LAVENDER REVIEW: LESBIAN POETRY & ART: November 2011

John Bauer

John Bauer, Odin et Sleipnir (1911)

Leopoldine Core & Eileen Myles

17 Fairy Tales

A fairy tale in which a young farm girl looks into the eyes of her father’s cow. In them she sees footage from other times – a film reel. No one else sees this and they claim the girl is mad. Finally, the cow is slaughtered and she really does go mad.

A fairy tale in which a young man who works in a mental hospital falls in love with the mooing songs a strange woman makes each night as she sits in her corner before she’s led to bed.

A fairy tale in which a handsome elf seduces a man on his way home from work. The man is convinced to bring the elf back to his apartment and they drink dark bottles of beer on his bed. But the elf does not kiss him. The elf does not even touch him. Then, with a single burning glance, he steals the man’s memories and lets himself out.

A fairy tale in which a siren screaming its heart out on a rescue truck on avenue A suddenly feels it is alive.

A fairy tale in which the orange candle full of light while its neck is melting begins to cry.

A fairy tale in which the small dog lying on your bed chewing a bone with dark burning eyes is thinking about the novel it will write.

A fairy tale in which another dog on another block barks and says me too.

Another siren on another truck is coughing and choking.

A fairy tale in which the car that passes down below while the two women are eating popcorn is actually a great fish that has swallowed the street.

A fairy tale in which a parasite talks to his host – a portly man in his 50s. The parasite says, “ You never do what you really wanna do.”

A fairy tale in which a woman looks into her newborn’s eyes and sees the venomous spirit of her grandfather – a cruel man who once bit her hand to wake her from a nap. The woman drowns her baby then looks in the mirror and screams.

A fairy tale in which two sharks encircle a surfer girl. She has her belly on the board and is paddling back to shore. They decide not to eat her and instead penetrate her sexually.

A fairy tale in which a man comes home to find that his teen son is enchanted. The boy has a shimmering yellow aura and looks the man very directly in the eye. The man can tell that the boy now knows everything. The boy knows WHAT HE DID. The man knows he must leave town.

A fairy tale in which a chair speaks. The chair says only terrible things and can drive any sentient being to suicide.

A fairy tale in which two women agree that the man next-door is an elf and even has an elfin name. At night they lie in bed and see his smile and can hear him quietly dancing. They wonder which one of them he wants for his bride.

A fairy tale in which a rat terrier falls in love with her owner. He is blonde and German. The dog feels certain that she is a woman and wants to kiss the man as she. The dog kills his girlfriend with one chomp and the man is hysterical. But he loves the dog and cannot gas her. He sets her loose in the woods.

A woman watches her partner write and wonders why she always looks left-handed when she is not. She continues to watch and slowly she realizes that the pen is left-handed. Awkwardly it suffers her grip.

Leopoldine Core was born and raised in Manhattan. She attended Hunter College. Her work has appeared in Open City and The Literarian.

Eileen Myles was born in Cambridge, Mass. in 1949, and moved to New York City in 1974 to be a poet. Her many volumes of poetry and fiction include Sorry, Tree; Chelsea Girls; Not Me; Skies; Cool for You; The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art; and Inferno (a poet's novel).

