I remember I vaguely considered asking her a stupid question, asking her if she had at some point seen a picture of Napoleon on horseback. But I didn’t, of course.

I think that in a story of this kind the sudden appearance of an entirely uncanny element — ​entirely and decisively fantastic — ​makes reality more real and brings the reader something that, if stated explicitly or recounted in detail, would have ended up being one more report about all the many things that are going on, but within the story it is shown strongly enough, through the mechanism of the story itself.

I think that right now, before continuing, some of you might like to ask me some questions. I see one person there wants to.

Student: Would you mind talking a little about Roque Dalton? I think there are a lot of people who don’t know who he is.

Yes, of course. Roque Dalton said he was the grandson of the pirate Dalton, an Englishman or North American who ravaged the coasts of Central America and conquered land he later lost. He also conquered, for better or for worse, some Salvadoran women from whom Roque’s family descended, and they kept the name Dalton. I never knew, nor did Roque’s friends, if that was true or one of the many inventions of his extremely fertile imagination. Roque is for me the very rare example of a man whose literary ability, whose poetic ability, was there from a very early age, mixed with or alongside a profound sense of belonging to his own people, their history and destiny. Never, from the age of 18, did he make a distinction between the poet and the fighter, the novelist and the combatant, and that’s why his life was a continuous series of persecutions, prisons, exiles, escapes — ​in some cases, spectacular — ​and a final return to his country after many years spent in exile, there to join the struggle in which he would lose his life. Fortunately for us, Roque Dalton left a vast oeuvre: several volumes of poetry and a novel with a title that is both ironic and tender; it’s called The Poor Little Poet I Once Was. It’s the story of a man who at a certain point feels tempted to devote himself fully to literature and leave behind all other things that his nature demands of him. In the end, he doesn’t do that, and he continues to maintain the balance that I always admired in him. Roque Dalton was a man who at 40 gave the impression of being a 19-year-old kid. There was something very childlike about him, he’d act like a child, he was mischievous and playful. It was difficult to see, to realize, the power, the seriousness, and the effectiveness that was hidden in that man.

I remember one night in Havana, a group of foreigners and Cubans gathered to talk to Fidel Castro. It was in 1962, at the beginning of the Revolution. The meeting was supposed to start at ten at night and last an hour, and it lasted until exactly six in the morning, which almost always happens in these meetings with Fidel Castro, which go on and on endlessly because he never gets tired and neither do his interlocutors under those circumstances. I’ll never forget how, around dawn, when I was already dozing off because I couldn’t fight my fatigue and exhaustion . . . I remember Roque Dalton — ​very skinny and not very tall — ​standing with Fidel — ​who’s not skinny at all and is very tall — ​and stubbornly discussing the proper use of a certain kind of gun, I never found out which one exactly, some kind of machine gun. Each was trying to convince the other that he was right, with all kinds of arguments and even physical demonstrations: they threw themselves down on the floor, then jumped back up . . . all kinds of bellicose antics, which left us all pretty amazed.

That’s how Roque was: he could play while talking seriously. Obviously the topic interested him for reasons that had to do with El Salvador, and at the same time it was all a big game that amused him deeply. His books — ​the poetry as well as the prose, he also has a lot of essays, many political works . . . they cover an important period in our history, especially the decade from ’58 to ’68. His analyses are always passionate but at the same time lucid, his denunciations and arguments always have strong historical foundations. He wasn’t a propagandist; he was a thinking man and behind and in front and underneath all that was always a great poet, a man who has given us some of the most beautiful poems I’ve read in the last 20 years. That’s what I have to say about Roque, and I hope you read him and get to know him better.

Student: In the story, you mention that people are afraid — ​like Jesus — ​of being betrayed, but don’t you think this is, generally speaking, because in Latin America reality is seen in a fantastic, emotional, irrational way, and only from one point of view? Because you talk about the people who were killed by the military, but in Argentina soldiers have also been killed, for example, Aramburu. It’s always looked at from only one point of view and that’s why there are those constant struggles, instead of trying to find a rational solution.

Of course there are constant struggles; of course there have been and continue to be confrontations, as there have been constantly in Nicaragua, and as there are right now in El Salvador. Of course there is violence on both sides and in many cases the violence is unjustifiable, on both sides of the struggle. What I think we have to consider and always keep in mind when we talk about violence, confrontations, and even criminal acts between two opposing forces is why did the violence start and who started it, or rather we need to introduce a moral dimension into the discussion. The Brazilian bishop or cardinal Hélder Câmara (I think he was a bishop) and the archbishop of El Salvador, Monsignor Romero (brutally assassinated a few months ago), both men of the church, they said in their last speeches that an oppressed, subjugated, murdered, and tortured people has the moral right to take up arms against their oppressors, and I think they were putting their fingers on the very core of the problem; because it’s very easy to be against violence in general, but what is often not considered is how that violence came about, what process originally unleashed it.

To respond very concretely to your question, I am fully aware that in my country, in our country, the forces that rose up against the army and the Argentine oligarchy committed many acts that we can qualify as excessive. They have behaved in ways that I cannot personally condone, or accept, not at all, but still, within that moral condemnation, I am aware that they would never have reached that point — ​because they wouldn’t have needed to — ​if beforehand, with the previous dictatorships (I’m talking concretely about Generals Onganía, Levingston, and Lanusse), there hadn’t been a monstrous escalation of torture, violence, and oppression, which finally led to the first uprisings against them. This is not a class about politics and I will stop here, though I think that you and I could discuss this topic much more, because clearly we are very familiar with it as Argentines. But I think I’ve said enough to show my opinion on this point.

 

Reprinted from Literature Class with permission from New Directions. 

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Romance Short Story: “Ladybug” by Gail Bartley

“Ladybug” by Gail Bartley is the First Place-winning story in the romance category of the 12th Annual Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards. For complete coverage of this year’s awards, including an exclusive interview with the Grand Prize winner and a complete list of winners, check out the May/June 2017 issue of Writer’s Digest. And click here for more information about entering the 13th Annual Popular Fiction Awards.

In this bonus online exclusive, you can read Bartley’s winning entry.

“Ladybug” by Gail Bartley

Ladybug isn’t really an insect, despite what her four-year fans believe. She earns her modest living starring in The Bug Parade, a one-woman extravaganza of fantastical creatures she creates herself in a cavernous loft, far out in Willamsburg, Brooklyn. It is not yet the trendy neighborhood it will one day become. She has an erratic frizz of brunette curls, a ballerina’s body, and is given to random acts of hugging. It’s rumored that she sleeps around, in a wholesome, Kundalini and carrot juice sort of way. No one really knows if this is true, for in spite of all the hugging, Ladybug isn’t an easy read.

Self-contained as an actual ladybug, standing alone on the corner of 73rd and Madison, she loads her heavy case of costumes into a Yellow Cab which speeds off into the milky grey light of another winter Saturday. On the private pre-school, Upper Eastside birthday-party- circuit, The Bug Parade is in great demand. Ladybug often works these parties back-to-back, sometimes three in a day, until it’s all one sugary, Baby Gap blur.

