^REiNVENTJO - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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Fairy tales, Legends,^
Parables & Fables: %
^REiNVENTJO
Airrfee Benfl^r'
Neil Gaiman
Richard Howard/
Rick Moody
JeanJte^Winterson
isa Yuskavage
I and others
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'Stephen Dixon
Marie Ponsot
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COLUMBIA
A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART

Editors-in-Chief
DAVE KINO AND NOVA REN SUMA
Poetry Editor
GABRIEL FRIED
Managing Editor
HILARY HOUSTON BACHELDER
Circulation Manager
RAFIOUE KATHWARI
Poetry Assistant
MAX FIERST
Prose Editor
DARA BOTVINICK
Editorial Coordinator
MICHELLE MONTGOMERY
Production Manager
BARBARA KOPELOFF
Prose Assistant
LILLIAN WELCH
Poetry Board
LAURENCE ALEXANDER, AUDRA EPSTEIN, PAUL HEINER, DANIEL WOOD
Prose Board
LAUREN GRODSTEIN, ALEC MLCHOD, DONALD MODICA, DAVID MURPHY,
CATHERINE QUAYLE, REBECCA POLITZER, LAURA ZINN-FROMM
COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART is a not-for-profit literary journal
committed to publishing fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art by new and
established writers and artists. COLUMBIA is edited and produced semiannually by
students of the Graduate Writing Division of Columbia University's School of the
Arts and is published at 2960 Broadwaj', Room 415 Dodge Hall, Columbia
University, New York, NY, 10027-6902. Contact the editors at (212) 854-4216,
or e-mail us at arts-litjournal@columbia.edu.
Visit our web site at:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arts/writing/columbiajournal/columbiafr.html
Annual subscriptions (two issues) are available for $15. Biannual subscriptions
(four issues) are available for $25. International subscriptions add $5 per year.
COLUMBIA welcomes submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art. We read
manuscripts from September 1 through May 1 and generally respond within two to
three months. Unsolicited manuscripts must be accompanied by a self-addressed,
stamped envelope. No e-mail submissions, please. Contact the editors for further
submission guidelines and information on upcoming theme sections.
) 1999 COLUMBIA: A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART
In this way we form our army.
—KURT HOFFMAN

The Editors would like to thank those who made this issue possible.
For Financial Support:
THE MARSTRAND FOUNDATION
NEW YORK STATE COUNCIL ON THE ARTS
For Advisement and Creative Support:
ALICE OUINN
MAUREEN HOWARD
RICHARD LOCKE
DON LEE
PHILIP GOUREVITCH
COUNCIL OF LITERARY MAGAZINES AND PRESSES
For Benefit Readings:
NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
MARIE HOWE
FRANCINE PROSE
MYRA MANNING, SHAKESPEARE 6. Co.
DENNIS WOYCHUK, KGB BAR
For Cover Design:
LAURA MILLER
"The Phone" by STEPHEN DIXON will be included in 30, to be published by
Henry Holt, April 1999.
"The Three Friends" by JEANETTE WINTERSON will be included in The World
and Other Places, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf, February 1999.
Cover art: Untitled, by THOMAS WOODRUFF from the series All Systems Go:
Mission Poesy, 1998, acrylic on linen. Courtesy the artist and P.P.O.W, New York.
Table of Contents
Poetry
KIMBERLY JOHNSON
MARIE PONSOT
MARTHA ZWEIG
SYBIL KOLLAR
ALEXANDRA SOCARIDES
STEPHAN MCLEOD
DIANE MEHTA
KEVIN PILKINGTON
Fiction
STEPHEN DIXON
CHARLOTTE HOLMES
MICHELE HERMAN
PAMELA A. MOSES
DEBRA LEVY
Below Mt. Nebo
Strung
Angling
Helper
Quick It Can
Wild
Ducks
Caper
Skirting the Demons
Good Country People, Revised
Going Blind
The Goldberg Variations
Chronic
The Russian Emigre
The Happiness of Black Umbrellas
Taxi Ride
8
9
10
II
12
14
15
16
17
19
20
23
24
25
27
30
The Phone 32
Refrigerator 41
Love and Ethical Culture 47
A Very Small Woman 55
Museum Pieces 7 1