Shantell Martin

Lucy Corin

A Woman with a Gardener

I’m with the caterers, a one-time job, a borrowed bow tie, old sneakers I’ve spray lacquered black. It was that or heels. Fifty bucks, four hours.
        White turned rails swoop up the lawn and curve around the verandah. What’s a verandah? It’s what I think I’m seeing. There’s a funny white statue of a lithe angel holding a lamp at the walkway entrance, and then later, up nearer the house where the stairs start toward the entrance, nothing you could call a stoop, a baby one, what do you call it, a cherub? Like going in reverse, back in time. Next, great lion-headed knockers looking nothing like boobs, I think, annoying myself, scanning for a back entrance, somewhere I must be supposed to be going. There is one. Around back. You go in a door built into a hill and it’s a tunnel left over from slave days. I heard of these somewhere, in a class, maybe, this way to pretend you don’t have slaves, like it’s magic everything is so nice, but this place might be old or it might be replica. It doesn’t look old. What looks old and not dirty? This looks clean, a clean hill of grass, nice trees, a clean door in the hill, and inside, chunky rock walls. It could be a rich crazy lady’s delusional obsession. She could have built it for her demons. I don’t know enough to tell.
        Either way I feel dumpy and defensive. Inside it’s an underground kitchen and the company is using it to do final prep. Long metal tables fold out from the walls on insectlike legs and people, mostly dropout-looking kids, are lined along it in narrow cook’s hats making piles of dices and squeezing butter into ramekins with pastry bags. Piles of baskets for rolls, buckets of utensils, trays of four kinds of glasses, mounds of grapes, and eight hams pegged with fruit, and platters of strung-up little birds, and supersized crosshatched pies . . . I don’t know anything about food, but I’m for it.
        “Hi Amy, hi Jacob, hi Tandy, hi Joe.” These are kids I know from other sucky jobs.
        “You should see upstairs,” Becky says. I like Becky and miss her sometimes. She’s holding a cleaver and there’s band-aids around the center three knuckles of her hand. Something is always happening with her. “Go upstairs and check in with Matt. Tell him you’re here. Wait til you see upstairs.” Becky got me the job. I did catering once before, a bar mitzvah with globes of gumballs instead of flowers on the tables. Gumballs all over the floor like marbles as soon as the boys landed.
        Okay, upstairs. How do I get there? I can’t remember. I’ll tell you what else I don’t remember, is how I know how to say what I saw. But I know.
        Upstairs first it’s all about chandeliers, then it’s about mosaic tile, then it’s inlaid wood all through the ballroom, marquetry borders, and walls of mirrors in gilt frames surrounded with ornate probably silk wallpaper, and dark carved wooden trim around everything and enormous arching glass doors, window seats lined with tasseled cushions, giant oil paintings of old men and bustled ladies with lace-up dress fronts, tables, tables, tables, with white cloths and centerpieces made from rosebuds and pearl beads. No metal folding chairs at this shindig. All six-tops waiting for six tops. I’m about to throw up from looking when server after server emerges from behind a staircase in a fashion so orderly I cannot believe I will ever blend in. These people who I might, a moment before, have recognized, weave like a mass of ants among the tables, surround them, cover the space, and then disappear in a wave back behind the stairs, leaving six place settings at each table where before there were none. In fact, as I watch, I begin to believe I am watching one person, over and over, as if time is stuttering and indeed there is only one person setting one table. But then somehow the whole place is set and I suspect I’ve seen dozens of servers, maybe hundreds. It feels like hundreds. How does it feel to see a hundred servers? I might have seen hundreds of servers over the plodding course of my idiotic life. But at once they’re not men and not women, and not kids, some of whom I know; they’re elements of the décor swooping in and returning like a living curtain.
        I go back downstairs. I’m shaking, all the bits of me rattling like they’re strung together or just tossed in one bag. “I don’t know who Matt is,” I tell Becky. She’s there with the cleaver. She might have been one of the servers upstairs, but now she is herself again.
        How will I possibly become one of them? I will stick out. My shoes will chip. I’ll fall. She tells me something. For a moment I remember what she looks like naked. I also remember what she looked like when she said, “I can’t take it anymore!” and I said, “Take what?” and she said, “It! It, it, it!” and started throwing her things around her crappy apartment. She didn’t mean me. She meant everything. I remember she broke this ceramic frog she’d kept from childhood that she had on her dresser and it held her rings in its mouth at night.
        I can see the blade of her cleaver moving and flashing, just as beyond her I can see other hands on singing tongs and other hands spinning wooden salad bowls that clack like castanets, and even though I know Becky is talking, time shifts—it shifts because of memory—and even though I am a terrible server, I feel it: all I have to do is move and I am caught up in exactly what surrounds me. So I do, and there I am. I am one in a line of precisely undulating bodies from a long line of long lines, moving up twisting basement stairs that become increasingly shiny as I near the surface, and I am balancing an enormous silver tray of twenty glasses of champagne as if the glasses and the liquid in them are suspended over my palm as weightless as any idea I’ve ever had. I look for Becky; I want to mouth to her how elated I am, how okay I feel, how light I feel, and graceful, but everyone is blurred together and when I try to glance in the mirrors I’m moving past I cannot catch my own image, which bothers me for a moment. But then I see that my free hand is guiding glass after glass onto the tables as I pass with exquisite timing; I never stop moving my feet and yet each guest’s elbow shifts out of the way as I approach and each baubled dandy catches my eye to accept or pass as if we are breathing together, and just as I cannot tell one server from another I cannot tell one guest from another; I simply know as if by rhythm, yes or no, I want, I don’t, or yes, but here, or no, but soon. Their happy noises ring and hover, rumble and soar, and utensils punctuate, and behind me, Becky, or anyone, is slipping them pâté and crudité (what, did I pick this up in construction? did I learn it landscaping?) and golden bouncy bits of fish and vegetables. I’ve glided in figure eights so balanced I’m breathless, I’m elated, I’m gliding back down the stairs, and although the damp basement walls remain distant, somewhere I sense that if I slow down, moisture from the stones will begin to cling to the fragrant hairs on my arms. Luckily my friends in their crimped white hats fill my tray with meat pastries; the tray, in fact, seems to levee, and it guides me back around and up the stairs, the funny flaky bundles tugging along like a tiny pack of sleigh dogs until I’m sailing again among the tables, the nods, the orchestra of motion and sound, the pulsing colors, and light that ranges from staccato sparkle to low humming glow.
        I loop down into the kitchen, the kitchen streams by, and when I next rise from the basement I pause at the entrance, to see if I can, of my own volition, and it turns out I can. I feel like a rock in a river, but it’s because I’m still that I am able to notice what I notice:
        It’s a breath I’m taking, a breath like I have never taken before, one so discrete I can tell that it comes from somewhere. I am of the collective of servers, but then I take this breath that feels like an icy ribbon of vapor is being fed to me in this hotly buzzing room of kaleidoscopic bodies. It’s a breath that is coming from someone. As I take it, I can almost trace it, and then I do, I trace it back toward the kite it’s come from; I’m paused at the foot of the room and the other servers bend away from me convexly; I feel them pull, elastic, but I am held there with my tray; I am breathing the ribbon that has been sent to me. In the pause, I remember that I used to draw pictures as a child, something I stopped doing, I only now suspect, for some reason. In the pause, I remember drawing a picture of a road going into the distance. Did I draw it accidentally or is this something I learned? I remember that moment in my history when I discovered, just as some time in human history it was discovered, that a triangle in two dimensions can make two feel like three. It was sort of great, but it also ruined everything.
        I stretch my neck and close my eyes, and I am being pulled by the center line of this perspective. Have I ever used the word perspective? Would Becky, Jacob, Tandy use that word? I am being wrenched, I am being dragged, and then I feel the last tendrils of my connection to the serving corpus plucked away like nerves in a surgical amputation—plink, pluck—although it appears I’ve been properly numbed or stung or filled via breath with druggy distance for this ordeal. I’m so loopy. Time is wobbly around me, and space is, too, and the thing that’s going to happen is about to happen.
        I almost know I am on my way to being unimaginably blissed-out.
        At the top of the room, a woman, the kite herself, has risen and she stands at her table at the head of everything. She is dinging her glass with a fork. Her gown is yellow with silver threads. I know it from way back here, hot gold and cold silver. Her pale hair swoops around the back of her head, loose enough to form a halo. She’s got diamonds on. I am dumb and I am awed. One is worse.
        She looks wise, like an excellent actress.
        I don’t know what happens, but she speaks.
        There are bells, or applause.
        She is as if born of the room, molten, but then her tone shifts and the room turns moony, or her tone shifts and everyone’s cheeks glow like roses at once and light dapples their spotty heads. It’s true she’s too far away to see but that doesn’t seem to be the point of this experience. Luckily I have no idea how time moves here. All I know is it’s not mine. Not my time, not my place. And thank God. Mine sucks. Luckily I don’t have to wait. Luckily as I stand there and her voice reaches and feeds me I am stunned as if by certain kinds of insects I have never studied. What’s sharp? What’s smooth? This is sharp and smooth. She’s done dinging, and finished speaking, and now it’s a banquet peopled with playing cards, jacks, queens, kings, and jokers that simply fall away from the grid of round tables and who knows where the rest of the deck went; back below, long ago.
        Light pulses and spasms from the mirrors and the gilded ceiling. Then the light quiets and cools. The hall is a field of strewn white napkins. I see them blow away like petals. I see the tables take to their legs and scurry off stage. I see me at the foot of the hall. I see her at the head in her gown, dinging her glass and taking a breath to speak, but luckily I do not have to live through dessert or whatever social thing the mounds of guests might insist upon next because time here has moved as if for me and now they’re gone and now she’s laughing at them but she’s still exhausted and happy that the night was—what—swell? It was something. It was all right. It was exactly what we wanted. She throws her arm across my shoulder.
        She’d looked very tall but up close she’s my size.
        Her laugh is as soft as a charcoal line.
        I can remember my parents like this. Two in the morning, coming home, tired and tipsy. This is when I slept on the couch because it was a one-room place with a curtain divider, and Dad flopped into the easy chair, laughing, and Mom flopped onto his lap, shushing, and I said, “I’m awake, you dopes.”
        We’re pooped. We did it. It’s over. Let’s turn in.
        But first, link arms. First, a walk in the garden.