Sliding into the cab, she tucks her purse neatly on her lap, exactly the way her mother does; the way all her sisters do, another vestige of her formerly-small-town-Ohio self which she cannot shake, no matter how far she runs. Inside the purse is an untouched chocolate truffle cake baked inside a red clay flower pot, the whimsy of which was lost on the three-year old guests at the last party.

That night, after a long hot shower, Ladybug crawls into bed with the flower pot cake and a fork, thinking of the Balloon Guy, who’d slipped her this treat on the guest floor of the Feinman’s townhouse where the two of them were taking a break from the toddlers. The Balloon Guy (whose real name is Max) is the Michelangelo of balloon animals. He’s been flown to Paris at least twice to entertain at fancy parties and recently spent a whole month in Tokyo, wowing customers at an exclusive children’s toy store.

While Max glows with confidence when creating balloon animals, he is otherwise shy, most especially around Ladybug, for whom he feels a heart-thumping attraction. Offering her pilfered cakes is the safest way he can think of to signal his affection.

A few days later, Ladybug steps out of H & H Plastics on Canal Street with a waggling armful of the foam rubber she uses to build her costumes and sees Max at one of the outdoor stands which line the street, selling everything from socks to sunglasses. She barely recognizes him at first, having never seen his naked head minus the silk top hat he wears when making balloon-animal magic. Max’s hair (as uncontrollable as her own) sticks up in five or six different directions, clearly not a style but a more of situation best resolved by hats.

Caught off guard by this unexpected Max-sighting, Ladybug is torn between making a quick getaway before he spots her or just walking up like a normal person and saying hello, but before she can make up her mind, Max sees her and waves.

Watching Ladybug approach, Max (who’s been picking through a pile of tin wind-up toys) nervously tosses a miniature robot from hand to hand while the vendor glares at him from behind a mountain of folding umbrellas.

“I thought that was you,” says Ladybug. She stands a few feet away since she’s a walking hazard with all the foam rubber. She waits while Max searches for his wallet to buy the toy from the vendor, who charges him ten dollars out of spite. Right then, it starts to pour.

Max reaches for Ladybug’s arm and pulls her gently under the store’s awning. The vendor shakes his head, amazed at someone who will spend ten bucks on a fifty-cent toy when what he clearly needs is a three-dollar umbrella. But Max simply isn’t an umbrella-person, and neither, it happens, is Ladybug. In spite of a nagging sense of missing something when caught in the rain, they have never been prone to solve the problem with the purchase of an actual umbrella, especially when standing next to a stack of them so large it shelters two people quite nicely from a downpour.

Besides, Max and Ladybug are consumed with something more important than precipitation. Fate has thrust them together at this particular umbrella-and-toy stand, of all the countless umbrella-and-toy stands from Hoboken to Harlem, a fact they both know must be acknowledged. Thus, when a short while later, Ladybug finds herself riding the subway home to Brooklyn with Max at her side, her bug-parts balanced gallantly on his lap, she is nervous, happy, and alarmed. For it is Ladybug’s tendency to fall into bed with men following innocently chance encounters like this one, and generally, to regret it.

The sweet promise of a glance across a library shelf or a shared ride up a long escalator seemed to fall apart once the breathing slowed, the strange bathroom was peed in and I’ll-call- you was said, if rarely meant. What could have been, mostly never was. The last one, she’d thought, might be different. They’d shared every single Wednesday for an entire year, but only Wednesdays, never more. So when Mr. Wednesday suddenly stopped calling, thirteen months ago, Ladybug took the hole in her week that was shaped like him and filled it instead with the gun metal sky outside her window and the hum of her sewing machine. New creatures sprang forth – a saucy lavender cockroach, a ten-foot tall praying mantis worn on stilts, fat velvet bumblebees, and just because, one pale pink rose she wore as a kind of voluptuous hat, her freckled nose peeking out from between the petals.

Mornings, she woke early, did yoga stretches beside her bed, then fixed a pot of tea (plain old Lipton) and sat at her worktable, contemplating whatever bug-in-progress waited there. Eventually, she would punch the button on her answering machine and listen to the confident mothers who intended to book her for very special parties celebrating their most extraordinary children. These calls Ladybug returned promptly, with a practiced brightness reserved for all things bug-show related.

Rarely, there would be another message, from her sister in Akron, or her mother. Weeks later, she might phone back and leave an answer on their machines, thus avoiding much actual conversation, which worked for everyone. Theirs was not a close family, and time and distance had pushed them increasingly apart. Mostly, she was alone.

Tuesdays and Thursdays, Ladybug rode the subway to Manhattan to take ballet lessons in a dusty studio on 14th Street, followed by a meandering walk to the fabric stores in the 30’s. She knew all the grumbly old men who worked behind the counters there, and could lose herself for hours amid the satins and brocades, the buttons, sequins and beads. Her last stop would be a Korean market for a few groceries; just enough to fit in her backpack, then the long ride home, a forty-minute daydream.

Now Max’s shoulder pressed against hers while the train swayed, picking up speed as it rattled across the bridge above the East River, reminding her that she wasn’t alone and had slept with no one but her cat in over a year. Abruptly, she was aware of how much she wanted to. But then what? If she disappointed him, if he disappointed her, to run into each other at work would be agonizing, whereas now, it was always a happy surprise.

Ladybug stole a look at Max, who gazed out the window at the dejected towers of the housing projects ahead. She’d never been close enough to him to notice the scattering of gray hairs above his ear which didn’t match his pink-cheeked-boy face. A face so much like those of the children he entertained that it was either scary, or perfect, or perfectly scary. He turned to her, catching the measurement in her eyes. She smiled a smile she hoped would say, don’t worry, I like your contrasts. I like the way you sit there in charge of my crazy foam rubber, ferrying it like precious cargo clear to Brooklyn because it’s raining and we both hoped you might. I like it that you’re nice and I don’t like it that you’re nice. Am I nice? I don’t know. Max smiled back, at her, a little sadly, as if he could hear her babbling, uncertain heart.

The walk from the train to Ladybug’s loft smoothed things over some. Max had never visited Williamsburg and a close call involving a beat-up station wagon jammed with Hasidic Jews, their ringlets dangling, gave them plenty to talk about. Max, it turns out, was Jewish himself (non-practicing) and was curious about Ladybug’s religious roots (Lutheran, also non- practicing). Theology covered six blocks and three flights of stairs, but abandoned them once they stepped inside Ladybug’s loft. Alone at last, an anxious silence settled around them like a low-lying fog.

Max spotted Ladybug’s worktable and placed his load there, admiring an intricate set of wings which she explained were for her new housefly costume. She struggled through the fog to her kitchen area, trying to remember what you did when someone visited, since in the three whole years she’d lived there, no one ever had. Then her Ohio upbringing came to the rescue and she began making tea, laying out honey, lemon slices, graham crackers, her grandmother’s cups and saucers. Max sat at the kitchen table, petting her cat who lay curled in his lap, blissfully shedding.