S P E C I A L S E C T I O N
Reinventions:
A New Look at Fairy Tales, Legends, Parables & Fables
Fiction
JENNIFER CARR
JENNIE LITT
JEANETTE WINTERSON
DAVID MARSHALL CHAN
AIMEE BENDER
JAMES PENHA
MARY O'CONNELL
KURT HOFFMAN
Poetry
MARGARET SHIPLEY
DEBORAH LARSEN
STEPHEN CUSHMAN
JEFF FRIEDMAN
SARAH VAN ARSDALE
LAURENCE SNYDAL
FELICIA MITCHELL
ANNETTE SLO/^N
CHKRLES HA.RPER WEBB
YOJO (.AMY SHAW)
Green Grass: A Fable 96
A Fable IOo
The Three Friends 104
from Memoirs of a Boy Detective 124
Elsa Minor ^4
Dust and Stone 149
Saint Catherine Laboure 163
The Giant 176
Sunrise 92
A Gloss on Cats in Exodus
93
The Woman Taken in Adultery
94
Orpheus in Williamsburg 106
Chorion and the Pleiades 108
Grandmother
Venus of Meadowview
in
158
Nudist Lady -with Swan Sunglasses I59
Calamity }ane 160
"R.at Defeated in a Landslide 161
Ragnarock 162
Essays
NEIL GAIMAN
RICHARD HOWARD
Art
DEBORAH EDMEADES
LISA YUSKAVAGE
COLIN HUNT
Interview
S P E C I A L S E C T I O N
Reflections on Myth 75
Gifts of the Gods 89
(Self Portrait) The Artist at Home
(Self Portrait) The Artist at Home
Kathy and Elisabeth #1
Kathy and Elisabeth #2
Kathy and Elisabeth
Laura and Shrink
The Rain Machine
Novelist RICK MOODY on Hawthorne and the Black Veil
74
179
85
86
87
88
134
112

—KIMBERLY JOHNSON —KIMBERLY JOHNSON
Below Mt. Nebo
At the crossing, green swales,
a clone of aspen shaking silver underleaf,
scrub oak and columbine, cottonless
cottonwood, yarrow like white fingers,
speedwell with its pinched blue throat,
monkshood clenched and penitent.
Over the Hog's Back to Sixth water, the river
stemmed underground, skilled around
slight tailings—an abandoned copper mine,
shaft collapsed and shallow.
On a nearby branch, a painted bunting
waited, covered by blue feathers:
saucers of bright refraction.
Its song was private and unintelligible.
Oh my leanness! Oh flat earth,
cracked and peeled!
Soil unravelled, field shirred,
shadowing with wings.
The plough is an eye. The black birds
spoke out and downward, shadowing. My door
left unfastened at dusk, light coming in.
The lightning bugs ascend, ignite.
Kinetic plants front the dark.
Strung
A light. A rose. Hub of the day.
A bovate bright with dew, whitened
to the horizon. My father was a pilot.
My mother dug the garden, vines
climbing wire mesh, wild roses
open on the trellis arch.
Nets of daisy, goldenaster
in the yard, sweet four o'clock
in the windowbox, my small voice
belling in the field. The spider
in its scaffolding, precarious
between the pyracantha and fencepost,
precarious, the body ledged
on silver. Frost at evening sagging the web,
frost matting the grass. My father
on the lawn outside. Fled the light, low
the flowering bed, the night
a pewter bell, unclappered.
Birds strung on electric wire,
then unstrung, wheeling, astral,
lit from below, spurring back to wire.
On the brittle grass, my father,
pointing out the constellations,
Caelum, Retinaculum,
the precise grass needling up.
Points of star needle down.