We survey the lawn for a moment from the great front doors of the house. We leave the doors open as we descend the curving stairs, dramatic in the light behind us, and we pass the cherub, and then we pass the lithe angel, and then we stroll onto the lawn. The lawn is dotted with seven enormous trees, a leafy canopied kind. Old trees. Can’t transplant trees that old. There’s some light from the moon and some light from the lanterns the angel and the cherub are holding. Am I myself? I feel as if I am, if a little wobbly, and with an echo in those words: myself, wobbly. She left her yellow gown like an enormous rose head on the floor of the hall and now she wears only her underthings, a simple cotton shift, or something called something like that, and she’s taken her necklace off and strung it in her loosened hair so now she’s nymphy, as if we’ve made it to Deco, so perhaps I picked up a little more history than I like to remember.
        Under one tree is a man and a woman stretched out next to each other, the man on an elbow. They’re making out near his floppy hat. Under another tree a fat old man is passed out, spread-eagle on his back, his pocket watch sliding from his pants. We’re arm in arm. We’re strolling. I’m barefoot with my trousers rolled halfway up my calves. The grass is cool. The breeze moves. I’ve untucked my white shirt, and it moves, and her white little shift thingy moves. A paper cup blows by from another era. We’re almost ghosts. We’d be ghosts to anyone watching. Nothing hurts.
        When will we speak? Is it possible to speak in this condition? Back in my old life, we’d banter. I wouldn’t call it “banter,” I’d call it “reeling her in,” but that cannot happen here. Too coarse. Here, there are practically no edges. I already know her voice and it’s already an aspect of the bubbling of my own imagination, so what can we do? We weave among the seven trees of the rising and dipping lawn until we come upon a break in the hedges and are in a maze. She shifts half a step ahead of me, because the space is very narrow, quite dark, and I can feel the tips of boxwood leaves on my shoulders. It’s as if I hear the word boxwood and as if the maze is moving beneath my feet and I am still, peering past the motion of her hair, the maze turning and gliding. We emerge from it along a stone path in a garden of evenly spaced young trees with silver bark and leaves that clack. A glass greenhouse shines in shards in the dark like teeth, like shifting knives. We are also surrounded by roses, which is lucky, because it’s almost the only flower I know. As we walk we can smell them. Most of the roses smell pale, but we pass one that is sharper. “These are old roses,” she says. “Generation to generation. Passed down.” She is still a half step ahead and although I know the gleaming line of her jaw as if it’s always lived in my periphery, I haven’t seen her face since we entered the maze and I’m a little frightened. I’m afraid that if she turns to me her face might be cruel, after all. Then the voice that told me “boxwood” begins humming again under the leaves. She turns enough to meet my eyes and says, “It’s my gardener.” She is still herself. Then, around a bend, I see him, crouched beneath a plant that looks like a buffalo, peering at a turtle that is black as a stove and looks like a stone. He’s wrinkled, and muttering. He looks like my grandfather. He looks like a troll. He’s holding a lantern. Bugs and desperate moths flail around it, bouncing against the glass.
        She says—and what should I call her? my lady? my girl?—she says, “What do you say?” and the gardener squints in the filmy light, his lips moving. I can see his throat push a little harder. I can see him pushing the sound out. I can tell he hates me. My own grandfather. Her gardener. A troll. He begins what is clearly incantation. I tell you, my education is singing. He says, or he recites:

        oenanthe crocata the water dropwort,
        argaricus xanthodermus, helleborus purpura,
        taxus baccata, amanita pantherina,
        deathcap, butlersweet, solanum dulcamara,
        laburnum, sulfur tuft, atropa belladonna . . .

        Is the turtle going to turn into something? “Ignore him,” she says. “Let’s go,” she says, and whisks me away before we can make a choice, before I am even certain there’s a choice to make. She whisks me away as if neither left nor right. She whisks me up. Up, up, and away. “He’s a creep,” she says. Then, we disappear.
        Darkness and she is almost all sound and smell. I am made of particles. She calls me urchin. She calls me waif. I’m an urchin. “You’re my waif. You are. You are my urchin.” These smiling words, one from the sea, one a limp city leaf. Here I am, in a wave of water, a wave of air, in the motion that makes up matter. I am honey, sugar, darling, all of them. I have the memory of her already. It could be the reason it is so dark, the memory I will have of her filling everything. We remain placeless in a way I almost fathom.
        This, love, is simply response to stimuli, I think, although I know enough to know I am not a thinker. An urchin knows nothing, knows only now, and now, and now. When I close my eyes I am overwhelmed by my own light.
        Morning and the bed is a boatful of feathers and we are floating under yellow blooming sheets. Her windows are enormous. Minty leaves shiver out there, fringing the view. Beyond them, though, if I squint, the gardener is approaching with a red machine slung by a strap over his shoulder. He’s wearing a cap. He’s hunched and ugly.
        What will become of me if I am someone who loves a woman with a gardener?
        “I’ll be back,” she says. “I’m famished.” She crosses the room. She’s not wearing the sheet. She’s left the sheet with me. She remains astonishing. From a hook behind the bathroom door she lifts a golden bell. She cups it in her hand like a bird and keeps it noiseless. She holds it in front of her as if she’s going to present it to me, as if she’s going to present it wryly, knowingly, writhing with our in-joke, the joke of how I would never do this; I would never get caught up. “Look, baby bird.” Am I a bird? Is the bell a bird? She keeps it cupped and hovering in front of her abdomen, and when she lifts her knee to the bed her muscles shift and when she lifts her other knee they shift again, but differently.
        I must be the bird; I am so fluttery.
        She’s kneeling before me, although we are clearly on the same level. I’m resting on my elbow, head in my hand. This can go on. I can see it. I know it. I can do it. I can see my rags and riches. I can do this, I think. I am tough enough.
        My hips are a hill under the blossoms. “Take the bell,” she says. She’s whispering. “Ring it. I give it to you. I give you everything.”
        Outside, the gardener is muttering, still. He’s a voice from the past. I believe I remember all of this from childhood.
        “I know this one,” she says. “You can listen but it’s best not to take it in. It’s actually a very funny tune.” He’s out of view, now, low, below the window. He revs his engine and under its roar and the spattering of the branches it encounters I hear the incantation rise:

        polytrichum juniperinum,
        festuca rubra, festuca arundinacea,
        poa pratensis, poa trivialis,
        lolium perenne, anthemis nobilis,
        dactylis glomerata, phleum pratense,
        agrostis stolonifera the creeping bent . . .

        What the spell does is make me remember my dream. In my dream my grandfather tells me the story of Thomas Jefferson from Virginia and his architecturally important house, and the slaves in the tunnels, and he tells me the story of Mrs. Winchester from California, haunted by a fortune made from guns, the house she built crazily bumping into itself, stairs into ceilings, halls into brick walls, wings tumbling over one another as if out of breath. The houses bookend the country. I know that in dreams, when you dream of houses, you are dreaming of yourself. I don’t know what this means. In the dream, I’m just a little kid. I don’t know anything. “Grampa,” I say, tugging at his nightshirt, “where did you learn this? Did you learn this in school?”
        I stretch across the bed, pull myself to the windowsill to see if I can see down. She takes my hand and pulls me back in a swirl of sheets. She’s grinning, dazzling. She says, “Shut up, you fucker!” and slams the window, and the room shakes, and the bell rings in my palm, and several figs tumble into our laps, and breakfast, it turns out, is the most delicious of all.

“A Woman with a Gardener” copyright © 2007 by Lucy Corin. Reprinted with permission by Tin House Books.

Lucy Corin is the author of the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls and the story collection The Entire Predicament, in which "A Woman with a Gardener" appears. Her website chronicles her work in her next novel and collects links to online micro-fictions she calls "apocalypses."

Gustave Doré

Gustave Doré, Cinderella (1866)

Sarah Schulman

Why Not

“Why not?” she asked, and I knew it was a real question. Little Catherine. Actually she is taller than me, but there is something about age that makes them smaller, until we start to shrink.

Starbucks has a repulsive ability to play great music that was banned in its day but has since become banal. It reminds us that few things in life are truly dangerous. Only drunk driving and the adoration of the young. All of their pastries are dry white flour and colored sugar lumps passing for fruit and we eat them without joy. The only pleasure comes from thinking about how they could taste. The young, I mean. It’s amazing how far one will go to sit in a comfortable chair.

