Category: Aquifer

Mrs. Tsai

It was past eleven at night when my mother called. The rain came down in great big sheets, and I’d been curled up under three blankets with the heater on for hours, reading a book about digestion.

            “You’re still up,” she said.

            “It’s not that late. What are you doing?” and before she could answer I started guessing, “Watching a crime thriller?”

            “Ha,” she said. “A western. The one with the good-looking sheriff who’s in your yoga class. What are you doing?”

            “Reading and resting,” I said.

            “It’s raining a lot,” she said. “Reminds me of winter in Pingtung.”

            “CeCe and I planted bell peppers this week, so it’ll be nice to have them watered without me having to do it,” I told her.

            “Is she asleep?” she asked.

            “Of course. She’s right next to me,” I said.

            I thought about my mother sitting on her green corduroy sofa in her new apartment with Tuo-Ba, her mop-like dog, watching the Western. From time to time, she must wonder what she would do next now that she was alone, except for the dog. A dog was good at filling holes in a schedule. A lot of walks to punctuate the day. Random and intermittent socializing with other dog owners here and there. Buying dog food and treats, vet visits. My mother took Tuo-Ba to volunteer at the library with a team of other service dogs. Children arrived to read to the dogs once a week, eagerly sounding out syllables on a bright blue carpet lined with drowsing dogs.

            She cleared her throat a little. I heard Tuo-Ba by the tinkling of his little tag.

            “Are you okay?” I asked.

            “Fine,” she said, but cleared her throat again.

            “Are you sick?” I asked.

            “No, I’m not,” she said and cleared her throat.

            I heard her walking around, opening a drawer. A faucet turned on.

            “I need your help with something,” she said.

            “What?” I asked, my voice perched.

            “Someone came over earlier today,” she said. “And they fell. They’re still here.”

            “What do you mean?” I asked. “Who came over?”

            My first thought was that she had invited a man to her place.

            “Wen-Ting, from the building,” she said, and drank water. “I invited her up to have tea after dinner.”

            CeCe flipped her arm in the air and smacked my pillow. Had I been lying down it would have been my nose. Lately I had heard snippets from all kinds of parenting gurus via podcast or Instagram about not letting your kids sleep in your bed. Boundaries! Sleep hygiene! Blah blah, I thought. But how about a black eye or a broken nose as deterrent?

            “How did she fall?” I asked.

            “She was leaving and she fell down the stairs,” my mother said.

            I had often been frustrated by my mother’s opaqueness, but this was really a new level.

            “Is she okay?” I asked. “Did she have to go to the hospital?”

            “No,” my mother rebuffed gently, as if I’d asked whether she wanted to try paragliding tomorrow.

            “No, she’s not okay, or no, she didn’t go to the hospital?” I closed the book and set it against my lap. The heater clanked and I could hear it clank below, too, in the downstairs neighbor’s apartment.

            “She didn’t go to the hospital. I brought her back up here,” my mother said.

            I was already setting and resetting the scene. Mrs. Tsai had fallen down some of the stairs, and crying in pain, had hobbled back up the stairs to my mother’s apartment? Maybe the injury was a sprain, a fracture. Maybe my mother had iced her ankle or wrist, and Mrs. Tsai had fallen asleep on the couch, not wanting to sit in the ER all night.

            “Did she break anything?” I asked.

            “I’m not sure. She’s resting. I need your help. It’s important, but don’t come now. Just come in the morning,” my mother said. “It’s late. No need to wake up CeCe.”

            I moved some of the hair out of CeCe’s face. Her skin was creamy as a cashew aside from the little white dots that sometimes appeared on her cheek. The corner of her mouth glistened with spit.

            “Okay,” I told her. “I’ll come right when we wake up.”

 

—

 

            Driving in the rain proved to be difficult. A car accident jammed all the traffic into a single lane. CeCe complained from the backseat booster about having to leave home without getting to play Barbies. But when I told her that Nai Nai would probably have some delicious moon cakes there and that she’d get to play with Tuo-Ba, she eventually changed course.

            We circled the block and meandered up a side street before finding a parking spot. And then we trudged through the rain under CeCe’s clear umbrella. Rainwater gushed down into the gutters.

            The slippery lobby was posted with a sign about the elevator not running, so we climbed to the fifth floor, one floor smelling like paint, another of boiling cabbage.

            “We’re here!” CeCe announced when my mother opened the door.

            “Oh! Come in,” she chirped, the heat from her apartment pouring out into the hall. Tuo-Ba shuffled forward happily, rubbing his moustache on our shins.

            The small dining table was arranged with plates of sliced fruit and moon cakes, covered in plastic wrap.

            “CeCe, will you help me feed and dress Tuo-Ba? I’m going to give your mom some books,” my mother said. She showed CeCe the food scoop and bag and pointed to a green diamond sweater for the dog.

            I followed my mother into her bedroom and found Mrs. Tsai face down on the bed with her knees on the ground. She was completely still.

            “Is she dead?” I asked in disbelief.

            My mother nodded, frowning.

            “Why did you bring her up here?” I hissed. “Why didn’t you call an ambulance right away?”

            “She can’t pay an ambulance fee,” my mother said crossly. “And her son doesn’t work.”

            “But now she’s here, and her legs are–” I swept my hand over Mrs. Tsai’s body, “like this!”

            “I need your help to bring her downstairs,” my mother said. “She lives on the second floor. We can put her on her own bed. Like this. Then I can call her an ambulance.”

            “The paramedics can’t help her now,” I said.

            “That way it won’t look suspicious,” my mother said.

            “I can’t get the sweater on,” CeCe was calling from the kitchen. And then as if she could teleport, appeared behind the door. “What are you doing in there?”

            My mother stepped out and led her back into the kitchen. The dog sweater was on halfway, but backwards. They laughed. I shut the door.

            If we carried Mrs. Tsai’s body back to her own apartment, would it seem strange that my mother was calling an ambulance? They were having tea and she’d fallen down the stairs on the way back home. If my mother had called for help, Mrs. Tsai would be in a hospital, or maybe she’d still have ended up in the morgue.