There they were, then, sipping tea while rain pinged softly on the roof and the cat purred, when Max reached over and took Ladybug’s hand in his own. They sat just like that for a long time. It might have been days until they fell onto her bed, where days slid into weeks as they swirled and spun till somehow, night arrived and though they should have been hungry, they weren’t. Finally, they slept. When Ladybug opened her eyes, it was really morning and the bed beside her was empty.

At first she though he might be in the shower, but the loft was silent and when she checked, there was no trace of Max. Not a damp towel, not a note. Only an indent on his pillow; the chalk outline of a good idea gone bad. Ladybug lay still, regret jagging through her. Then came tears, the worst betrayal of all, for Ladybug was not a crier. Pulling the blankets around her, she rolled onto her side, searching for comfort in the reliable gray sky outside her window, but the gray was gone and floating there instead was a rainbow bouquet of balloon birds, balloon butterflies, and one magnificent red balloon rose. She rushed to the window and looked down.

Three stories below, Max leaned against the building, patiently clutching his gift as it bounced and drifted on the morning breeze. As he had done at regular intervals for the entire two hours he’d waited there, Max looked up towards her window, but this time, he saw Ladybug. Beaming up at her, he waved both hands, in his excitement forgetting the balloons, which saw their chance and sailed up and out, across the rooftops, headed for the lonesome streets of Manhattan, where another heart surely needed winning.

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A Florida of Sun, Sky, Sea and Mind

One of the themes of “Sunshine State,” Sarah Gerard’s striking book of essays, is how Florida can unmoor you and make you reach for shoddy, off-the-shelf solutions to your psychic unease.

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Gerard grew up in Clearwater, a beach city near Tampa. She writes about how her otherwise incredulous parents (they met in a biker bar; he was wearing a baby-blue Jimmy Buffett T-shirt) fell into New Thought, a mind-healing movement.

Almost as bad, they signed on with Amway. That company, co-founded by the father-in-law of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, can, many have argued, resemble a pyramid scheme.

Gerard decides that dabbling with Amway was, in her perfect phrase, a form of “achievement tourism.” She writes, “We left reality for a moment and believed the impossible was possible.”

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Gerard’s essay collection is one of two new books that examine the Florida experiment. The other is Jack E. Davis’s “Gulf: The Making of an American Sea,” a sensitive and sturdy work of environmental history.

Obviously, the Gulf of Mexico does not belong solely to Florida. It is the 10th-largest body of water in the world. It touches several other countries — indeed, it is named for one of them — as well as other American states.

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But Davis lives in Florida, and that state’s wet western edges run along a vast amount of the Gulf’, like salt on the rim of a cocktail. He can’t help but dwell often upon his home place.

Thanks to books by John Jeremiah Sullivan (“Pulphead”) and Leslie Jamison (“The Empathy Exams”) and a handful of other young writers, the essay collection has new impetus and drama in American letters. The essay has gained ground on the short story.

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“Sunshine State” deserves to be talked about in this company, even if its essays are hit-and-miss. When Gerard is on, she is really on. She’s the author of one previous book, the novel “Binary Star” (2015).

The first essay is a knockout, a lurid red heart wrapped in barbed wire. It’s called “BFF,” and it’s about the author’s intense friendship with a girl who grew up to become a stripper and who spent time in shelters for battered women.

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This essay is about attraction and betrayal, and has the sinister propulsion of a Mary Gaitskill short story. “You shinier,” Gerard writes about her friend. “You prettier. You taller. You thinner, more popular. In middle school, you had friends and I had you.”

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They’d had tattoos on their hips that read, when they stood side by side, “Forever / & ever.” Their eventual split was devastating. The author had the means to get out of town; the friend did not.

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Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

Gerard catalogs the lies her friend told her, then she lists her own. She writes about her damage, splitting her face open while jumping from a train. This essay draws blood.

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Many of the essays in “Sunshine State” fall somewhere between memoir and journalism. Two of the longer pieces, about work to care for the homeless in Florida and about a troubled bird sanctuary, are serious and impeccably reported. But the author’s voice is lost in the telling. She’s best when her evocations of the frenzy that is Florida are personal.

Historians, inspired by Fernand Braudel’s epic 1949 two-volume study of the Mediterranean Sea (1949), have written books about most of the world’s important bodies of water. Davis’s “Gulf” is the first comprehensive history of the Gulf of Mexico, a place that tends to be, he persuasively argues, “excluded from the central narrative of the American experience.”

Texas and Louisiana also have a great deal of Gulf-front real estate, and Davis’s book does not skimp on their histories. But since Gerard, Davis and I each grew up staring at the same blue-green water off Florida, I will stick with Florida in this review.

Davis carefully relates its history, from the state’s native people and its earliest European explorers, through the early history of the United States and the arrival of tourists, developers and those who would fish and hunt Florida to depletion.

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The author has a well-stocked mind, and frequently views the history of the Gulf through the prism of artists and writers including Winslow Homer, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway and John D. MacDonald.

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His prose is supple and clear. About the arrival of motorized shrimp boats on the Gulf, he writes: “They pushed farther out into the Gulf, the classical music of a wind-driven sea passage drowned forever by the heavy metal of internal combustion and snorting exhaust. Fishers discovered that if they worked past sunset, their trawls were filling with a new kind of shrimp, browns, which rose near the surface at night.”

Davis’s book functions, as well, as a cri de coeur about the Gulf’s environmental ruin. His book runs up through the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. That event aside, he writes, “Every day in the Gulf is an environmental disaster, originating from sources near and far, that eclipses the spill.”

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“Goodbye North, Hello South,” Bessie Smith sang in “Florida Bound Blues.” “It’s so cold up here that the words freeze in your mouth.” The words in Gerard’s and Davis’s books are sun-warm and, in their way, optimistic. Both writers make the effort, essential to any form of love, to see their state plain.

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Lit Hub Daily: March 28, 2017

The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day

TODAY: In 1914, Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal is born.

Julio Cortázar on the hazy borders of memoir and fiction, and the fantastic violence of Latin American politics. | Literary Hub
How to write a libretto about a massacre: Harriet Scott Chessman tells the story of My Lai. | Literary Hub
Bookstore as political act: Scott Esposito finds resistance on the shelves. | Literary Hub
Julia Dahl: writing crime fiction among the pious. | Literary Hub
After facing complaints from parents and state lawmakers, a North Carolina school district has pulled Jacob’s New Dress, a book about a young boy who elects to wear a dress to school one day, from its first grade curriculum. | Cosmopolitan
“I do think there is something about this hybrid form that meets a need that is specifically female, one that is specifically marginalized by our culture.” An interview with Melissa Febos. | Bookforum
Fully entering into a different language involves a total upending of the self: Three translators weigh on what Arrival gets right (and wrong) about language learning. | Words Without Borders
“I read to be filled with a sense of wonder.” An interview with Kanishk Tharoor. | Los Angeles Review of Books
In honor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s 20th anniversary this month, a New York Times-curated list of Buffy fanfiction, by authors who range from 17 to 56. | The New York Times
“Considering what climate change portends for our future, the subject ought to be the principal preoccupation of fiction writers the world over.” Amitav Ghosh on writing in the Anthropocene. | The American Scholar
His insurgent D.I.Y. purity is on full display: On a new volume of Bill Knott’s collected poems, which he may not have “been pleased to see . . . in print.” | The New Yorker
Gore Vidal on sex, Capote, and the pope in Tennessee Williams’ memoirs. | Book Marks

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At PEN Awards, A Scaled-Up Atmosphere and Political Bent

PEN America hosted its annual literary awards at the New School in Manhattan on March 27 in a ceremony the organization hoped would be "celebration of literature on par with awards shows for other art forms," and which saw its biggest honors of the year bestowed.