We’re in the gay Starbucks on Santa Monica Boulevard. I’ve come to Los Angeles for money, for meetings and to find a girlfriend, but instead I found Catherine and she meets none of my requirements. She’s young. That’s out. She’s not accomplished, in fact she’s lost. She doesn’t have her own friends. She’s not busy and she’s not solvent. She’s also not cute, although strangely attractive in the way that smart lost souls with wounds that will never heal are always compelling to the terminally hopeful.

Don’t do it! I tell myself sipping the burnt coffee, passing for strong.

An hour later we’re on her mattress on the floor, fraying towels, telephone wires buzzing outside the window against the passing traffic. She has three coffee mugs but no coffee, so they’re filled with tap water. Of course she’s a great kisser and looks at me deeply and soulfully, doing what women in the know know how to do. Holding, guiding, placing, maneuvering, lifting, painting my soon to be corpse with skill. She ignores my various symptoms of use, mostly because she doesn’t recognize them for what they are. I’m silent about aches and pains, dislocations, biopsy scars, thinning, bunching, untrimmed, puckering. She individuates me within her panoply of 22-28 year-olds, and it all makes sense to her because every human being is real at some point.

This isn’t what I want a voice is whining inside my head, but it’s not my voice. It’s Jamie Robbins, Emmy-nominated but closeted, who ten years before when middle-age was some vague possibility, stood naked and gorgeous in her dank, dreary studio apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and after four hours of the best sex of her life, blew me off because I couldn’t advance her career.

In the way that abused children abuse – I had waited the entire decade to use those wasteful stinging words on some innocent, thereby transferring the poison from my own wound to the next victim. Who would then pass it on to the next. This ensures multi-generations of traumatized lesbians who are great lovers but have no power, realizing that the former simply doesn’t compensate for the latter. Giving each other meaning in private has its limits and it’s our jobs to devastate each other with this news. The gay girl version of black-on-black crime.

Apparently, I’ve learned nothing despite my years, because even while moving from the discarded to the discarder, it all still takes place in tiny hovels with no view. Later, I decided at the last minute to be grateful and not sadistic, and so noncommittally kissed goodbye to sexy but flat-affected Catherine the Younger. Relaxed and yet troubled, I drove my white third-hand Pontiac down that Silverlake Street where Jamie has lived for the past four years with Louise Rockefeller. For the past four years. Each morning that I am in Los Angeles, I drive down their street, past the house where Portia and Francesca used to live. The pool. The Mexican gardeners. The BMW in the driveway. The delivery truck unloading a piano. The caterers and their tents. The limo waiting to take Jamie and her brother to the Emmy awards as Louise stood in the doorway waving good-bye with a drink in hand.

Investigating them has been an education. The first thing I learned is that people named Rockefeller are all related. That one easily becomes a heavy hitting producer at the same studio where her Jewish grandfather started it all. Her father (Mr. Rockefeller) married the boss’s daughter because he wanted to avoid the fate of his indulgent cousins and so got his own sports channel from papa-in-law and went to work every morning, happily. In his Ferlinghetti. I mean Berlusconi. Until he traded it in for a Negamaki and started collecting grandfather clocks. That’s how big the house was.

When Louise became a lesbian, it got as far as her father. But when she showed up one morning with a tattooed butch from Milwaukee, it went directly to her grandfather. Summoned onto the studio lot, she sat quietly in a small leather chair as grandfather laid down the law.

“If you can tell me that you are going to be with that woman for the rest of your life, I will accept the tattoos. But if you can’t tell me that, the tattoos have got to go.”

Young and freshly out of a legacy BA at Brandeis, Louise sat simmering between his Emmys for Dr. Kildare, impressed by his authoritative pragmatism, and realized she wanted Emmys too. She realized that she wanted them more than she wanted a boney muscular and somewhat dirty-minded hard-working mechanic from Wisconsin. They made a deal. Louise got a career in Hollywood and began a parade of acceptable girlfriends and lived happily ever after, now with Jamie Robbins.

So for the last four years I have taught five extension classes at USC, two online courses at UCLA and written earnest but overly sophisticated screenplays and pilots in my simple but quiet West Hollywood apartment which was five times nicer than anything I could have afforded in New York. I bought Russian delicacies, shopped intelligently at Whole Foods, worked out at 24 Hour Fitness on the broken machines, all the while driving my leased Pontiac. I had an occasional drink at the Abbey, while watching celebrity children walk to the 8 pm AA meeting across the street. Once I went to AA myself, and all the stories reminded me of Jamie Robbins. It was like she was sitting there, emaciated, buff, microdermibrasioned and suddenly ready to tell the truth about herself. And yet, she never appeared. All along, as I drove and typed as a way of life, I knew that my primary motivation was to prove something to Jamie Robbins. To prove that she was wrong. To make it. And to make her. And to have all my dreams come true. Like in the movies. To win, to win the girl, to win the Emmy, and to be my one and only true self, the self that turns down love because it doesn’t advance your career. The self that no one else can destroy. So far, I have achieved none of these, but at least I have goals. It tells me what to do everyday.

It is easy to get waylaid in Los Angeles. In a typical week I meet for breakfast at Hugo’s with a dyke who has been spending the last five years trying to help the latest platinum Sammy Hagar look-alike find a movie that he wanted to make. Finally she stumbled on the winner. “Murder on an aircraft carrier” was sold on a one-sentence pitch. Five years of a human being’s life, devoted every day to this. She read my adaptation of Madame Bovary, called Mrs. Bovary about a modern housewife who gets her values about the world from watching the soap operas.

“Who do you think should direct it?” she asked.

Uh oh. I knew that meant she wasn’t going to help me.

“Uhm. Jane Campion?”

“I’ll try to get you her email address.” Then she introduced me to Billy Crystal’s manager.

That was Monday.

On Tuesday I met with a former underground lesbian cult star who was looking for a writer to work for free on a movie starring all the former lesbian cult stars of the 1980’s and 90’s. It would have an audience of 45,000 or so, which isn’t enough, but it would be fun and could be good.

“Now that the L Word is finally off the air we could get our own people back out there again,” that was her strategy. “Now that the economy is collapsing we can make art again.”

“Sure,” I said, paying for her burrito.

Wednesday I went to see a friend from New York in a play at the Geffen Theater. It had good New York actors, a good director, a good designer and it was awful. Something about being in LA affected everyone involved. They seemed traumatized. I had never gone to the theater in LA before. The audience was filled with women who seemed to have burned their hair, dyed it with vegetable root and applied Kabuki make-up before leaving the house. Strangely the audience clapped after every scene. It was like the crowd from New Jersey at The Nutcracker.

“Why do they clap after every scene?” I asked.

“I don’t understand why anybody in LA does anything,” my friend said. And then we didn’t have a drink because New Yorkers don’t have the skills to drive home drunk.

On Thursday a cute gay pop singer Facebook’d me.

Have you ever thought about writing a musical? Sure I wrote back. Let’s get together and talk. I’m free after 3. I’m free all day tomorrow, she answered. Okay, what about 8 am at Mani’s on Fairfax? Great.

And then it occurred to me that this girl might be gf material. After all she ran a career that required upkeep of an image that was simultaneously spacey and sharkey and tough but unassuming. She was accomplished. I called my friend in Brooklyn for advice.

“Buy a new shirt,” she said.