            “It’s me,” my mother said and quickly opened the door. “CeCe is watering plants on the balcony. We can cover Wen-Ting with a sheet, take her down to the apartment – I know the keypad code to unlock her door. We can put her on her bed. Then I’ll call the ambulance later.”

            “Well, we can’t do it now, with CeCe,” I said.

            “We can do it tonight,” she said.

            “But what about her fall?” I asked. “Won’t the paramedics see she has an injury from falling down the stairs? And won’t it be strange that her knees are like that? What if they match the sheet fibers on her body to your bed?”

            My mother scoffed. “That’s stuff they do on murder shows,” she said. “This was an accident. I should’ve just dragged her to her own apartment when it happened. Come out.”

            She closed the door behind us and we called CeCe in. Sitting at the table eating fruit and cakes, and drinking tea, I felt like I was in a bad dream. And had my mother said dragged?

 

—

 

            I returned to my mother’s apartment in the evening as soon as I dropped CeCe at her dad’s. The rain had ceased long enough for me to walk through the cold without getting wet. I was thankful since CeCe had taken the umbrella with her.

            My mother and I pushed Mrs. Tsai into a seated position on the bed. She was absolutely rigid and startlingly cold. When I finally dared to look at her face, her eyes were open!

            “Oh my God!” Her eyes were hazy, grayish.

            My mother reached out and had to push the lids down twice.

            Draped with a sheet and in a permanent yogic chair pose, we lifted Mrs. Tsai to the door and then hurriedly shuttled down one flight after another.

            “What if you’re questioned by the police?” I asked.

            “I’ll tell them we were going to meet for tea last night. She never came. This morning, I go to her door and she doesn’t answer. So I get worried and call the police. In case she fell. And she did fall.”

            We passed the floor that smelled of boiling cabbage. A dog barked behind a door.

            “If someone sees us, we’re screwed!” I whispered, running around the curve so that I could keep Mrs. Tsai level.

            My mother started to laugh her silent laugh.

            “Imagine someone comes out of a door right now. ‘What are you carrying? Looks heavy. Let me help you,’” I said.

            “No one is going to help us,” she said between our shuffling.

            When we got to the second floor, we hurried down the hall to Mrs. Tsai’s door and my mother trembled, lifting her side of the body with one hand while punching in the code with the other. She got it wrong the first time and I started to panic, sweeping the hall and staircase with my eyes.

            “I really hope you know the code,” I said. “We can’t go up and down, up and down like this.”

            When the door opened, we hurried in and followed the familiar floor plan to the bedroom. Like my mother, Mrs. Tsai lived alone. Her little apartment was tidy and smelled of cedar and camphor. A rattan living room set with red cushions crowded around an old TV.

            In the single bedroom, a big red calendar with a single date on each rice paper-thin page, and a black and white photo of her family of origin hung on the wall. We lowered Mrs. Tsai onto the bed, face down, and then maneuvered the sheet out from under her.

            “Won’t it look strange to find her like this?” I asked.

            “Probably,” my mother said. “Probably strange to find anyone dead.” She patted down Mrs. Tsai’s hair and smoothed her blouse.

            A narrow gray cat slithered into the room.

            “Tu zi,” my mother said, folding up the sheet.

            “Rabbit?” I asked.

            “The cat jumps like a rabbit,” my mother said. “Mrs. Tsai was funny.”

            “Should we feed her?” I asked.

            My mother turned on the kitchen light. We rifled through the cabinets and found it well stocked with tins of sardines in tomato sauce, pickled vegetables, rice, pork floss, dry noodles, and a variety of soy sauces and vinegars. Nice French wines frosted in the refrigerator, along with glass containers of cooked porridge, poached chicken, and tea eggs.

            “You two drink together?” I asked.

            “Sometimes tea, sometimes wine,” my mother said.

            “Will you miss her?” I asked.

            “Yes,” my mother said, clearing her throat. “She was a nice woman.”

            Finally, underneath the sink, I found the cat food and scraped it into the cat’s dish. We slipped out then and locked the door behind us. My mother had always been friendly and likeable, lighthearted. She had friends from before my father’s death, a few she still met for lunch or coffee. But Mrs. Tsai was a friend she’d made in this new life on her own.

            “What will you do tonight?” I asked as we walked back through the hallway.

            “Maybe go on a walk with Tuo-Ba,” she said. “It’s not raining.”

            “I’ll walk with you and Tuo-Ba,” I told her.

            She looked tired but pleasantly calm. I followed her up the stairs and back into her apartment. I pulled on my jacket as she leashed Tuo-Ba and straightened out his sweater. On our way out, I picked up her old umbrella that sometimes opened too far out, but still worked.

 

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Ad meliora

Ad meliora, or “towards better things” combines hundreds of separate images that create a deep meditation on being, creativity and nature; a mandala of forms that becomes highly symbolic of life, death, yesterday, now, and the next moment. Flowers, plants and textures were photographed in places such as nature conservatories, cultivated gardens, vacant properties and parking lots. The familiar landscape appears molten, luminous and renewed. Ad meliora is suggestive of adaptation, resilience and transformation.

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Murphy’s Law

30 rabies shots, my uncle got
when, after cornering a rat for fun,
and drunk, it lept and bit his bare chest.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, they
say—what can happen, will—Which is what
my dad was thinking when he passed the pub

so aptly named on the day they sawed
through my skull. This is the perversity
of the universe. You go outside

to catch your breath and butcher’s knives wink
in every window. Miles’ trumpet intones
So What while atom bombs dream of flouting

their dormancy. The night before surgery,
I lay on the plush hotel bed, staring
at a room service form. When I was

little, I was obsessed with opulence.
I wanted filet mignon, lobster
delivered to my imagined penthouse

as I watched cartoons: a toddler bobbing
along the steel girders of a nascent
skyscraper, pianos crashing down, turning teeth

into sonatas. Sometimes you have
to confront the world’s malice like a mouse
who’s been burned too many times by spring-

loaded-cheese. I remember assuming
the hospital’s food would be suspect.
Juice with plastic peel-off top, overly-

salted soup, but, I thought: that’s only
if they don’t slice into my temporal
lobe. If they don’t accidentally

give me a lobotomy, or cut my
head clean off. I’ll be lucky to gag
on pot pie while mom scrolls WebMD.
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Two Poems

On Our Date I Forget the “Birds of Prey” Exhibit is Closed Sunday

Grace is just life
caught in the throat. Imprinted
and broken winged.
Crow hit by my Toyota, muddy.
Peace and rehab three-syllable words

when slurred. Grace of certainty
in the sun’s smallness—small enough

to set behind your hand,
yet still lift like a hand
on her waist while facing a dark nerve.