—KIMBERLY JOHNSON
Angling
Crooked branches,
red leaves like shook fire,
the brook fishhooked, hairpinned
around this bend like hot wire.
Hobble Creek, limber in autumn,
its bank silting, layered
with scales of flint and shale.
The water courses and folds.
Reverses, turns over, sucks.
A throat opening and closing,
opening around rocks,
rocks consonantal, guttural.
Bright fish, barely covered, are
surface-feeding, spangled, mouths
open. The hooked underbite of trout.
Sun sparking off the surface.
Upstream they're kindling
leafpiles. Smoke drapes ruddy nets
across the sunset. I unpin my hair.
It spills over my shoulder, catches light.
I look directly at the sun.
Close eyes. Blanched suns.
Smell of something burning.
Mutter of water.
—KIMBERLY JOHNSON
Helper
Of rock, of razorgrass, of standing
water tells the town, wherein
the westbound Rio Grande couples
with a second locomotive, crouched and greasy,
for the last upthrust of Rocky Mountain.
Nightfall, and the engines skirl the incline
past the coal mine and its compressed stars,
past Wan Roads, where the aspens'
alphabet inscribes the hillside.
And Sheep Creek, where my father
lost his truck in nineteen-eighty—
the sudden blizzard carving an embankment
of the road. He felt it slip,
heard the suck of mudded tires, saw the sky
enlarging, whitened through the windshield.
And Thistle, quiet valley town
until the mountain flooded down.
Past Childs's Ranch, the pond disturbed
by nightswimming fish,
silver backs to the full moon bared.
The railside gravel jumps and glints,
the sleepers deepen in their grooves,
unappreciably. At Diamond Fork,
the clamor of uncoupling. The engine fires,
grinds, returning light to Helper.

12
—MARIE PONSOT
Quick It Can
Quick quick nothing
is broken, sweep up the mess,
bag it, twist it shut,
down the disposal chute with it—
a lumpy drop, bump thud
and out of mind, gone.
Turn the stereo up a little,
lean on the bass, like some
self-shut kid but very responsibly
using the sound to re-orient
your blood, get your equipoise
back on track with a drum-ripple
beat
Your solar plexus picks it up
as pleasure. It'll steady your stride.
Oh and look out the window, over-look,
I mean, the area of this latest disaster—
now banished. Let it go.
Admire the seagulls' height of flight
up the skyscraper thermals,
their sea cry, that mewl, their purposeful
surveillance of their world.
By the time they locate & down
their next meal, the sack of bad writing
—bad, dim-witted, self-serving, sloppy, bad-
will be incinerated ash or baled for dumping.
Don't worry, it won't come back to haunt youchange
your pencil or next time try pen
or boot up some old stuff you still like
and work on that, if you can find any,
and I think you can, if it can't come back
to haunt you, though I think it can.

—MARIE PONSOT
Wild
Even the eagle
soars deep into dailyness
acts as if safe & is silly
during its courtship rituals
spends days inspecting
impregnable building sites
before choosing one
with a view of fat meadows,
water, & the right neighbors
clucks at stubborn children
to hurry them up,
models high tricks of survival
for their benefit
wakes in the night
when the wind shifts hard north,
& tunes in hastily
to the weather reports.
—MARTHA ZWEIG
Ducks
Maybe a murder
sucks the river's mean streak:
some melodrama underneath;
rocks waddle there in thick silt
& the slick waterlogged trees lock.
I do love a snag!—to work it all day,
to pivot up any visible debris
until the bottom drops out & the water
& mud churn; hurl it, haul it all & set it
off to dry to burn another time.
Time was I was timid, I tried
to crouch myself low in some hope
to befriend whatever might be
there timid of me. I remain pleased
to have made acquaintance.
From the bank ahead cerise bushes tip
their tips in decorum clear down. Little
April daughter, do look now &
listen!—
wacks in preamble,
backtalk & sass.

-MARTHA ZWEIG
Caper
Pickpocket death
eased her out of her one
rosy fold of flesh
in a wink—who 'II know—
& you know he didn't
need her a bit, nor anyone
else, nor for that
matter covet her even,
no, but he just swipes
in passing, got his one
& twitchy trick so keen to
exercise itself it wheedles
him out of all rest & back
to the business—you remember,
same way the opposite stunt
slicked being from nothing once.
—SYBIL KOLLAR
Skirting the Demons
If you spend too much time
in the country
you begin seeing things,
first in the trees,
then the forest hides
the hunter craving
your fingers.
You may come upon
a missing person
sliced up under a thicket
the feet nowhere to be seen.
The sound of a dried branch
cracking cuts into your spine.
Then there's the pure darkness
like a sheet that is slipped
over die dead.
But on the last night
of the half moon, you can't
resist the possibility
of shooting stars.
To get to the field
you have to pass the pond
filled with your modier's warning
of dybbuks who want your company
but will settle for your eyes.
You scuttle by as you hear
a murmuring in the mist