By the time I got home from the horror of clothes shopping in a town where parking determines experiences, she had canceled.

Dentist she Facebook’d. Are you free later?

Dinner? I asked. 8 o’clock at Hugo’s or Real Food? I have therapy in Encino at 7:30. Anything else? 11:30 at Mustard Seed in Los Felix? I asked. Nope.

And then she blew me off. This was such a typical LA experience it was funny.

Right out of LA memoirs like Hello, He Lied by Linda Obst and that sort of thing. I went home and worked on my pilot LOVE MONEY about actresses trying to make it in New York, so I could base a character on Jamie Robbins, but I couldn’t make her gay, it was for network.

The next morning I met Bill at The Casbah in Silverlake.

“This neighborhood is just like the East Village,” he said – which is what everyone says about Silverlake because it was gentrified by people with tattoos. Bill had just gotten a job on that TV show where the detective is really dead, but he doesn’t know it.

“You should get a job on a TV show,” he said. “I’d love to,” I said. “I have a great agent,” he said. “Good,” I said.

“Your friend, Gina, has her too. You should get Gina to hook you up.”

“Great idea,” I said and ordered my fizzy pink lemonade.

The weekend was coming and with it that special kind of loneliness, the one so well worn it’s a comfort. Sometimes on Friday or Saturday night I lie in bed, have a cocktail and watch one of the greatest movies ever written like Primary Colors, and cry tears of joy that someone (Elaine May) could make every second interesting and count and surprising and human and funny and still throw in the Jewish jokes. And I feel so happy, so safe, and comfortable that beauty does exist. If I wasn’t used to loneliness, I would be miserable in moments like that because I let the right one get away. But that absence is my life now, isn’t it? That absence is why I live where I live, work where I work, write what I write, why I get in the car, why I have these ridiculous conversations with people whose lives make no sense either. Because I have a goal, and that gives my life meaning. My goal is to be someone who can advance Jamie Robbins’ career, and nothing else is worth doing. So that loneliness is special, it’s part of my quest, it’s got its own clarity and I know it. It knows me. I put its name down under In case of emergency please call, please call on my loneliness. She will pick me up from the hospital, bail me out of jail, and take me to the doctor. She’s the one I really trust to be there for me.

The next Monday I drove to a boring café on Cuhengua to meet with a lesbian who works in independent packaging at the new William Morris/Endeavor merged monster. I wanted to talk to her about my movie, The Lady Hamlet, a 1920’s backstage comedy about two great actresses competing to play the role of Hamlet on Broadway. She’s heard of Hamlet but doesn’t think there would be any interest. So we start to gossip. There are lesbians all over Hollywood. There is the costume designer at that HBO show and the assistant to the producer at that same show and the head of talent at that agency and that film agent and her TV producer girlfriend. They are all there, but they don’t work together. They have no Apparatus. So the moment always gets wasted. Sometimes I see them sitting at the corner table with Sandra Bernhard as I drive by the Ivy – three hundred dollar haircuts and eyeglasses that are Belgian design. “Are you single?” she asked benevolently. Trying to help.

“Yeah,” I say, suddenly remembering the beauty of Catherine’s chest tightening and releasing and I realize why I had been avoiding the gay Starbucks. “Do you know someone who would be right?”

“Let’s see,” she says assessing me across the table of Diet Cokes and bad salads. “You’re looking for....a butch professor.”

“No and no,” I say. I am a butch professor. Has it come to this? Am I so inconceivable that I now look like the type that I crave?

“I know,” the WM/E girl says, suddenly lighting up with happiness. We all want each other to fall in love. We really do. And we all do everything we can to help. “What about Louise Rockefeller? She’s a really lovely person.”

“But she’s with Jamie Robbins,” I say – robotically, because some kind of information has entered my consciousness that I have no ability to accept.

“Who’s Jamie Robbins,” WM/E asks.

“She had an Emmy nomination for the Charlie Brown Hanukah special. She played Lucy.”

“I never saw it.”

I was offended. How could someone so in the know that she didn’t get fired in the WM/E merger have never have heard of Jamie Robbins. The great. The great great actress. The one I love.

“Well, they’re together,” I denied.

“No,” the girl answered, looking at her Blackberry to see the time. “Louise has been single for two years. She’s lonely. She said she had a partner but the girl was too selfish.”

Two years. “Sure, I’d go out with her. We both dated the same woman at different times, but I’ll meet anyone.” “Yeah, she said the girl was too selfish.”

“Well,” I realized hopefully. “Maybe Louise would want to talk.” Why not? I thought. Why not just have the conversation. “Sure, I’ll meet her,” I said. It can only illuminate. But I knew it was absurd. Most people don’t do things like that. They don’t just let it happen.

All night I cried. I cried more than when my father died and more than when my mother died. The loss was greater. For two years I had been driving past a mansion where there was no Jamie. I was dreaming, thinking, aspiring to a success that she could not keep a grip on. I wanted the girlfriend that she had failed to be, I wanted the success she had not become. My heart was full with a Jamie that poor Jamie couldn’t have either. I was stark, in my crappy nothing life. And even more, the lesbian grapevine had failed me for two entire years. Now that was devastating. I started thinking about Jamie, not by the pool but on the subway. Borrowing money from her crazy father, and selling off her piano and flat screen TV. She became someone very very near to me. Instead of a frolicking piece of gauze, it was so close I could smell her earwax and I could see her pores. Just like I was once able to do for real. And then I realized that this delayed news of her failure, weirdly, brought Jamie and I closer together than ever. We had both failed at being her. But I’m not her, and she is. So she failed more. It was so LA. It was so stupid. Why can’t people just love their sexy, smart, talented devoted lovers instead of dumping them for the elusive? Why can’t they realize years later that they made a mistake, chosen falsity over substance and pick up the phone and apologize? Why couldn’t we get back together?

I drove down Santa Monica and actually found a parking place in front of Starbucks. Maybe because it was 6:30 in the morning. I knew Catherine would be there because she worked there. She was a barrista.

“Hi,” she smiled, flatly, sexily, intelligently with promise but confusion and that young person’s entrancing directionless lack of hope. She was happy to see me. “What’s new?”

“I’m leaving,” I told her, forgetting everything I ever knew. “I’m going back to New York.”

“Why not?” she said. And then she poured me a grande latte in a venti cup and smiled. She didn’t make me pay. It was her gift.

Sarah Schulman's most recent books are the novel THE MERE FUTURE (Arsenal Pulp Press), and two nonfiction books THE GENTRIFICATION OF THE MIND: Witness to a Lost Imagination (U of California Press) and TIES THAT BIND: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (The New Press). She is co-founder with Jim Hubbard of the ACT UP Oral History Project and co-producer of his film UNITED IN ANGER: A History of ACT UP.

Robert Giard

Sarah Schulman. NYC. (1988) Photo by Robert Giard. Courtesy of the Stephen Bulger Gallery.