 

Her to touch, a crow
not very much a crow, wingless
who must hop from branch to branch

as crippled form of grace,
as chapel wind is pious, bows
in gospel like fletching
post-launch, inalterable flight.
Who dares claim the feathers
of such a fucked-up bird for

violence?

 

Rhetorical questions claim
power from the empty, ellipses
lit like street lamps, spacing
regular pools through dark.
Anyways you forgot
your walking boots. Leave
like the cut that gliding scissors
pass. You came into this life
like chains deliver the flightless.
Like silence delivers a stillborn grace.

 

Touchpoints

The wanting child breaks a bowl
before he loses his first tooth. Research says

 

we regress before moving forward

 

the way white tides marshal themselves

before they break. A circle

 

opens into a spiral and the trauma

 

opens into an echo. But I don’t wanna

echo. But despite the begging

 

watch the hitting segue into bars

 

and showers full of right heat. The way

washing becomes a sloughing

 

or a person becomes a lesson.

 

 

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Junior Steaks

We both order junior steaks, and she asks the waiter to turn on the fight. She says it just like that, “the fight,” and he understands. He’s got a lumpy, bald head, peppered with drops of sweat and he goes over to tell the guy behind the bar. We are seated beside a wall. Across the restaurant, people are seated beside windows.

            She asks, “How’s your summer been?”

            I say, “I moved.”

            “Oh yeah? How was that?”

            For my last month or so living in the old house, they played the same Tom T. Hall song every day and suggested I didn’t leave. “Call the whole thing off,” they’d say, “It’s not too late.” And I would say it was fine, that people moved all the time, people just moved. Anyone who found somewhere that cheap so much closer to the city would be stupid not to take it. Then I’d go up to my room, close the door, open the window, and cry. I give her a brief lesson on the geography of the suburbs. Bridges I drive over now.

            She begins to tell me that her summer was fine, except that the guy she was seeing drowned. She glances at the fight, frowns, then back at me. Yes, it was pretty sad. Pretty shocking. Pretty tragic.

            “The guy you were seeing drowned?” I repeat. I can see it clearly. I must be remembering a scene in a movie. The man is wearing a 1920’s style bathing suit and has center-parted hair. A British accent. British teeth. We have whiskeys and are pushing the ice cubes around with black stirring straws. I think of the Titanic. Now that’s drowning.

            “We don’t need to dwell on it,” she says.

            “How long were you two together?”

            “A month and a half,”

            “Oh,”

            “See? It’s strange. It’s strange. I’m not sure what I’m grieving – a summer fling? A future? The children we could’ve had, I mean.” She looks down at her drink. It’s gone. So are the steaks. I wish we had just stopped talking long enough to enjoy them. We order more drinks, doubles this time, and fries to split. The sweat drops on the waiter’s head are bigger now, as if he’s crying from his scalp. “So now you’re on a trip?” She asks. That’s why I’m here. Passing through and staying at her place. Before we came out here for steaks, she laid a folded mattress topper on the floor beside her own unmade bed, then said “It’s like a side-car bed.”  Her place is down the road from the restaurant, close enough to walk. She’s got a window box herb garden and a rabbit named Misty and the whole place, an unairconditioned studio, smells like it. Her linens are the color of surgical scrubs and I can tell, somehow, that she took them from the hall closet the day she left her parents’ house.

            “Yeah,” I say. “Just, you know, to shake things up.” We were never very close. I realize this now, downing half my whiskey. It was only ever proximity and I try to conjure an image of it. There was the time we drove an hour away to see our professors present at an Environmental Studies conference. All I can remember is coming back, her maroon station wagon cresting a hill in the springtime. And I think we had discovered a commonality, lactose intolerance or left handedness, something that seemed to matter then. And now we are here, looking down at the wood laminate table, a little uncomfortable because lonely people are afraid of each other.

            “There are three rounds,” she says, picking up her steak knife and pointing it towards the television, “and a one-minute break between them.” I nod but don’t turn around. I am not sure if I don’t care, or if I do care and that’s why I can’t look.

            “So, tell me more about the house,” she urges, using her knife’s tip to draw a smiley face in the juices left on her plate.

            “The house?” I ask.

            “Yeah, the house, the one you just moved to.”

            I stare at her and nod and think about the place. How all of the cabinets are labeled and none of the women wear bras and at night we sit around with our breasts falling in all directions and talk about dogs until one of us cries – cries about how good dogs are. Then we talk about talking, about ourselves and our habits. We talk about how we always talk about dogs until one of us cries. How strange this is. How special we are. Then bedtime, and we walk around the kitchen without looking into each other’s eyes. “There’s a big front porch,” I say.

            “Hey, that’s great,” she says. Then I sigh and look at the wall. There is a small, framed map of the state. That’s all there is. If we were really friends, I would’ve insisted we sit by a window. I study the image of the state, floating on a white page, trying to remember the borders. Was it landlocked? Was that a lake coast, up at the top?  “It was a long, Catholic service,” she says, through the ice cube she’s chewing. I turn in time to watch her wipe a drip of water from the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand. “Catholic with an open casket. And I hate open caskets and I hate Catholic services because all their songs sound like Broadway hits – I was raised Methodist, have I told you that?”

            “No, you haven’t.”

            “I was, and the music is better. Anyhow, I didn’t have anyone to sit with. None of my friends would come with me. I asked one and she said it wasn’t appropriate. She wasn’t family.” I finish the watery whiskey left in my glass. She does the same.