While PEN announces the bulk of its winners, including the inaugural PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, in advance of the ceremony each year, it saves its major awards for the ceremony itself. This year, the top award—the inaugural PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for the author of the year's "best book-length work"—went to Hisham Matar for Fathers, Sons and the Lands In Between. The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay went to Angela Morales for The Girls In My Town. The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, which honors a first novel or collection of short stories, went to Rion Amilcar Scott for Insurrections. The inaugural PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement In International Literature went to Syrian poet Adonis for his full body of work.

The ceremony, hosted by former Daily Show correspondent and Halal in the Family creator Aasif Mandvi, was themed for the first time in PEN history, labeled Books Across Borders to "showcase the power of literature to transcend geographical, cultural, gender, and artistic boundaries, and to illuminate the impacts and influence of artists around the world on American thought," the organization said. The event was held on the heels of two widely-protested executive orders issued by President Donald Trump intending to secure American borders by halting the country's intake of refugees from a selection of predominantly Muslim countries.

Mandvi, a Muslim, began the evening joking about the danger of books crossing borders, noting that they could be "really bad libros," and suggesting that, should the president wish to keep Muslims from accessing the country, he might do so by building a wall "out of bacon. As a Muslim," he continued, "I know that would keep me out."

The ceremony featured a scaled-up atmosphere replete with musical performances and a dramatic reading of the work of Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, screenwriter, and novelist Suzan-Lori Park by actors from the Huntington Theatre Company's staging of Park's play Topdog/Underdog under the direction of actor, singer, and director Billy Porter. Hamilton Leithauser, lead singer of indie-rock group the Walkmen, performed Leonard Cohen's song "Democracy" set to artwork by the artist David Mack and musician and composer Olga Nunes, and PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award winner Natalie Scenters-Zapico performed a poem about the U.S.-Mexico border along with accompaniment by violinist Ernesto Villalobos.

The event rounded up other star power as well, including ESPN's Jeremy Schaap, of SportsCenterT, and Tony Kornheiser, host of sports program Pardon the Interruption, the latter of whom regaled the crowd with stories of working with author William Nack at Newsday in the 1970s before presenting him with the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Sportswriting. Tarell Alvin McCraney, the author of play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue and Academy Award–winning co-author of the script of its film adaptation, Moonlight, was also on hand to accept the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Playwright in Mid-Career.

"I have to admit this was a surprise," McCraney said as he accepted his award, nodding to the well-publicized flubbing of the conferring of the Academy Award for Best Picture: "And you'd think I'd be used to surprises by now."

Throughout the ceremony, PEN screened pre-filmed segments featuring each of the five nominees for the night's top award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, reading from or discussing their shortlisted works. The segments, introduced by Mandvi, were similar to the highlight reels more customary at cinematic awards ceremonies such as the Academy Awards or the Golden Globes.

In closing, PEN America executive director Suzanne Nossel reminded the audience that "in our present political moment, words have new meaning." She added: "When words are used to harm, we use words to heal. When words are use to lie, we use words shed a light on truth. When words are stopped at the border, we use words to cross boundaries."

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Horror Short Story: “Oakland Mothers, Oakland Wives” by Corey Quinlan Taylor

“Oakland Mothers, Oakland Wives” by Corey Quinlan Taylor is the First Place-winning story in the horror category of the 12th Annual Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards. For complete coverage of this year’s awards, including an exclusive interview with the Grand Prize winner and a complete list of winners, check out the May/June 2017 issue of Writer’s Digest. And click here for more information about entering the 13th Annual Popular Fiction Awards.

In this bonus online exclusive, you can read Taylor’s winning entry.

Oakland Mothers, Oakland Wives by Corey Quinlan Taylor

I gave birth to my husband Morgan in 1863, five months after he died during the Battle of Gettysburg. The babe I held emerged as a vessel of my husband’s soul. He had told me this would occur, in the last letter he wrote, before getting shot in the leg during Pickett’s Charge. The .58 caliber bullet didn’t kill him; the infection and fever did.

Days after his delivery, my husband had no inclination to cry as most babies would. His smiles gave me solace. Though incapable of speech, his eyes expressed volumes to me. His hands, so soft and pink, could not hold a quill pen. I just assumed what his needs were. I would sit in the parlor of our home in Doylestown, with him on my lap and allowed him to see the letters and newspapers as I read them. Seeking his counsel in the form of yes and no questions, with a nod or shake of his head to guide me.

A learned man, fluent in German and Latin, he had no need for schooling during his years as a boy. He had no patience for children, though he was just as small. I grew accustomed to him recalling our courtship, or his expressions of consternation when gentlemen from our local church attempted to court me. I still held my youth and my husband had made sound financial investments. Like Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey, I kept the suitors at bay. Mr. Oakland was the only husband I ever had.

When he became capable of full speech, he pleaded that I keep his resurrection a secret. I asked if this ever occurred before.

“Yes. Many times.”

I asked if he always returned as a boy.

“I’ve had a woman’s form during several lifetimes. And if you’re wondering, I have dabbled in miscegenation. I didn’t live long as a mulatto – at least one of me didn’t.”

I asked if he ever had siblings.

“Yes, they were all me. We were one, minds in unison; experiencing multiple settings, multiple events, multiple encounters. Though we could never be more than three siblings of one mother or the connection would drift, become diluted. It’s madness: seeing a fourth son or daughter, and him or her completely shut down, isolated, unconnected, mentally gone. A freak. We took care of it.”

I asked my husband to explain.

“We took care of it; I will say no more.”

With the years passing, he became a man. He kept our love strong. We were discreet.

“I must take a bride, to live in a new form,” he said. “I cannot sire a child through you, my love. It’s forbidden.”

I understood; duty dictated that I’d give aid to his renewal. I invited local girls from established families for tea. Some were sweet enough, but not very savvy. I needed a young lady capable of protecting my husband when he became an infant again. There’s much horror during those months and years, of having an adult’s mind, though incapable of speech, incapable of walking, even feeding oneself. Like being buried alive in a beautiful coffin.