diat rises like an open mouth.
Your blood banging hard, you bolt
headlong toward the gathering stars
for a glimpse of a heavenly body
exploding across the sky.
—ALEXANDRA SOCARIDES
Good Country People, Revised
Sometimes I sit in the silo-topped barn
witii Joy. I'm hunting for a leg, but
it's already been written—
taken off, to somewhere between the hills
and over the sky-blue lake like her eyes. Gone.
"The girl" asks: Do you ever look inside?
My hay-hair sticks to the wooden
plank that's not die leg. Read the story
again. There's something to be said
for what is hollow: deep as the hole
that creates the innocence. And the girl,
my pale-blue Joy, says: We are not our own light.

-ALEXANDRA SOCARIDES
Going Blind
In third grade, I went blind,
or said I did at least, when
Miss Canary asked why I touched
the walls when walking, rough
white plaster gripped between my ringers.
I said it simply: I woke to blackness.
All morning I walked like this,
classroom to bathroom, library
to greenhouse, and forced that vacant
look I'd long since mustered up.
For weeks (should they have seen this
coming?) I'd stolen pairs of glasses:
all my father's, from drawers
that only he went in, drawers
of cigarettes and magazines,
of long-abandoned racing stubs.
The thick frames hard
against my cheeks—and I looked
funny, going blind, tense
with what to see and what to leave behind.
But on this day, when blindness had been
scheduled and carried out, I was
earnest. A life was changing,
and Miss Canary knew it, her live eyes
looking down into my blind ones.
She played my game and let the other girls
lead me, room to room, one thin hand
always tight in each of mine. Mid-afternoon
I decided some sight might just be useful,
when thinking of my brother
—a blot of darkness in our home—
and went to Miss Canary, her blue skirt
long and brightly starched against my face,
to say it was a miracle, for I could
see again, and I returned
to play fast and free with the other
girls, their closeness to me gone.

22
What is it I could not bear to see,
I ask myself, at subway stops, along
familiar highways in the dark,
at the curb's edge before I cross.
What was the thing that made the game of going
blind turn into blindness, and what,
what unforsaken power turned me back?
—STEPHAN MCLEOD
The Goldberg Variations
Baled in grave gray, this photo is three-quarters
triangle of enormous hair. I believe you when you say you
are Beautiful, Generous, Untimely. I believe your
Litter of Events. You are not their tree.
The Little Flower, enclosed in habit lived utterly free
and died a silent girl. You've not had freedom for one goddamned hour.
In the Goldberg Variations a pedestrian tune's
a rich man's lullaby made new:
We are neither bitch divas, nor virgin martyrs.
We are these variations warmed with vigor of an obsolete
Triangle: Composer, interpreter, listener, each with a job to do.
The theme is entrusted to you (whoeveryou are) as though
to raise it in your hand while dazzling light
splinters the world in finite spectral glow.

—STEPHAN MCLEOD —DIANE MEHTA
Chronic
It seemed bed-saws' grinding teeth; something churning
in the sheets, carbide winter ahead, broiling sea at each equator
where men's bones are oboes now, men like myself who have no name or too
many to fit one stone. Or simply no one. It was my
room just off the hall. It was my
vantage point: I watched my parents tear each other up.
Light
brazen, invading my dark. It seemed that if I slept someone would go and
not come back. He did and I was right to be alone. I've loved. But loved alone.
And what does it matter now, thirty years late? Snapdragons, goldenrod,
tall tulips opening, autumned limbs arranged with pumpkin kids, gesture paintings,
too many clothes, too many books; but just the right kaleidoscope. And then,
there's always someone else to consider, his brain, his
24
bearing.
The Russian Emigre
The diction of pogroms is the bitter root
of new American verbs. Our greatgrandfather's
fabrics came to suit
supply-and-demand, its guaranteed
returns. He sewed his dreams into textile
eternities, belt-loops, buttonholes, good deeds
for neighbors or paying customers.
Generations of children he leavened
to middle-class would eventually measure
double-breasted happiness
less in tailored, hand-stitched faith
(to build a family business)
than in financial gain. Now, primetime
television joins Talmud for better
or worse, and what we value is leisure time.
As the American thread of our phrases
form patterns, the knots become
beautiful since they resemble lace.
Work is fashion, its knee-length
respectability negotiates faith as we do—
answers to cut from measurements.