            On my last Saturday at the old house, I said that Tom T. Hall’s voice had an adolescent quality. It was a particular note, a strain of startling, boundless grief – the sort we are no longer capable of feeling once we reach adulthood but might be reminded of in a plotless dream. None of the others agreed, “not quite adolescent,” they said, frowning, “not adolescent, something else.” But there wasn’t much debate before we put the matter aside and drank coffee in the yard until only two of us were left. The shadow of the house was beginning to creep across the tufty lawn when he started in on it again, with waning conviction, saying it wasn’t too late.

            The whiskey floods me with affection for her – torrents of buoyant sympathy. I float on it like a lazy river at a waterpark, filled with Band-Aids and hair and timid children, too scared to ride the real attractions. The waiter wants to know if we want another drink. We don’t. He wants us to leave but doesn’t say as much. The droplets on his head are even bigger now, and they have multiplied. I take her hand. It is puffy and claw-like, with fingernails filed to points and I think of the man who drowned and wonder how it was to be attracted to a woman with hands like this. She’s going on in a stage whisper, leaning across the table, like a conspiracy theorist. She had nothing to wear to the service, she’d never met his mom, she didn’t know what to do – bring flowers? She’d been thinking of breaking up with him (actually, she’d decided on it).  She wasn’t close with his friends, and they were grieving so hard (that’s the adjective she chose: “hard”), harder than her. Should she have tried harder, she wants to know, tried harder to grieve harder? Should she have made some sort of performance? The front of her blouse is dragging in the ketchup on her plate.

            At church coffee hour as a child, I used to take the jelly donuts, suck the filling out, and then put them back on the platter. Their appearance was perfectly preserved, perfectly innocuous. But there was a backwash effect. With the saliva, I mean, if you can imagine that. It wasn’t kind.

            “Why are you crying?” she asks, a little incredulously, withdrawing her hand and leaning back in her seat.

            “I don’t know,” I say. She looks over my shoulder at the fight and I can see it reflected in her glasses, not in any great detail, of course – just flesh and bright lights.

 

            A few months after I make it back home autumn arrives over the course of a single weekend and in advance of the first frost, I ferry all the tropical plants from the big front porch into the living room and she texts me late one night to say that she found a dead opossum at the end of her street, that it was sweet, that it looked like it was sleeping. Before I can reply, she writes more, she says: “At any rate, it made me think of you.”

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The Other Side of Now

 

 

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than – this” The opening line of the poem touches on words by Fredric Jameson that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

 

The 16mm film evokes the everyday-ness of life in the abandoned public spaces of the present-day city, colonised by nature and wakening to new possibilities after the long period of pandemic. Erased by the ebb and flow of urban regeneration, these repurposed sites are resonant with the city’s histories, rewilded by visions from past and possible futures.

Poem spoken by Ruth Mitchell.

 

A Creative Associates project for the Sustainable Earth Institute, University of Plymouth.

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On the Levee Once Again I Walk to Sharpen

my body to a blade. Weapon for nothing. Recall my first diet,
66 pounds, my proud refusal of a fist-sized milk carton.

My mother’s sister at 40, spooning Gerber peaches
into her mouth at the family table. Recall the game

my mother taught me when I was a teenager—
—find someone on the street who has my body—

Now without her how I will sharpen. Will be
vapor. Smoke. Furious at the world for nothing.

Rushing down the year’s dark corridor, street unspooling
every morning, tracking miles.

How I craved my mother’s judgement. Be vapor. Be smoke.
Be blade. Remember how it feels to desire

nothing, not even touch’s static. Remember why
emptiness still comforts like nothing else.

I will shrink myself down to where I don’t matter.
Thumbelina, tight and safe in a walnut shell.

Yet grief thickens everything. Even the imprint of my body.

Who’s keeping count.
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Interview: Bud Smith

      

Author Bud Smith’s recently released novel, Teenager (Vintage, 2022), creates its own absurd and passionate world. The book follows two teenagers in love, Kody Green and Teal Carticelli, who travel across the country to flee their violent pasts and find their own American dreams. The book is both beautiful and violent, both absurd and very real. It features passionate characters who livedifficult lives and seem to have the best view of the stars when they’re knocked down by life.

Bud Smith’s repertoire of publications is lengthy and diverse. He has published a memoir, Work (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017), and two short story collections, Doublebird (Maudlin House, 2018) and Or Something Like That(Unknown Press, 2012), and a poetry collection, Everything Neon (Marginalia, 2013), and two novels F250 (Piscataway House, 2015) and Tollbooth (Piscataway House, 2013). His short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Hobart, Wigleaf, and other journals. He lives in Jersey City and works in heavy construction, a profession which he is quite proud to represent. He is known for his blue-collar lifestyle and writing while in the trenches, punching out incredible short stories on his phone while on his lunch break.

In a conversation over iced coffee and follow-up emails, we talked about how absurdity in fiction can be used to abstract our lives and help us deal with our problems, and how it’s a key ingredient for imagining something better.

Denise Robbins for The Florida Review:

With all the crazy shit going on right now, it’s almost nostalgic to read a story about two violent teenage kids committing crimes for love. Many people think of fiction as an escape from the absurd. But when reading your work, it’s more like an escape into the absurd. How have you used fiction to process the absurdity of life?

Bud Smith:

Since the dawn of time, there’s always been crazy shit afoot. Life is just as absurd as it’s ever been. The science is correct, and the math is correct too, but people skew facts, it all gets blurred and harder to believe. If I switch on any news channel, I’m being told or sold an unbelievable story. At least with straight fiction, I choose the flavor of the skew and blur what I’m in the mood for. I use art to turn down the noise on everything else.

TFR:

How did the story Teenager come to you? Where did it begin?

BS:

I was at a poetry reading and the event organizer asked me to read something. So I wrote a quick poem on a napkin. I was thinking about this boyfriend shooting his girlfriend’s parents and them going on the run together. It started from there, as a poem. And I just kept thinking about it, and eventually, it became a short story, which I remember beginning after waking up on my friend’s couch—the kid who shot his girlfriend’s parents on the lookout on top of a water tower. But for what? And it wouldn’t leave me alone. To find out, for myself, it then became a novella, and then further investigation turned it into a novel.

TFR:

 How did the story change in each iteration?

BS:

It deepened every time—became darker. Less hopeful. It became more realistic and more troubled in each draft. Trouble for the characters and their situation, and the gravity of their reality.