In 1886, my husband married a young lady named Beatrice – three years his senior, though that could not be helped. She was committed, intelligent, and dutiful. However, I decided to not tell her about my husband. Such things can never be explained between Oakland wives, they can only be experienced.

My experience? I love my husband. He died, then returned. I grew old. Now I sit on my deathbed: blind, weak. He and Beatrice visit from time to time. I still miss his face.

***

1927: Beatrice Oakland

We were never like those other people. The reserved people. The timid people. The morally obsessed people. It became pathology, really. The way husbands and wives declared before the world how righteous and cautious and unassuming they were, while hissing under fans and powdered cheeks about the shortcomings of others. I’m not sure who were worse, the wives of the pastors or the wives of the town councilmen. Authority has a way of tainting one’s spirit.

Mr. Oakland and I would attend picnics, recitals, and summer socials. From my periphery I could see eager lips whispering: how we held hands, or how he kissed me in tender ways unacceptable for most. My appearance often provoked their ire. Others wore their hair up with clasps and pins; I wore mine short. Others chose corsets and restrictive dresses in July; I wore blouses and pants. While most wives discussed cooking, sewing, and children, I joined my husband and the other men on the topics of politics, science, and commerce.

I fancied myself an amateur ornithologist, and I would regale summer social husbands with my mourning dove calls. I could also perform a raven’s cry, or that of a northern cardinal. The applause I received made Mr. Oakland smile. Even when the mayor’s wife, Agnes Johns, took it upon herself to ask my husband if he approved of such behavior, my beloved replied, “sunbeams don’t need approval to shine.”

The only time Mr. Oakland became insistent was on the matter of children. I understood when his mother invited me over for tea; it was with the possibility of becoming a bride for her son. I always found it odd that when he showed me affection she held an expression of resignation and duty, instead of joy. I chalked it up to a mother’s love, at first. Years later, I finally understood. I sobbed before Elizabeth, as she lay on her deathbed. She truly loved her husband, even when bound in the body of her son.

Years before that, he fascinated me. As he courted me, I grew to appreciate him … as a friend. My heart could not produce more. But in the most unusual way, I think he understood. And he began, almost intuitively, to treat me as an equal. To love me with a woman’s heart, and not a man’s assertion. With that, I accepted his proposal and we became as one. I even gave birth to his son and daughter. Twins.

The acts of an Oakland can rarely be explained without being witnessed. He wanted his son and daughter named after him, as he took on his departed father’s name: Morgan Oakland. After the first few days of their births, my son and daughter rarely cried. They spent their moments observing: the room, visitors, my actions, and hanging on every word spoken in their presence.

Mr. Oakland would ask about a neighbor who visited during his departure on a business trip. He would inquire about treatment for a bruise our daughter experienced after stumbling to the ground, or a cold our son caught from a local boy’s cough. When our children began speaking with his cadence, his mannerisms, I felt a streak of panic: my family sees the world through each other’s eyes. My five-year-old daughter had to rest my fears and inform me of her true self.

“I’m Morgan; we all are, Beatrice.”

I attended church, during my youth. In my realization of my husband and children, I recalled the biblical verse of Mark: the fifth chapter and the ninth verse, “And Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion for we are many.’”

In this case, I was not in the company of a New Testament demon. My family wasn’t – isn’t evil. They’re different forms, ages, and genders, all of the same spirit or personality.

My little girl pled to me, tearful, not to tell anyone. She trembled in my arms.

Why would I? It was 1896; people hadn’t been burned at the stake for hundreds of years, but I understood all the same. Sanitariums were just as horrific as the fires of inquisitors. And having one Oakland bound and hospitalized for insanity would become a prison for the other two – or how many more there are in the world.

So I acquiesced and raised our children – my husband.

On occasion, I needed a respite from the ambiguity of identity and familial roles. I knew a teacher, just outside of town, named Joan: a wonderful friend and a patient listener. I told her everything except our family’s secret, which still lifted such a weight from my heart.

Oaklands, being as they are, found out about my visits. Mr. Oakland insisted on having Joan join us for Sunday dinners, which soon included Friday dinners, and Saturdays as well. He never asked about my time with Joan. He never asked me to define my relationship with Joan. Perhaps it was his way of permitting my true self and maybe thanking me for never pushing back on having children, getting married to him, being courted. His mother – his wife before – was intuitive enough to know my heart. That didn’t matter, as long as I was strong willed.

Mr. Oakland died while reading the evening newspaper in 1918. An article about the Great War worked him into a rage. He was 55; our doctor said he had a heart attack. Our children experienced that sensation of death as well, through the emotional trauma. It took weeks to console my daughter, but my son Morgan was a 27-year-old lieutenant, stationed in Europe. Beyond my comfort and assurance.

Mr. Oakland left a stipend to hire Joan as an assistant in our Doylestown mansion. At least that was the official justification. Even in death, he understood me. And I continued to raise Morgan the best I could, despite her brother’s slaughter in a muddied trench in France. We are still a family, smashed and reassembled. We are whole.

***

1943: Isabelle Oakland

Some listen to American jazz for entertainment. The Résistance listens for messages about the Nazi officers, fuel deliveries, downed Allied pilots, and where to lay explosives for SS patrols. Each artist represents a scenario, each song a call for action. Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, Lester Young, Benny Goodman, Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holiday, and others, are like a spectrum of activities. Magnifying a mood, telling a story.

What better vehicle to convey our message to French brothers and sisters in arms. The idea and the albums belong to my son, Morgan Yves Oakland.

Spies and collaborators are never able to break our code … if one could call it that. Nor are they able to identify which radio station, at least among the pirated stations, is sending the information.

At first, I believed he had his father’s spirit – figuratively. For it’s rare to see creativity and toughness live harmoniously within a soldier, especially one from The Great War. I remember first meeting his father at a piano bar in 1918, so skinny in his brown uniform. His charisma filled in spaces his muscles could not. Yet, I fell in love and we shared much in our brief year and a half.

These memories had provided me peace when I gave birth to our son, not long after his father was killed in action. And then fear and disgust festered within me when I understood the truth. A truth I could not even confess to our village priest. Ironically, it was the Nazis that brought us together, again. In our darkest times, I could not deny my son.

Though we were poor, his other self – an American cousin of great kindness wired us funds, which we used to buy weapons. She even mailed us albums, to find some respite.

One night, while hiding from the Vichy police, Morgan had the idea about how Rhapsody in Blue, could be a musical piece to signal an attack. At first our friends considered it impossible, but someone in the upper echelons of the Maquis thought it was a superb idea. We just needed radio equipment, and two trucks to broadcast.

“Can you telegram your … cousin-self to send us the funds, Morgan?” I had asked.

My beloved’s soul spoke through my son, “No need, ma petite, she sees our conversation through my eyes. I am Oakland.”

Our strategy gained us many triumphs: officers killed, soldiers rescued, and more importantly information sent to the British and Americans. I was so proud of my boy, though I knew with the look he gave me; this was not his first war. Wisdom and innocence cannot inhabit the same heart.