Susan Stinson

Martha Moody

        My husband John was in most nights now. Carry Nation’s visit had spent the town’s temperance fever, and, like John, most of the horn players had gone back to their evenings at saloons or dreaming next to dour wives. I wasn’t really dour, just blank as an egg, while I sat near the fire burning towards Martha and mending shirts for John. I stopped joining him in bed, but sat up over my sewing until he blew out the lamp.
        I had gotten a lock for the sewing chest. I saw John notice it, but he never said a word. I kept pages about Martha under the tray of spools and thimbles and a pile of fabric scraps.
        I wrote about her nights after John had gone to sleep. I wrote her hand inside me, I wrote my body arching, I wrote her teeth on my nipples and her hair in my mouth. I told lies and made up stories and gave her special powers. She wrestled buffalo and screamed at eagles. I cupped her, formed her softness. She touched the tops of mountains with her languid double chin. She pressed her breasts against my bones. She lifted herself to find my slick tip with her nipple. She parted river waters so people carrying food in baskets could cross. She sank on me with her full weight, and I breathed shallow under her, caught by her substance and her wonder.
        She flew. She spoke with angels. She played Jesus in the Bible. She carved a canyon with her tireless hands. She shook and brought forth waters. She sang whales into the ocean. She ploughed the ground with her knee while she rode a ridge and stroked her hands along the surfaces of grasses in the fields.
        I became the earth, her instrument—smoothed and dug and brought forth—but I wrote her powers into her, and played her every night. The mornings were rushed and secret, bordered on all sides with commerce, but at night I made her stretch across me until we filled most open places I could imagine in this world.

Dangerous

        Men were sitting on the porch of Moody’s store one night, debating about the sacred. The Reverend was off at the swimming hole, where he liked to go alone at night, so he wasn’t there to embarrass the discussion, and somehow things had drifted away from schisms and got hung on the nature of God.
        The men chewed tobacco and leaned on the cracker barrel, serious. The sheriff said he believed the laws of nature and science were expressions of a Higher Mind. The blacksmith sat on a railing, drumming his hands on his thighs and calling out, “Sweet Jesus." The banker said such matters were best left in church. He stubbed his cigar out in the dust, and crossed Main Street lit by moonlight.
        When a farmer said god was a father, a ram, not a pasty-faced lamb-kisser from colored pictures, the sheriff sent a boy into the store to fetch Martha.
        He bowed from the waist as she stepped onto the porch. “I’ll keep watch on the cash register, Ma’am. There are mortal matters to discuss.”
        Martha stood in the doorway with her hands stuck in the pocket of her black apron. She looked around the circle of men’s faces in the silver light. A wild little girl, Ruth, was chasing June bugs within voice range. She and Martha were the only human females out that night.
        The sheriff posed the question, fingering his badge. “Mrs. Moody, you are familiar with mysteries. I’ve heard that you’ve spoken with water and had it speak back. Could you give us an image of God we could care about?”
        Martha pulled a pipe from her pocket and lit it. The smoke smelled fruity and sharp. “Why ask me? I’m just here to sell mops and cream.”
        The men coughed and shifted. They knew she had powers. The blacksmith started stomping his boots on the porch, and they all picked it up.
        The sheriff tensed and raised his hand. “Now, we’ve all been making purchases from Mrs. Moody for years. Show some respect.” He gave every point of the circle his magnetic election day eye, and the stomping died off.
        Martha smiled and breathed smoke. It looked yellow so near the lantern, and drifted over the men like a butter fog.
        They all heard the slow clop of cloven hooves on sawdust as Azreal walked out through the store. The sheriff stood aside, his mouth gaping. The cow had her wings folded across her back. She ambled over to Martha, leaned against her, and lifted her muzzle to Martha’s ear. “Tell them to take off their golden earrings and bring them to you.”
        The cow shone with a cold light that cast Martha's shadow over the porch and to the edge of Main Street. The men huddled together, but the sheriff stepped up and tapped Martha on the shoulder. “Um, ma’am. None of us wear earrings. If you could wait for us to go home and talk to our wives, we could come up with a pile of gold, I’d guarantee.” The sheriff was a bachelor, but confident.
        Just then, a great rattling began. All metal started to move. Every watch and gun was shaking on the man that wore it. The blacksmith screamed. His glasses were dancing above him, floating over his face like a big-eyed silver spider. The sheriff’s badge pounded and buckled on his chest. His guns rose and clicked their butts like castanets. Pennies and half dollars spun on the boards. Belt buckles dragged men behind them across the ground. Men tangled in each other’s spurs.
        There was no noise from the pots and axes and shovels inside the store. Ruth crouched in the darkness with the June bugs, who were whirring and clicking as on any other night.
        A squirming pile of men fell off the porch, stuck together by the metal on their persons. They knocked the cracker barrel off, too, and it splintered. Crackers shaped like hearts and eyes and silhouettes scattered in the dust.
        “Listen,” shouted Martha from the cleared porch, “this is an old story.”
        Azreal looked at Martha standing on the edge of the porch with her hands raised and her red hair catching lantern light from the back. “You’re a fine figure of a woman,” said the cow. “Let’s wrestle.”
        The men shouted and thrashed in their pile on the ground. Azreal and Martha circled each other. Suddenly the cow brought one of her wings forward and slashed across Martha’s skirt. The cloth split, and Martha jumped back. Then she grinned and threw herself on Azreal’s broad, muscled neck.
        “Careful!” yelled Ruth, drawing closer to the porch. Some of the men were cursing and some were listening to what was happening on the porch.
        Martha held the angel's neck close to her shoulders trying to tussle her to the ground. Azreal beat her wings, making a wind that loosed Martha’s hair from its bun and blew her ripped skirt up over her petticoat. Martha didn’t loosen her grasp, but took a step closer and wrapped one foot around Azreal’s foreleg. The cow lifted her hoof and stomped. The boards of the porch splintered beneath her, but Martha held on.
        Sweat poured from the woman’s face like wax from a hot candle. She grunted, then dropped her full weight on the cow’s neck. The two figures fell to the buckling surface of the porch, and writhed: the cow on her back, hooves and wings in the air; the woman with her black-stockinged legs wrapped around the cow’s golden sides, flopping and groaning and clinging to the animal with all her might. Azreal contracted her wings, then she used their feathered muscles to lift her from her back and push off from the porch. They hung low in the air while Martha struggled to straddle the cow’s back, then they rose and flew toward the moon, laughing and breathing hard and whipping up a wind behind them.
        The men found that they could untangle themselves, and they went home with whatever guns and watches they found stuck in their pockets. The next day they sorted through their possessions and fixed the porch for Martha. The sheriff asked Ruth who had won the wrestling match, but she just chewed on her fingers and said she didn’t know. Martha opened the store three days later, looking like a proper laced-up matron. No one asked her about mysteries after that. It was dangerous.