TFR:

So it made you feel less hopeful each time?

BS:

It made me feel more balanced each time. In the initial drafts of it, there was more of a “love overcomes everything” attitude. I think that’s still in the book, but in reality, there are many things that love cannot overcome.

TFR:

Although in total, the novel was absurd, it still felt more realist than most of your short stories. I’ve also noticed that your other previous novels seem more realist than absurd. Is that an accurate depiction — that your short form fiction veers more to the absurd and your long form fiction stays more grounded?

BS:

I start somewhere absurd and surreal because that’s how my imagination works. Over time and many drafts, I think out and apply logistics to my little cartoon. It has other dimensions to it. My shorter, surrealist stuff is some of my favorite work, probably closest to a dream I had. I wouldn’t change it. I wouldn’t develop a story called Tiger Blood into a 300-page book, because I said everything I meant to say in 1500 words. Magic or laws of physics, whatever works, I don’t care.

TFR:

Is there a physical limit to absurdity and surrealism? Is that the reason why it’s strongest in your short fiction?

BS:

When we look at our own lives, often we can’t abstract our own problems. But when we can do that, something bigger than us happens and we get to laugh at it. The author Tim O’Brien says, sometimes there’s no way for anyone to understand how something momentous feels to an individual except through abstraction. He has a story he tells about being at a seminar and telling the audience his child’s first words were quoting Macbeth. And someone in the audience called him out on it, “There’s no way his first words were ‘a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.’” And he says something like, “You’re right, they weren’t his first words, but how can I ever explain to you how they made me feel if it wasn’t something that amazing? To you, it’s just a baby talking, but to me, it was doing this incredible thing that could never happen.” That’s how it feels sometimes to be alive, and to capture that in fiction, you don’t have boundaries. It’s okay if I lie, that’s the point. But we’re trying to convey something more than just the straight truth. I’m trying to elicit a feeling. That’s the goal. To elicit a feeling larger than life, and sometimes we go into the woods to get there, we’ll lie in the lie of the lie.

TFR:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how absurdity can be found in the mundane because I’m reading Catch-22, where these characters are dealing with extremely banal issues, like parade contests and mess hall seating arrangements, while they’re in the middle of a war and could die any day. You also do a great job of this in your story “Gling, Gling, Gling,” where a man gets hit by a car and, dying, wants only to go on his errands. I think often about how, even in times of crisis, we want so badly to keep things normal and to follow our little routines we’ve created for ourselves. It takes a lot to shock someone out of that. Are you trying to shock people out of what they expect when they read this?

BS:

No, not at all. This is just how my imagination works. I usually don’t think about that kind of stuff when creating, I’m just trying to keep myself interested. I tell a story to the best of my ability. Anything can happen in a story. If something is anarchistic in content or form, it stays recklessly interesting to me.

TFR:

Everything in Teenager certainly is interesting. Yet probable. Yet the sum of its parts — the way everything fits together — kind of brings it back to the absurdity level. Was that something conscious to you, for everything to seem realistic, or are you trying to acknowledge that the story is not real? 

BS:

I just watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre before I came here. Everything is completely plausible in that film if you look at it in one light. And everything is a total implausible nightmare if you look at it in another light. It’s how you want to interpret it and how you’re feeling about it. Has a lot to do with how stories are presented. The folk tale John Henry vs. the Steam Drill. There’s not a guy literally racing a railroad steam driver, but of course, there is.

TFR:

What other books or stories have influenced your attitude towards surrealism in fiction?

BS:

Don Quixote, Epic of Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Arabian Nights, The Divine Comedy, the Old Testament, Hamlet, lots of other Shakespeare plays, Beckett’s plays and the novel Molloy, the Brothers Grimm Fairytales, on and on. Those are some of the most influential stories ever told and to read them and study them, you can’t help but see how they have been retold and reinterpreted time and time again in contemporary forms, which got compressed in the work of Donald Barthleme, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, on and on. Everyone should read the author Ben Loory, he’s an incredible storyteller.

TFR:

You mentioned Bonnie and Clyde. If this story follows a Bonnie and Clyde-like structure, were you trying to turn that on its head, or did you think about that at all?

BS:

I was a junior in high school when the Columbine school shooting happened. The copycats are still caught in that cycle of violence. I learned in that same high school that Manifest Destiny was this glorious thing. From sea to shining sea. Then I went to a different classroom where the teacher had served in Vietnam, and he told us not to believe everything our government said to us, what our school books said. Teenager is a story about young people breaking away from their families, and from society. A very old story that becomes new again each generation, across the world.

TFR:

Do you have personal experiences with violence that drew you to this story or these characters?

BS:

Anyone paying attention knows there is brutality all around, often behind closed doors, people being abused by loved ones, assaulted physically and sexually, emotionally, and it goes on for a time, until a person pushed too far, lashes back, and is taken away by the police. If there is a gun in the home where this abuse is taking place, sometimes it is used to end the abuse one way or another. You hear about it on the news. You hear about children taking those guns into schools. People getting shot in church. A friend of mine put a shotgun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. Another friend of mine was shot by a friend of his, a drunk police officer. It went unreported, and the limp has almost gone away. Another mass shooting. This one sounds similar to the previous mass shooting. Missiles fly across the TV and explode in the dark. I’m not sure who is at war. Hospitals become rubble. It’s all so incredibly overbearing. I am surrounded by it wherever I go, but I have to look elsewhere. I wrote about these characters because they are in love. I am looking for love. But every love story— if you are telling the whole story—is a tragic story, with its own fair share of atrocity.

TFR:

The main character Kody is quite violent. He also suffers from a brain injury. Is that a signal that this is not ‘okay’? Do you worry about his violence being accepted? Or glorified?

BS:

The violence in the book is somewhat glorified. And I don’t think that his brain damage causes him to become violent. He just never had anyone to show him the way the world could be. He’s all alone, his ideas got misconstrued. He had no support system of people who love him and explained things. Teal is the first person who loves and believes in him, but she’s still completely aware that he’s a fool, and he thinks the same thing about her in a way. We’re just dealing with average people of average means who didn’t really have love in their life and got led astray. 