26
We create what we believe: sometimes
turning away means learning that nothing
takes shape without tailoring designs
from old fashions into what eventually
will be fashionable. We select vogue
ensembles, determined to be contemporary.
-DIANE MEHTA
The Happiness of Black Umbrellas
1
A cold steam blurred the streets of Bastille,
ideals like rain that gets into everything—
sewers and the soles of my shoes,
the gutturals of men in search of the evening
on Rue de Lappe. Matrons were turning
signs to Open while bartenders readied liquors
for love and sadness. Strangers hurried
under black umbrellas, but happiness was not
impossible. From the soft syntax of drizzle
you emerged: a slender exclamation
teetering from the curb into my time and fog.
Wild contortions of women, men thinking
solemnly in the symmetrical gardens of Musee Rodin.
For 18 francs I can witness the pain of others:
despair that's deeper for the pleasure
in watching this loss, this tenderness.
Faces, fingers, figures emerged from marble,
suffering so much that the rain stopped.
Thinking of you perfecting my pronunciation of rue
I gazed at a sculpture of a man walking
and realized there was nothing left to see in here—
I wanted to explore, to get closer to you.

28
"She's So Lovely" was '90s love: sweet and rough,
never enough but too much. In Cassavetes' film,
love is a red dress stumbling through hard rain,
thrill-seeking and all crescendo.
The more we dream, the less we lose ourselves.
Imagine Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron
down by the Seine, dancing their hearts out,
and realize this was romance: watching other people
fall in love (foolishly, I thought friendship was enough).
Glimmering lights threw their lingo on the Seine,
which moved on, like subtitles in a foreign film.
Life-sized photographs of whores gilded
the facades of Pigalle's sex shops.
Salesmen peddled bargains to businessmen
while policemen pursued illegal immigrants
up and down the hills. Bulging with sales
and sadness, this cross-eyed, topless heaven
burns with facts we have just begun to think about.
The right street was the one everyone crosses
over and onto. Parisians have perfected the logistics
of love; like cars in traffic, determined
to get wherever they're going.
Thousands of people impatient for January
on the Champs-Elysees. With reckless enthusiasm
the evening got under way: for example,
Desdemona died in the theater. At midnight
the air was thick with shouts and resolutions
but we made none, being sure to break them.
Lovers had already returned to their rooms,
cafes shook with alert couples who jigged to Piaf.
It was our last night and Paris was completely
drunk with itself. We were unreasonably sober:
Backlit in fireworks, a stranger tipped his hat.
Surreal dreams: my wake-up call coincided
with tears. Crazy about you, I boarded the Metro
to Chatelet and switched to Charles de Gaulle.
It was too hot, too cold, though the drizzle was serene.
Among strangers, I entered that inconceivable blue—
in seconds I was miles apart from you, opening
Malamud again, thinking about kindness and books.
"You must read Dumas when you get back," you said.
An ocean and a half-day later, the clock repeats
the hours again. It's a new year in New York
and I begin The Three Musketeers without you.
for Mohammed

-KEVIN PILKINGTON
Taxi Ride
I hop into a cab
and when the driver says
where to, I check to see
which way the heavy traffic
is going then tell him
to follow it downtown.
He cuts through Central Park
the way I should have cut
through the crap that day
and didn't. I rest my head
against the seat that is as soft
as a woman's chest and think
for the first time in my life
I might be able to fall
in love with vinyl.
When I was a kid
I had an uncle whose round
face would light up
with a smile after a few drinks,
mess up my hair then give
me whatever change he had.
That's what the moon
looks like tonight, an uncle
working on another drink
and ready to put his hand
in his pocket to fork over
a couple of bucks.
Apartment lights gleaming
from high rises around the Park
are mixed in with stars
that slid down from the sky
during the heat wave last
week. It's hard to tell them
apart. At least I know in
this part of die city any star
I can reach by elevator
isn't worth the ride.
We come out on 58* Street.
Broadway glitters like a bracelet
filled with jewels and waiting
to be bought. I figure
it's a good idea to come back
for it later, then give it
to a woman who'll appreciate
how these lights sparkle
in all kinds of weather
and why traffic is the rarest
of gems whenever it dangles
from your wrist.