One evening while broadcasting Strange Fruit, sung by Billie Holiday, a patrol had found one of our trucks – Morgan manned the vehicle. The scuffle and arrest could be heard over the radio. The brutes didn’t even have the courtesy to permit such a beautiful song to finish.

My son knew what would happen if he were arrested. He chose to detonate the potato masher on one of the soldiers’ belts. I lost my husband twice, but I lacked the moral courage to tell him I loved him, because of old taboos preached by old men.

And now I play the songs my boy once played. He, in the form of his female American cousin, sends fewer letters, but still wires cash through the Red Cross or missionary groups beyond the suspicions of the Vichy and the Nazis.

France will find liberty once again, and if possible, I would like to visit and embrace this cousin. Just to reunite once more with the son and husband I lost. I, too, bore a strange fruit.

***

1986: Morgan Kate Oakland  

My mother was born a twin in 1891; she gave birth to me in 1921, though out of wedlock. Illegitimate acts occur for legitimate reasons. In my case, for survival and to prevent our … my family fortune from falling into the hands of some suitor unsuited for the burden of responsibilities that come in sharing my history, my state of mind, or the synecdoche nature of what it means to be an Oakland.

Oh, I’ve been a woman before – multiple times. But in different centuries, consequences occurred from taking on some sympathetic husband with good intentions, or a spouse compelled to dominate my thinking, my opinions, and my sensibilities. Each time, whether for the best or not, we – I – we lost control.

Having more than three children, with the fourth or fifth completely lost to my pan-cerebral thought and being. Numb to us. Abominations. They would have been empty vessels, devoid of senses. Devoid of a mind – completely. With their brainstems providing barely enough motivation to wail for food and drag across the floor like a crippled pup.

I can tolerate much, but not disconnected Oaklands. I took no joy in correcting those errors. Yes, I lied each time. If a baby didn’t catch consumption, she or he would be exposed to plague, or smallpox, or perhaps they turned the wrong way in their crib and could not breath. Afterwards, I would claim that my womb could bear no more. Few men truly understand a woman’s biology, so they would acquiesce.

That is, until those cold nights; those nights of heavy drink and boredom. When a man attempts to treat a wife like someone less than the person he committed vows to during the wedding ceremony. I’ve been a warrior and a soldier in enough men’s bodies across the centuries to easily subdue a drunkard husband while I reside in a woman’s body. The first time results in a bruise and a warning. The second time, I explain to a village constable how my departed husband fell and struck his skull on a stone stair. I will not be subjugated in any form. I am Oakland.

After America’s war with the Axis Powers, I felt it best to follow my departed mother’s path and bring children into this world. I had a cousin and aunt in France, resistance fighters, but they were both eventually killed. I also have a Negro extended cousin, from an Oakland branch going back more than a century ago. But in the mid-20th century, his autonomy was limited; significantly more than this brunette white woman in Pennsylvania. In my mind and heart, I live his life to this day, as he simultaneously lives mine. I know what I speak of, completely.

So I needed a male heir – a vessel. I asked a loyal friend, Melvin, to drive me to a summer resort in the Adirondacks. We purchased a room, and spent the week watching married couples, or families with smart, strong sons. Young men of good breeding.

I would spend my time reading by the lakes in my bathing suit, or taking sailing tutorials in dinghies with tall bright sails. Several men approached me on the sly, beyond the eyes of their wives or attentive mothers. We’d talk news, politics, and literature: some were exceptionally dull, while others were arrogant. I noticed a somber man, nursing his bourbon on the rocks, for an hour or so each afternoon. He noticed me noticing him, yet remained. I approached. His name was George.

He was a professor before the war, and afterward, he felt his nerves exposed. A draining sensation, which alienated him from his wife and daughter. I understood. We talked for hours.

“Life is a series of moments, sometimes they can last seventy years and other times they can last a few wonderful hours. Just because the good moments are fleeting doesn’t mean it’s wrong to deny ourselves. Share a moment with me, George. Only a moment.”

The following day, Melvin drove me back to Pennsylvania. On March 9th, 1946 Morgan George Oakland was born. A Morgan Oakland can give birth to another Morgan Oakland, the pan-cerebral links are still maintained. However, a Morgan Oakland should never have sex with a Morgan Oakland, and then produce offspring. … Why? Because I fear the consequences. In my nearly 800 years of existence, there are levels of experimentation in human husbandry that even I would prefer to avoid.

Having a son in the house brought a new era of lively activities and friends. My mother Beatrice and her friend Joan were a bit more insular, for understandable reasons. But as Morgan George entered his teen years, he and his friends would spend afternoons on the veranda, listening to rock and roll albums and drinking bottles of chilled Coke.

I must say, I did enjoy those moments: peaceful, simple. I’ve died on battlefields of mud and vomit; I’ve owned men and forced myself on women purchased as my property. I’ve fled provinces for fear of being burned as a witch, or a heretic, or a protestant, or at least a half dozen excuses screamed by mankind. I’ve even killed my children to spare them pain.

My odyssey began as a 12th century Crusader who gained eternal life after finding forbidden holy men in Jerusalem, then dying in the Battle of Azaz, pissing in my own chainmail as I spoke the holy words and drank the elixir to renew my soul. And in a cruel joke, my soul became a vine wrapped around a long host of flesh. My ancestors, as shells for my exploitation. And in 1961, I was making sandwiches for high school students; dancing in their socks, on my porch, to Chubby Checker. It was a fun life. Too bad it wouldn’t last. A couple of years later, my boy received a college deferment, thus avoiding Vietnam; yet, found another war – Civil Rights, taking him to Southern states that were just as foreign to him as Southeast Asia. If anything, Oaklands are never innocent to the world.

***

2016: Morgan Terrell Oakland

I sit through the commencement ceremony, listening to our university’s president. He’s about to introduce Barack Obama; everyone is eager to hear this president’s advice on life in the real world. It’s remarkable to see so much change. Sixty years ago, I wouldn’t even have had access to a lunch counter in a Woolworth’s, or equal access to a white man’s bathroom. Now we have this man as our nation’s leader. I smile.

Among the audience in the graduate student commencement, I see me in the form of Morgan George Oakland, a man in his late seventies with gray eyes and trimmed white hair. I also see me in the form of Morgan Samantha Oakland, my mother and my brother Morgan Robert. Seeing so much from numerous perspectives is a treasure that I never take for granted. It’ll be even more helpful when I begin my residency in New York.

I do wonder if there’ll ever be a day when I decide to stop. No more children who aren’t really children but a means of passage. No more strained relationships defining what it means to love beyond the constraints of the physical. It’s just my decision and technically not just mine. At any given moment, my soul rests in five to twelve bodies across the planet. For the restriction of births are relevant only per mother – three, no more. But the number of families hovers somewhere around a dozen or less. That’s a lot of heartache to end myself … to end us, all at once. So I will stay, and try to become a better person in each incarnation. White, black, brown, or yellow; male or female, American or other; I and we are Oakland.