TFR:

Kody is not a sympathetic character at the beginning. You start the book on a very shocking and surprising note, and then over the course of the story, I learned to love Kody and the way he saw the world. This seems like the opposite of most ‘unsympathetic character’ stories like in Breaking Bad, where you start out sympathizing with him and then see him descend. But here you start at the low point. Was that intentional?

BS:

I thought of Kody as a person who didn’t really have much of a chance to begin with. He doesn’t have far to fall. When you don’t have people who love you when you’re a little boy, and the best he had is his stepmom, Rhonda, who’s a slight friend but didn’t love him fully. It’s not far to fall when you’ve not been properly loved and nurtured. Usually, people make their futures in a way, but when something’s written out for you like that you have a much harder road.

Walter White from Breaking Bad is a character who had a lot of things going for him, and he squandered his own life—even before the cancer. He’s a miserable, washed-up guy. I’d rather read about somebody full of passion, even if that passion is misplaced. As an artist, it’s smarter for me to have passion for the story being told. So that’s why I’m interested in Kody and Teal. They’re two really passionate people. I don’t think I could write a book about someone like Walter White, who feels robbed, who’s dissatisfied, and hates his own life before he even gets cancer. He’s already dead before he has it. Those kinds of characters very rarely move the needle for me. I’m more interested in Levin from Anna Karenina, this person so imbued with life. And Don Quixote, who is on this wayward mission because he wants to make a difference.

TFR:

 If reading about violence can inspire violence, can reading about something better help imagine it into existence?

BS:

An individual is just that, an individual. Free will belongs to each and every person currently drawing breath. That said, many people are trapped in invisible systems of control that takes great power to break out of. Pearl clutchers, and satanic panic Finders, and video-games-made-me-do-it, or Holden-Caulfield-loaded-my-gun theorists, are missing the point that we are in the middle of a great bubbling, melting, swamp of joy and pain, and our stories that we have been telling each other since we first created our languages have been inside us since the very beginning of our consciousness, and they aren’t getting any more wicked or twisted than they ever were. All our stories have ever been is a mirror held up to our culture and our place in it. If we are frightened by the stories we are telling, it’s because we are appalled by the world we’ve collectively created, little village to little village, slowly netting out to be the entire surface of this earth. Yes, a person has the power to hope for something positive, and they have the power to make that tiny positive thing happen in their home. They can share it with their family. Their family can share it with their neighbors. Their neighbors can share it, and so on.

TFR:

Did you start writing surrealist work when you felt stuck in life?

BS:

I’ve never felt stuck in life, and I’ve always told my stories with a heavy mix of surreal and real. I believe they belong together, and I don’t see much of a distinction between those modes of storytelling. The object is just to convey a feeling. Storytelling is already a hallucination, is already asking someone to step inside a dream with you and accept the dream. The earliest stories I was taught as a child were fairytales. A lot of them had some kind of lesson that was supposed to help a person navigate the worst perils of life, and find the rewards of that same life. If the story had to do that with a talking wolf, then it did it with a talking wolf. If Shakespeare had to send the ghost of the father to the parapet walls to send a warning, then so be it. If a poet has to be taken on a tour of Hell to find his way back to his true love, then the whole story becomes a metaphor we can use to make sense of our problems. I want to read something that is going to elicit some strange surprise in me. When it happens through abstraction and bent reality, brushing up against the proposed real world, and its supposed laws of order. There isn’t anyone to grant your magic wish at the actual supermarket, but really, there is. You’ve just got to ask around, ask the right questions. The genie can be behind the deli counter or stocking the yogurt, or any of the shoppers, it could even be you.

TFR:

You are so frigging optimistic. I got this feeling also when reading your memoir, Work. Just seeing what writing and art has been able to do for you and your outlook on life. If people are feeling depressed about the state of the world, what can they do?

BS:

Refuse to be idle. Even if you have to go forward in your lowest gear. Seek out people and places that do not seem ruined by impending doom. You can have fun, I’m saying, I’m advising, I’m begging. I’m begging both you and me to go have fun. It’s better to go outside and find it. The sun lights it up easier than any electric lamp can. But sometimes this fun cannot be seen in ordinary moonlight, and in those cases, I recommend a bonfire.

TFR:

Okay, I’ll have a bonfire. So there’s a narrator in Teenager who’s not Kody but has a lot in common with Kody. The narrator also has a lot in common with you—having a sharp eye that takes in only beauty. The narration seems to get more frenetic and beautiful as the story goes on, as the end is in sight. There’s a passage I want to quote:

That night, they closed the door and listened to the mules bray in the starlit yard. Dead Bob could be heard out in the living room, strumming a guitar, singing in a sonorous voice, evil sounding, and eerie gloom to it.

“He’s out there singing murder ballads.”

“Well, not to us. Not about us.” Teal called through the wall, “Bob?”

He kept strumming. “Yessssss?”

“Do you know any love songs?”

The minor chords switched to major and the same song carried on, but right there in the middle there was a turn, a new verse, his voice changed and rose in pitch and became saccharine and the miserable characters in the song canceled revenge and made amends, the knife was pulled out of the heart and the blood was wiped off the blade, the wound closed up and the wrong itself rewound like wire on a spool so the wrong was never done and the people were kissing in the daffodils, bluebirds swooping all around them and never a better match ever made in the history of the world.

“Thank you, Bob,” she said.

It makes me feel like the narrator is saying to the reader, “I choose to make you sympathize with my characters and agree that their lives are beautiful.” Is that what you’re saying here?

BS:

When things are desperate and dark, to survive, sometimes we focus on the sublime and the beautiful. That’s a lot of people’s experience in life—to transcend bad things that happened or are happening to them, they embrace anything that can give them a transcendent feeling. Drugs, sex, religion, music, climbing a mountain or two, whatever it is, they’re trying to find some escape from the bad things happening to them. I think my characters, hopefully, will always be like that. Looking to break away from pain, and seeking a cherry on top, even if they are absolutely fucked. Life and death is unpredictable. I hope the characters I write about will always get swept away, and sweep us all away with them too.

https://coolgoodluck.com

Twitter:  @Bud_Smith

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The Wounds of Childhood

We are the last to arrive. Jonathan parks on the gravel shoulder and is halfway out of the car before he remembers to help with Ellie. “Go,” I say, though I will cash in on his choice later. Jonathan is shouting greetings to his buddies who are lobbing sacks at the cornhole boards while I crate Ellie across the lawn to a picnic table covered in gingham. Here are the remains of the adults’ dinners, empty glasses and crumpled napkins, though the women, Peggy and Andrea, are still spooning puréed foods into their babies’ mouths. I leave Ellie in her carseat on the grass and reach for the open bottle of rosé.