Cream

        One day an angel was walking down the Main Street of Moody. She saw a store, and entered. A fat red-headed woman stood behind the counter. She nodded at the angel, and the angel recognized her. “Are you Martha Moody?”
        Martha rang up a purchase and nodded again. “What’s your pleasure?”
        The angel blinked her large yellow eyes, and said, “I am Azreal, and I need a favor”
        Martha said, “I can’t take any time off from the store.”
        Azreal stuck her muzzle in a barrel and picked up an apple. “Come on. It’ll just take a few moments of your time.”
        Martha frowned. “Don’t bite that apple unless you're going to buy it. Can it wait until after five o’clock?”
        Azreal licked the apple with her long tongue, then put it back in the barrel.
        “Hey,” said Martha.
        Azreal held up her hoof. “That will make it extra sweet for some lucky customer”
        Martha looked skeptical, but as soon as the angel had wandered off, she found the very apple and took a bite. It tasted like honey would if it had a peel.
        Azreal was back at five sharp. She lowered the awning while Martha locked up.
        Martha was used to being asked for favors, but she was curious about this character. “What would you have me do?”
        Azreal suddenly looked grander. “Your task is to come to a dry town and use your powers to make it wet and green.”
        Martha stared at the angel as the store fell away around them. A wind came up and blew the gray cloak off of Azreal to reveal her in full glory as a winged cow. She was the color of fine butter, with deep yellow skin, broad yellow udders with veins in the pattern of lightning, yellow at the end of her tail, and the inside of her ears and around the eyelids yellow.
        Martha saw that she was no longer standing, but floating on blue air thick as cream. Her black dress melted away from her, and she found herself in a short garment of a shimmering white fabric she did not recognize, with thin straps and a pattern of eyelet flowers over her breasts. Her body was loose underneath—her corset frothed off her into ticklish bubbles—and she was moving all over herself, like the sky cream she was riding.
        “Look down,” lowed Azreal. Martha saw a hilly, green country, very different from Moody, with trees in abundance and black roads and strange houses at regular intervals.
        “You must make it wet and green,” quoth Azreal.
        “But it’s already green," said Martha, turning onto her side so that she could see the cow flying beside her. "So many trees.”
        “It’s dry at the heart,” Azreal insisted.
        So Martha stretched out on her stomach and floated looking down through the clear blue cream to the clusters of houses and odd vehicles. Azreal watched over her shoulder and breathed grassy smells on her back.
        When they were close enough, Martha saw people—women, mostly, and small boys and girls—carrying brown bags, talking, gliding the streets in closed wagons. They looked like the people of Moody, just dressed funny and most of the women were thinner—but a smell rose from them and their houses. Martha didn’t recognize it, but it bit into her nose and made her eyes water.
        “Dry rot.” Azreal flicked her tail, and the cream sky darkened. “Go on, Martha. They’re desperate.”
        Martha wondered how to go about bringing them liquid. She could cry them a river, but she wasn’t that moved. In fact, she felt indifferent to lives whose dryness made her itch even from this distance. “Why don’t you do it?” she asked Azreal.
        The cow stretched her wings. “That’s not my role. I just make the cream.”
        Martha knew a thing or two about cream. She dipped a flesh-rippled arm in the thick sky she was floating in. “So that’s it. Okay. I'll churn the air.”
        “You can stand on my back if you want.” Azreal beat her wings and flew close to Martha. "To have a solid surface.”
        So Martha climbed onto the back of the yellow angel cow. Azreal's back was broad, and Martha's feet were bare, so when she squatted for a moment, then stood up straight, she had a firm footing. She wanted to beat as much of the cream as she could, so she started swinging her arms and rolling her hips, the big swings of her belly moving the cream in a firm circle. Her hips stirred from the front and the back, and her arms caught the motion over her head and brought it back down to her hips again. She moved like sex, like magic, like the ocean she carried with her in her rippling back. The soft parts of her body that she couldn’t agitate floated back and forth in rhythm as she worked. It was hypnotic and exhausting. Martha didn’t learn so much motion in childhood, but grew into it with her breasts and the rolls of her sides. She walked forward on Azreal’s back with her hips and arms rolling, then turned on her toes and walked to the tail. Azreal sang low repetitions in the ancient voice of cow, to help.
        They hung in froth that lasted for what seemed hours, a screen of small blue bubbles that clung to Azreal’s hide and Martha’s skin, but slid off her shiny slip. They could no longer see the town, but Martha had closed her eyes, anyway, to concentrate. She forgot about the people, forgot about dryness, but lost herself in texture, in nuances of foam as it slipped down her sides, as it clung to her eyelids and coated her hair. She felt herself swelling, arms and belly spreading until she and Azreal could move the whole sky.
        Then it happened. It thickened. Martha’s breaths came slow and filtered through blue whipped cream. Azreal kept singing. Martha waved and rolled and danced. Quickly the cream clotted and butter milk spilled upon the people who had been pursuing their business as if the sky were a far and placid place.
        Martha sat on Azreal, who flapped her wings slowly to help her gather the butter into a ball.
        “That’s the moon,” Azreal told her. “They’ll see it shine tonight.”
        Martha dug some craters with her fingers. “Do you go through this every month?”
        Azreal shook her head. "Not that often. But these people are so hollow that they suck the moon down to nothing. So I look for a woman with strength and succulence who can churn my cream to butter when it gets too bad. There’s nothing like buttermilk rain for dry rot.”
        Martha glanced down. It all looked about the same, only glossy.
        Azreal landed. “Thank you so much.”
        Before Martha could answer, she was standing at the counter of her closed store, with an apple sweet as honey in her hand.

These three pieces are excerpts from my novel Martha Moody. My publisher and I thought about the book as a “fantastical western,” although that might be misleading to those who love the traditional genre conventions of westerns. In the novel, Amanda Linger, the narrator, falls in love with a shopkeeper named Martha Moody. Amanda is unhappily married to a trumpet player named John, and both of them take comfort in the solid, animal warmth of their milk cow, Miss Alice. One revelatory moment for Amanda comes as she is caught up with other women in her community in a saloon-smashing when radical temperance activist Carry Nation rolls into town with her hatchets. That incident is referred to in the first story, “Martha Moody.” “Cream” and “Dangerous” are both stories from a series starring a powerful, mythic version of Martha that Amanda writes and sells to a pulp magazine called True Western Tales during a time when she is yearning for and separated from the real life Martha. Miss Alice, the household cow, gets transformed in these stories, too.

While I was writing the novel, which was published in 1995, I was exploring my responses to the wonderful, demanding, strange, revelatory, silly and exciting pockets of fat lesbian liberation that I first encountered in the mid-eighties. I thought of the book as about being about the nature of love. I meant that broadly, but my way into it was an exploration of the nature of the love of fat women for our own bodies and for each other. I had experienced plenty of discrimination, hatred and shaming around fatness, but I wanted to focus on convincing possibilities for joy and love. One thing that I felt both grateful for and unsatisfied with was the tendency I found in fat lesbian culture (and lesbian culture, in general, for that matter) to represent fat women as goddesses. It sometimes seemed to me that this incredibly brave, new movement – which, by the way, transformed my life – was so bent on countering the negative stereotypes we faced that we all were expected to be role models rather than actual, flawed human beings. The magical elements in Amanda’s stories, and in the book as a whole, let me evoke the thrill of that first rush when I recognized beauty, power and sensual pleasure where I had been taught to see only failure, ugliness and weakness. The arc of the book let me take the characters into recognition of their own flaws, so that they could know each other in more complete ways, with room for mess and wonder, both.

Susan Stinson is the author of novels Venus of Chalk, Martha Moody, Fat Girl Dances With Rocks and a collection of poetry and lyric essays, Belly Songs. In 2011, she was awarded the Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her work appears in anthologies from Ballantine Books, Scholastic Books and NYU Press, and in many periodicals, including Kenyon Review, Seneca Review, and Early American Studies. She is Writer in Residence at Forbes Library in Northampton, MA. Visit her website. View a video of Stinson reading from Spider in a Tree on the website of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale.

Martha Moody, novel. Spinsters Ink, Duluth, MN: 1995. British edition, The Women’s Press, London, 1996. German hardback edition, Alfred Scherz Verlag, Bern, Switzerland: 1997. Paperback edition, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt, 1999.