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Christina Vella, Author of Sizzling Works of Narrative History, Dies at 75

Using court records, family papers, household accounts and government archives, Ms. Vella constructed a gripping family drama that told a larger tale, shedding light on “the complexities of class, marriage, family economy, politics and the law, both in France and in Louisiana, spanning four generations of two families,” Angeline Goreau wrote in The New York Times Book Review.

Ms. Vella told the reference work Contemporary Authors in 2006, “History is above all a human drama, and peering into it can be as exciting as opening a diary you find in an attic.” She added, “Any analysis of great movements in history is far more fascinating and trustworthy if we can distinguish individual faces among the masses and hear their voices within the din of abstract ideas.”

Christina Vella was born in New Orleans on March 14, 1942. Her father, Mario, was a traveling salesman who married a distant cousin, Nicolina, with the same last name. She was a homemaker.

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The family moved to the tiny town of Pearl River, La., when Christina was young, but she attended school in New Orleans, about 40 miles from home.

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She enrolled in Louisiana State University but left to teach in the public schools of St. Bernard Parish, near New Orleans. Through correspondence courses she earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1965. She later took night courses at the University of New Orleans, which awarded her a master’s degree in history in 1971.

Ms. Vella taught history for several years at St. Bernard Community College (now Nunez Community College) in Chalmette, La., before earning a doctorate in 1990 in modern European and American history from Tulane University, where she was an adjunct professor of history for many years. Her dissertation, on the Baroness de Pontalba, was the basis for her first book.

In 1980 she married Robert Riehl. The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her daughter Robin, she is survived by another daughter, Christina Riehl.

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“Intimate Enemies” established Ms. Vella as a meticulous historian with a flair for description and an eye for the telling detail.

She also had a nose for a good story, regardless of the historical period. “The Hitler Kiss: A Memoir of the Czech Resistance” (2002), written with Radomir Luza, plunged into the world of the Czech resistance during World War II, seen through the eyes of Mr. Luza and his father, a Czech general.

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“Indecent Secrets: The Infamous Murri Murder Affair” (2006) served up another helping of scandal, this time in turn-of-the-century Bologna, where Count Francesco Bonmartini was found stabbed to death in his apartment. Ms. Vella unearthed the details of a celebrated trial involving the count’s wife, Linda Murri, the free-living daughter of a celebrated surgeon — the newspapers called her “the enchantress” — and a cast of co-conspirators.

“It stayed on the front pages of every newspaper in Italy from 1902 to 1906, and it was still surfacing in articles as late as 1910,” Ms. Vella told The Times-Picyaune of New Orleans in 2006. “It was bigger than the O. J. case!”

The composer Thea Musgrave turned “Intimate Enemies” into an opera, “Pontalba,” which had its premiere in New Orleans in 2003.

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Ms. Vella also wrote “George Washington Carver: A Life,” published in 2015, and at her death had completed a biography of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey.

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Eggshells | Literary Hub

The following is from Caitriona Lally’s novel, Eggshells. Lally studied English Literature in Trinity College Dublin. She has had a colorful employment history, working as an abstract writer and a copywriter, as well as a home helper in New York and an English teacher in Japan. She has traveled extensively around Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and South America. Caitriona was shortlisted for “Newcomer of the Year” in the Irish Book Awards in 2015.

I wake to the sound of me grinding my teeth. I should probably sleep with cotton wool or marshmallow in my mouth to soften the attack. David from the Social Welfare office is visiting today but I don’t want to think about that just yet, so I lie in bed snatching at my dream-thoughts before they vanish through my eyelids: I am in a tunnel that’s split in two, each side rising up to the roof in turn, crushing anything on it. I have to keep jumping from the rising part to the falling part until that too starts to rise. No wonder I feel tired, I saved my own life in my sleep. My throat feels scratched where the scream clogged, I only wake from a nightmare if the scream scrapes through. I wish it were a song and not a scream. Or a laugh. My sister laughs in her sleep. When I used to share her room I would wake in the night to hear her laughing, eyes shut tight, at something that didn’t seem funny in the morning.

I get up and root through the wardrobe for a pair of khaki combats that will show David I am a serious job hunter. Then I take a dark-green jumper from the shelf. I bring my clothes into the bathroom, put the plug in the bath and run the taps. I duck my head under my pyjama top and breathe in my smell for the last time—even when I leave it another while to wash, the smell will not be this exact combination of sweat and food emissions. I pick up a bottle of pink bubble bath that my great-aunt left behind. The bottle is heart-shaped and ugly, like two inward-facing question marks with no interest in the world. I tip the bottle into the bath. It pours like a thick gluey syrup, turning the bathwater pink and adding white bubbles on top: beer for little girls. Then I hold the bottle over my head and thrust it onto the floor with all my might. The bottle has been transformed into dozens of shards and pieces. I examine them for a while, then step into the bath, squat on my hunkers and lower myself into the water. I stretch out my legs and raise them out of the water, but they haven’t turned into a tail and my skin hasn’t turned into scales and I haven’t turned into a mermaid. I lie back, the bubbles scrinch scrinching, and try to form an expression of extreme calm on my face like the women in television ads, but I’m so hot my heart is rattling in my chest and my toes feel like they belong to somebody else and I can’t relax when I smell like strawberry bubblegum and feel like dirty dishes. I’m not sure how long I have to stay in the bath to be clean, so I swirl the water around and sluice it over my face. Then I lie back with my head facing the ceiling to wash my hair. The water fills my ears and muffles my world; this must be what Lemonfish’s world sounds like. I pull the plug and sit in the bath while it drains. It feels like I should be dying, like my internal organs are being slowly sucked out of my body and down the plughole. I get out, crouch under a towel and tug my clothes on. Then I blast my head with the hairdryer, breathing in the smell of hot burning dust. I eat breakfast and bring Lemonfish’s bowl to the sink. I slowly pour some water out, trying not to lose fish or lemons. Then I turn on the tap and add some fresh water. I’ve just changed Lemonfish’s liquid nappy. I brush my teeth at the kitchen sink and imagine a toothbrush so small that it could brush each tooth individually. If only there was an elf section in the supermarket.

David has the name of a king, so I will clean the house and make it fit for a king-guest. I bring the hoover upstairs and open the door to the hoard-room. A huge toy gun, the kind that stretches across the body and makes a ratatatatatatat noise when you pull the trigger, catches my eye from the childhood-toys pile. It could be useful for a job-hunter so I bring it downstairs. I hoover the landing, then I hoover the stairs, which is like trying to slide down a fireman’s pole in stops and starts, then I hoover the hall and, finally, I bash the hoover in between the chair legs in the living room. I wish I’d made a list of chores so I could put a thick pencil mark through “Hoover House.” Or, to get more pencil strikes, I might divide the chores into:

Hoover Landing
Hoover Stairs
Hoover Hall
Hoover Living Room

When the doorbell rings, I’m standing in the hall sniffing my strawberry hands, which smell unfamiliar and hateful. I open the door.