            “You made it,” Peggy says, deadpan.

            “Barely,” I say. I’m allowed one glass of wine because I am nursing, so I must drink it slowly. “Why didn’t we stay in Duck again? This place took so long to get to.”

            “It’s better up here. Quieter,” Peggy says. She looks tired. The skin under her eyes bags down like an old basset hound’s.

            Andrea plays her part, like she did in college, smoothing things over between us. She reassures Peggy that the house is cute and super nice, ignoring what I can see from here, even in the dwindling daylight: this rental is a downgrade, old and unwanted. Its siding is worn and salt-baked. Spiderwebs glaze the floodlights while weeds eat through the driveway. I can already feel how damp the bedrooms will be, with loud ceiling fans that can’t compete with the humidity.

            As Andrea praises Peggy for getting the house on such short notice—we hadn’t coordinated our schedules until late April, when most houses were already booked—her son sucks his thumb and stares at me. He is a dull, lifeless weight on Andrea’s knees. He wears a blue helmet that is reshaping his skull, which was mushed on its journey through Andrea’s birth canal. With his helmet and dulled expression, he looks like a stoned NATO peacekeeper.

            “What’s so funny?” Peggy asks me.

            Instead of sharing my thought, I say, “Remember the house we got after graduation? It had seven bedrooms and a hot tub. Remember that hot tub, Peggy?”

            Peggy reddens and glances across the street, toward the sound of waves crashing on a shore that we can’t see. In her firm but forbearing, good-mother voice, Peggy says, “No thank you, Tommy,” to the child in her lap, who is trying to rip the buttons off of her shirt.

            Peggy’s dutiful husband, Seth, appears then and picks up Tommy, throwing him in the air so that he squeals. Peggy is gearing up to lecture me, the last of them to get married, get pregnant, accept my fate.

            “We’re not twenty-two anymore,” Peggy says, as if I could forget. “We don’t need to be close to the bars. We need a place that’s family-friendly. This house is small, sure, but there aren’t stairs for the kids to fall down or, heaven forbid, hot tubs to drown in. If you really feel cramped though, there is an extra bedroom between our rooms you could use. It’s got a crib.”

            “Great,” I say. “I absolutely will. Ellie hasn’t slept in our room for three months.”

            While Jonathan plays one last lawn game, I find our bedroom, which contains a musty double bed and a particleboard dresser. Ellie is fussing, as usual—she is always fussing—and the spit bubble between her lips and the blushing skin under her eyebrows tells me she’s hungry, again. The mattress sags and the frame creaks as I lower myself onto it, wincing at the scrape of Ellie’s single tooth on my nipple.

            While she nurses, I take in the room. There are coarse wood planks, nailed diagonally across all four walls. I squint at one and notice black outlines, here and there, peppering the planks. At first, I mistake these half-circle outlines, upturned at both edges like crescent moons, for irregularities in the wood. Rotted whorls, maybe, or carpentry mistakes, but then I lean over and touch one and my finger is coated in ash.

            When Ellie’s eyelids sink, I scoot to the edge of the bed and lug myself up, then walk through the door that leads into the extra bedroom, which is so tiny that a crib and rocking chair crowd each other like commuters waiting for a train. The odd planks cover these walls too, only here, the blackened crescent moons appear in uniform rows up and down the planks.

            The room is cramped, but the crib looks clean enough, and Ellie, exhausted from the drive, is snuffed out like a match.

—

When I hear Ellie’s throaty cries just two hours later, I nudge Jonathan. He groans and rolls away from me, but I won’t let him win this. I had her all evening. He can deal with her at night.

            “Your turn,” I hiss, before squeezing my eyes shut and trying for sleep. “Dammit, Jonathan, go in there before she wakes up the whole house.”

            But then, the noise stops. Ellie has gone from hungry crying one second to complete silence the next. There is a void of sound, as if Ellie has disappeared.

            I shoot up in bed, deciding that Ellie truly has disappeared: suffocated, fallen out of the crib, that she is suddenly, infantly, dead. I rush through the door between the rooms, and my hands are gripping the crib’s rail. I look down and see Ellie, and see that she is okay. She is so okay, in fact, that she is practically glowing in the moonlight that streams through the window’s wavy panes, her chest rising and falling with each breath.

            I take a few steps back until I am standing in the doorway. I am watching her breathe and marking this night in my mind: the first night Ellie has soothed herself back to sleep.

            Jonathan won’t believe it.

            I have nearly turned away when a flicker of movement catches my eye and I realize that Peggy is here, in the room with Ellie. Peggy is standing in the corner, between crib and window. The black of her high-necked, long-sleeved gown has merged with the wall behind her so that I might not have noticed her at all if it weren’t for her pendant. The pendant hangs on a silver necklace and is big and gaudy, for preppy Peggy, wide as the palm of a hand, but curved like a crescent moon with sharp points. It is creamy white, its edges a garish red.

            “Peggy?” I whisper.

            In the shadow, I can’t see her face, but I see her hand as she lifts it to the pendant. I hear her as she breathes out, “Shhh.”

—

As soon as Jonathan hands Ellie to me with a grumble about missing tee time, she is clawing at my left breast. I shift her to my other arm and seek out Peggy among the adults in the kitchen. She is pouring coffee and humming softly. I touch her shoulder and say, “Hey, thanks for helping out last night. How did you get Ellie back to sleep so quick? She’s impossible.”

            Peggy looks like a beachy angel in a silky white cover-up, her hair blown out. “What are you talking about?”

            “You took care of Ellie,” I say, but I hesitate at her confused expression. “Remember? I went in to get her, but you were already there. You were wearing black.”