Carla Steiger

Carla Steiger, Untitled (2004)

Catherynne M. Valente

Bones Like Black Sugar

        Why did I ever go back? Isn’t it enough that the eggs fry evenly in my iron pan, that the white edges crisp so prettily, like doilies, that the chimney huffs its smoke grandfather-satisfied, that the green trees stay in their civilized trim, that they will never again reach out for me as they did in those days, brackish arms a-bramble? Isn’t it enough to serve a brute-blond brother in my smooth apron, to bow a braided head before him as before a husband, and make sure his coffee had enough chicory, enough milk? I have a house of my own, of wood and stone, with violets eating earth in the shadow of an iron-hinged door, and not a sparkle of sugar in any cupboard, on any tongue.
        He told me it would be enough. With a brown hand he took up the axe in the woodpile, and built a house around me, up, up, up, a house with no windows, where I could crack my eggs like knuckles, and polish stairs until my fingers wore away. He forbade me to boil chocolate in a silver tin; he forbade me to stretch taffy between my fingers for the village children; he forbade me to comb honey from any hive. There was milk enough, and bread enough, and meat slung across the table, glistening with fat.

        And still I go back. To her, to the glen, to the ruins of her house casting shadows like spice on the grass.

        Over and over, the moon slashes windows into the black soil while he sleeps behind me, sleeps dead and sweat-pooled. My steps grin on the pine needles and I need no breadcrumbs, never needed breadcrumbs, north into the forest, the wood, the thicket of breath and branches that pricks my skull hours on hours, that tangles my lungs in sap and sweet. It is not that I remember where it is, but my feet have learned no other path than this, this crow-hung track slinking through the dark. They turn and point with the eagerness of a girl in pigtails, a girl in braids, a girl with ribbons streaming like oaths behind her.
         Between two midnights it appears, no warning, a waft of silver and sallow, blades bent over like broken flutes, a disc of grasslight whispering to itself. The ruins are classical, Athenian: charred banisters of twisted licorice and cherry-sticky stairs leading up to the star-bowels, crumble-barren. The butterscotch-and-toffee floor is half-eaten by mice and voles, its shards flashing cloud-quick—on its scalded surface, bubbles long hardened into checkered barrows, stood shattered furniture: praline fauteuils roasted into stumps, marzipan sideboards shot through with burst sugar-glass and icing-china, a molten headboard twisted into a shimmer of jellybean slag, linen-ashes of peppermint and raspberry seeds, still floating windwise after all this time. The smell is still thick as scarves: burnt candy, everywhere, the carbuncle-heart of sugar seething in its endless boil, vanished jam-mortar and confection-white rainspouts, crystalline panes crusted with sweet, peanut brittle rafters and gingerbread walls, all wheeling in their invisible cotillion, gobbling the air into syrup.

         And there is the oven.

        It is a good German oven, squat as a heart, whole and leering. Its cacao-grille gapes throat-open, and I want it to be full of ashes this time, I want it to be purified, scrubbed empty and clean as an oven ought to be. I know each time I breathe the air of that furnace that I will always taste of this house, I will taste of witch and grief, I will taste of the laughing fire even as I taste of wife and sister. The smell of flesh cooking will cling to my nose, the cloy of gold teeth melting will stick in my sleeves.
         I will never recover from this, I will never be well, I will never grow up.
         It ought to be scoured of meat and grease and burst irises—but she slumps out of it, stuck, now as all the other times, her candied pelvis caught on the broiling pan, fleshless arms stretched out in supplication, frozen in the grace of a ruined arch, the skeleton of an angel consumed, angles all wrong, ribs descending black as treble scales, femurs like cathedral columns dripping with honey-gold. Her eyes stare into the loam, gape-hollow. Her teeth have broken on the root of a snarling yew—they scatter on the wet grass like Easter eggs. Her skull has burst open where it struck a stone. There a jagged rupture where her fontanel must have been—when she was an infant, when she was pure, when her eyes were large and bright as peppermint wheels and she had a mother, somewhere far off and unimaginable, where women like her are made.

         Every time is the same.

         I gather her up into my arms, tenderly, bone by bone. I have to be careful—she falls apart so easily; her desiccated ligaments surrender without struggle. It would be poetic to carry her up the stairs, a dead bride, but there is no need, and the stairs lead to nothing but windburnt night. Instead, I bear her to the decrepit bed, its vanilla coverlet curled back like the pages of a spoiled book, the pillows cinnamon-cinders. The harlequin relic that was once a high-postered frame casts shadows of berry and blue, pools of emerald like gumdrops on the sheets. I lay her down like a princess, arrange her bones like runes, never forgetting to keep her head balanced in my hand, infant-gently, as I pull her sternum into place, her clavicle, her jaw, her delicate wrists crossing over my shoulders.

         And I put my face to her scorched cheek; I fold my body into hers, into the light of the candy-ruins.
         And I hold her to me, like the child I was, the chubby girl with lacy skirts peering out of her cage.
         And I breathe: her bones move with my breath. My pulse swims: hers rustles like a wood in winter.
         And under my arms there is flesh, there is a taste like cakes in a pretty window, there is a rush of hair darker than ovens. Under my lips there are lips like floss, and my eyelashes beat against warm skin, beading with caramel-sweat.
         She smiles at me, she smiles at me and the belly under my hands is turkish delight, she smiles as if I had never pushed her, as if I had come to her house alone and stood student-bright at the stove while she baked her new bookshelves, as if there was no smoke or flame. She smiles like erasure, she smiles like a confessor. She swells with candy like a mother, her green eyes opening and closing, and under my hands she is beautiful, beautiful, under my hands she is innocent, I am innocent, there is nothing which is not white, which is not a scald of purity, which does not flare with light.
         And she forgives me, she forgives me, her heavy arms draped over me like curtains, her demoniac mouth red and bloody at my ear. I hold out my breasts to her like an apology and I beg, I beg her to make me like her, make of my body a window or a cellar door, peach-sweet and clear as glass, grind my bones to sugar, braid my hair into bell-pulls of saltwater taffy and punish me, punish me, I ought to be punished, I ought to be burned, I ought to have gone into the oven with you, into the fire, into the red and the ash, and my blood ought to have boiled over your hands, and my marrow ought to have smelted into yours, and my skull ought to shatter on the stone where my fontanel must have been, and the shards of it, the shards of it ought to have mingled with yours when the leaves fell, ought to have been indistinguishable, ought to have, ought to have! Devour me now as you promised, swallow me, I am offering it, carve me into light and dark and I will be your obedient supper—don’t leave me, don’t look at him, don’t chose him, he does not love you, and he will taste of bracken and snails—take me up into your iron pot and I will boil for you, if you ask it, if you will stay with me and all the while call me sweet, call me sweet. You promised, my love, you promised to destroy me.

        Under my hands you are so young. Under my hands you laugh like blackbirds’ wings.

        And I put my hands to her in the sweetshop-graveyard of her house.
        And I hold her to me like a widow—she is wet with my weeping, my tears a melt of plums.
        And I breathe: there is no answer. My pulse pleads: there is no echo.
        And under my arms there is nothing, nothing but her bones like black sugar, and the chasm of her dead mouth yawning at the moon.

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat. "Bones Like Black Sugar" first appeared in Fantasy Magazine.