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“Hello, David,” I say.

His face doesn’t match his name, David is a gentle name, with soft indecisive “D”s and an open “V,” but this David is pursed and definite.

“Good morning, Vivian,” he says, and shakes my hand—a crisp formality of a handshake.

“Come on through,” I say, because that’s what people in soap operas on television say to visitors, but the words come out in a Manchester accent. He sits at the kitchen table, and Lemonfish swims bowl-side to look out.

“You’re his first visitor, so you must excuse him if he’s shy,” I say.

David half-laughs, a cautious kind of sound without much bark in it.

“Would you like some tea?”

“Please, a drop of milk, two sugars.”

He speaks with an admirable abruptness, but his sentences don’t provide enough information.

“A big drop or a small drop—like a thundershower or a drizzle?”

His face puckers and narrows, as if something under the skin is pulling it back.

“A big drop.”

“Right. Heaped or level?”

“Sorry?”

“Your sugars. Heaped or level teaspoons?”

“Either.”

David waves his hand as if swatting away my question, pulls out a grey folder from his briefcase, lays it on the table and opens it. I fill the kettle and whisper, “Take your time, boil slowly.” I should have added ice to the kettle to slow it down. David clears his throat.

“So you’ve been out of work since when?”

I don’t like being asked questions that are already answered in grey folders.

“Since somewhere between Grand Stretch in the Evening and We Won’t Feel it Now Till Christmas,” I say.

“I’m sorry?”

David is a lot of sorry it seems. “September.”

“Okay.”

He writes something on a page. David seems like the kind of man who likes neat black words to fit into neat white boxes. I look at his black biro and try to imagine all the other unworkers it has written about. I wonder if he ever writes things like, “Her house smells of boiled mutton” or “His ears stick out strangely.” The roar from the kettle becomes a gurgle and then a click. I pull the lid off the teapot and—oh no!—there is mouldy fur inside. I scoop it out and secretly sniff it—it smells like soil multiplied. When the tea has brewed, I bring the mugs to the table.

“What kind of jobs have you been applying for, Vivian?”

“I’ll show you.”

I go into the living room to get my list. The toy gun is sitting on the red chair like a gift for a king—now is a good time for my trick. I run back into the kitchen pointing the gun at David and holding down the trigger: ratatatatatatatatat! David jumps at the noise; he turns to face me and squeals when he sees the gun pointed at him. Then he scrapes back his chair and dives under the table, his papers scattering around him. I stop to admire the arrangement of white paper on black tiles, it looks like the kitchen has been paper-bombed. David’s face peeks out from under the table—his eyes bulge, he looks like fear has taken him over.

“It’s nice under there, isn’t it?” I say. “That’s where I had my blue feast.”

“Jesus Christ, woman, what the fuck are you playing at?”

I didn’t think officials were allowed to curse.

“I’m playing at Job-hunters, that’s why I’m dressed in khaki. I thought you’d join in the game.”

He gets up from the floor with a creak, his black trouser-knees covered in grey dust and cornflake silt. He sits in the chair, but he doesn’t sit up quite so straight. Then he leans his elbows on the table and puts his head in his hands. When he takes a sup of tea, the mug shakes and spills. I put the gun on the floor and gather up his papers. The top page reads, in squat handwriting:

“Client appears to have inappropriate—”

I put the pages on the table and look away. David is breathing in short gasps that don’t seem to take in much air. I sit opposite him and stare, in silence, until he gives his head a small toss, like a pony or a snooty child, and straightens his papers.

“Right, where were we?” he asks.

“Well, you were on the chair, until I started shooting, so you moved to the floor—”

He waves his hand in the air like a conductor, so I shriek “Lalalalalalala” as loud as I can. He cowers under his papers and hisses,

“Christ, what are you at now?”

“You were conducting, it’d be rude not to make some kind of music in return.”

I like singing—the breath and effort of it—even though I can’t tell from my own ears if I’m in tune. I was told to whisper in my school choir, but maybe I’ve grown in tune since then. I start singing “Doe a Deer,” but I sing quietly so that I don’t scare David. He looks at me like I have bled the last drop of milk from the carton and left none for him, so I drop my tune.

“What kinds of jobs have you been applying for?”

I push my list across the table. He reads aloud: “Dog walker, bubble-blower, changeling, assistant.”

He turns the page over but that’s all there is. He looks at the list again and seems to wilt.

“Assistant what?”

He has barely enough up-breath to form a question mark. “Assistant anything, I won’t know until I see the job description.”

“I see.”

His tongue doesn’t quite reach the roof of his mouth, so it sounds more like “I hee.” He picks up the list with his fingertips as if it’s a paper disease, takes a sip of tea and coughs.

“Excuse me.”

“That’s okay, I put half a cough and a quarter of a hiccup in the teapot.”

David closes his eyes and, I think if he had glue, he would have stuck his lids shut. When he opens them again, his eyes seem to have sunk further back into their sockets, as if he’s showcasing his corpse look.

“Have you ever pretended to be dead?” I ask.

His face doesn’t move and his voice, when it comes, is sealed good and tight.

“Have you considered other areas—administration jobs, for instance?”

I prefer an example to an instance, but David won’t understand this.

“I don’t like telephones, and there are lots of them in offices.” His face twists into a tormented expression, the kind of expression I’ve seen on the faces of war victims on news reports. “Indeed” is all he says, but he says it like it’s the last word before the end of the world. He rustles through his papers as if he’s looking for an official response, then he straightens up and makes a small speech about benefits and credits and signing on and job seeking and computer courses and upskilling and qualifications in pharmaceuticals or marketing or industries where they are hiring. I nod my head and say “hmm yes” and “oh I hadn’t thought of that,” but I know this is all a cod. Employers won’t hire me to work in their offices when they can hire a shiny woman who speaks in exclamation marks.

“It’s important to keep an open mind,” he says.

“I am open-minded,” I say. “Sometimes I wear my slippers on the opposite feet to change my worldview, even though it makes me hobble.”

David takes a deep breath. He looks like a faded mural in a children’s ward.

“Right, I think we’re all done here,” he says on a new gust of breath, and he bundles his papers and stuffs them into his briefcase. He says half a goodbye and leaves in a great hurry, such a great hurry that it makes me think there’s a fire, so I follow him outside and look up at the house. There are no flames, but the house seems more menacing now that David’s been in it. The smell will be all wrong: the smell of fake strawberry and David and fresh paper. I regret my bath—David didn’t even ask to smell me. I tuck my nose into my jumper and sniff. I still smell strawberry-sweet, but there is also the start of a sweaty tang. I go back inside and walk through the house, closing every blind and every curtain and every door. I crouch in the bathroom, pick up a piece of the smashed bottle and stare into it. I will check every shard, surely in one of them there’ll be a glimpse of where I’m supposed to be.

 

 

From EGGSHELLS .  Used with permission of Melville House. Copyright © 2017 by Caitriona Lally.

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