            Peggy blows across the top of her coffee and rolls her eyes. “Who wears black at the beach?”

            By evening, my woman in black is a joke. Around the picnic table, Peggy asks if the woman not only calms babies, but changes their diapers, too. Andrea wonders aloud how much ghosts charge an hour for babysitting. Jonathan shakes the ice in his glass and calls into the dusk that he could use a top-off.

            I spray on more bug repellent and keep my mouth shut. I know what I saw. At least, I think I do, though surrounded by the nursing babies, the ball-busting fathers, the woman in black doesn’t seem so real. Could she have been a product of my sleep deprivation, of post-partum whatever?

            When we all head inside, I change Ellie’s diaper and dress her in her pink pajamas, then pick her up and walk toward the door that links our room to hers.

            “You’re letting the ghost have her again?” Jonathan says to my back, an audible smirk in the question.

            “I don’t believe in ghosts,” I say.

             But hours later, I wake up sweating, the sheets tightened around my knees. I grope for Ellie, then remember that she is not here. She is sleeping in the crib in the little room because I don’t like to sleep with her. I relish the time that I am free of her; Jonathan does, too, though he won’t admit it.

            That, and I don’t believe in ghosts.

            When Jonathan rolls toward me, vapors from his ginny breath mist over my face. I prop up on my elbow and listen for Ellie.

            After a few seconds, I hear the slightest whimper, or maybe it is a coo. Or it could be a whisper.

            In the little room, the rocking chair’s runners creak against the floor as the woman gentles my baby. Ellie’s hand reaches up for the pendant, and the woman accommodates her, letting the necklace fall so that it almost touches the space between Ellie’s collarbones, her pink pajamas burnished in the moonlight. When the woman bends down, her gowned body covers Ellie up, blots her out, swallows Ellie into her shadow until I can see no part of her, not her cloth-covered feet or fisted hands.

            Half of me is panicked, horrified by Ellie’s consumption into this woman’s shade, the other half embarrassed at the sentimental nonsense that is pouring from my mouth. “She’s mine,” I am pleading with the woman, but I am whispering too, because something about her demands that my resistance be quiet, like I’m negotiating with a nun or a grieving great-aunt.

            “She’s mine,” I whisper again. “She’s mine.”

            At this third plea, the woman’s torso rears back against the hard dowels of the rocker, and I am tripping over my feet, wrenching Ellie from her, not looking at the woman’s face, this woman who smells of dust and oleander.

            When Jonathan sits up in bed, I am clutching Ellie like she is my purse and someone tried to snatch her. Her chest is so warm that it burns.

            Dinner that evening is steaks on the grill, Peggy’s salad. I don’t help. I don’t pass out forks and knives, or pour the wine. I cuddle Ellie and sniff her hair. Instinct keeps drawing me back to the skin of her chest, which is the vulnerable shade of thawing ice, the blue blood coursing under it like a spring stream.

            Across from me, Peggy is tipsy, urging Jonathan to tell it again.

            As he tells it, I am the lunatic. I am the confused, attic-wandering mommy searching for her baby, one step from the asylum. “So then, she comes running into our room and tells me I have to scare away the ghost,” Jonathan says. “Only when I go in…”

            “…No one was there,” Peggy finishes. “I mean, obviously.”

            “Might explain why no one else had rented this place,” I snap back.

            Peggy groans. The wine has loosened her. She is no longer tolerating me, even though we once shared a kiss, immersed in a rental hot tub. When I put the tip of my tongue on hers, Peggy moaned and reached for me. She liked it more than I did.

            “It’s all in your head, and I’ll prove it,” Peggy says.

            “Oh, yeah? How?”

            “I’ll put Tommy to bed in there tonight.”

            She smiles up at her husband, who is swaying, the yellow liquid in his glass threatening to spill over. “We could use the night off, couldn’t we, babe?”

—

That night, in the salt air leaking through our bedroom window, I dream of ovals that flatten and bulge and wane to become crescents, of the moon juttering through its phases so quickly that it catches on fire, causing typhoon, mud slide, hurricane. I dream of a naked woman who has captured the moon and held it between her lactating breasts, can hold it there even though it burns. I dream of threes, of fairy tales, of the third night, when the humans fail and the witch wins.

            I wake up gasping, my throat burning. I yank off blankets to search for my asphyxiated baby but find her, soundly asleep, tucked against Jonathan. I breathe out, then ease myself back down, careful not to wake them, but I don’t sleep again, not for hours. Whenever I close my eyes, the phases of the moon whir by, full back to full again.

            Toward sunrise, I think of Peggy’s little boy, quietly asleep in the crib.

            I think of checking on him.

            I think of these things, and perhaps the thinking of them alone pulls me back into sleep, because soon I am drifting on soothing black swells.

—

The next morning, Peggy looks fresh and free in a purple tank top. She looks like the Peggy of old, who used to grind against strangers at The Wreck, who used to be a wreck herself. I am fuzzy from my dream, which feels silly now, in the dazzling gold of the morning, with Ellie happy in my arms, full of milk and tenderness.

            I am gathering myself to apologize to Peggy for a few things: for giving her crap about this sea-roughened house on the unfashionable end of this barrier island, for bringing her down with a ridiculous ghost story, for mocking her devotion to her son.

            I am about to apologize when Seth rushes into the room, holding Tommy around his belly as the child wails and rubs his chest, keening, mama mama mama, an incantation that starts quietly and expands to coat the walls.

            Peggy is a comet streaking toward them. She barks at Seth to put him down, and he does, holding him on the counter so that Peggy can unstick his pajamas from his body. When the little boy sees his own blood on his mother’s fingertip, he is stunned out of his wails. In the unholy silence that follows, the rest of us take in the blood and the charred, red-rimmed crescent moon now exposed on Tommy’s chest.

            I slap my hand over my mouth and do not say what I am thinking, instead rushing to gather up what Peggy needs, her phone, her insurance card, her shoes. And in the aftermath—through Peggy’s anxious updates from the burn unit, through all of the disappointments about the failed skin grafts and infections, through the questions that the skeptical woman from child protective services asks all of us—I never say what I am thinking.

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