—STEPHEN DIXON
The Phone
HE GOT A PHONE PUT IN THAT DAY. His woman friend had said,
"How can I stay over in an apartment with no phone? My daughter,
when she's with her father, might want to call me, or he might
want to call me about her or that he's going to be late bringing her
home." She said, "Sometimes I've business to do on weekends, so
how am I supposed to do it at your place if I can't make or receive
a call?" She said, "What if we just want to call a theater for movie
times or make a reservation for someplace?" and he said, "For
movie listings, we look in the paper—that I've always got. And
what would we make a reservation for, a restaurant? I don't go to
restaurants I have to reserve a table for. Right away I know it's too
expensive for me, and I like to go to a restaurant when I feel like
going to one, not when they tell me I can have a reservation. So
what else, a resort somewhere? Who's got money for resorts?
Maybe you do, a little to spare, but I wouldn't let you pay for me
for even a night's stay." "My dad might be sick and I want him to
always be able to reach me in case it seems it could get worse," and
so on. "I don't like it when the damn bell rings," he'd said. "I
might be deep into my work or a book, cut off from everything
outside my head, when suddenly there's this loud ring; it sometimes
scares the hell out of me," and she said, "Millions of people
in the city put up with it, you can't? What am I saying? Billions
around the world put up with phone rings. But if it jars you that
much, get one where you can turn off the rings, though I don't see
how you'll know if someone's calling you then, or one which has
soft tinkling chimes instead of bells—I haven't seen one but I
know they exist." So he got the phone, a regular one with an on
and off switch, since the chimes cost a few dollars extra a month.
It was the daughter argument that mostly convinced him—her
daughter even told him: "Sometimes I want to talk to my mother
if I'm with my father for the weekend and I'm feeling sad or lonely."
His first phone of his own in about ten years—the last was when
he was a per diem substitute teacher for the Board of Education
and got work when one or another school called him almost every
morning. And that night, while reading in bed, he got a call, the
first ring startling him. It's probably her, he thought; nobody else
knows he has a phone, and he gave her the number a few days ago,
after he'd applied for a phone and the phone company told him
what it'd be, though next time when it's this late and he's reading
or going to sleep he'll turn the phone off. He grabbed the receiver—
phone was on the floor by an easy chair at the other end of the
room; he'd wanted it installed away from his desk and bed because
of the rings—sat in the chair, and said, "Hi, and just think, my
very first call on my very first phone in more than ten years—a
landmark of sorts, wouldn't you say?" and a man said, "What's
that?" and he said, "Oops, sorry, thought you were someone else.
You must have the wrong number, sir, or the right one, but of
someone who had this number a few months to a year ago," and
the man said, "I don't think so. Is this Mr. Bookbinder?" and he
said yes and the man said, "Then I have the right number if your
name is also Gould, and only wanted to say—" and he said,
"You're not from the phone company, are you? It's too late for
that kind of call. What is it, near twelve?" and the man said, "That
late? Excuse me, I wasn't aware. But not phone company; just
someone who—" and he said, "And tell me, how'd you get my
number? I only got the phone today, maybe six hours ago. What,
the phone company passed my number around already—sold it, I
mean, for whatever lists companies buy to contact people at home
to sell them something? Because I explicitly told them not to sell
it, give it away, anything, to any person or company; just to list it
with telephone Information and in the directory and that's all,"
and the man said, "I got it from Information. I looked in the Man-

34
hattan phone book, didn't see your name there or even in the ones
from a few years back, so called Information, and when she told
me there was no listing for you, I said—because I knew you lived
in the city; your bio notes always say that—well, then try new listings,
since it's possible he only got a phone the last week or so. But
I never thought today was that day; that's astounding," and he
said, "Okay, but why is it you called?" and the man said, "Only to
say—and I don't do this regularly with people like you, I want you
to know—how much I admire your work, especially the piece in
the current Zanzibar. I hope this isn't inconvenient or even upsetting
to you in any way to hear this. But when I truly like someone's
work and I know that person lives in the city, and a few times elsewhere
in the States and once even in Paris, I call him. My French
isn't good, or not fluent enough to get a number from Paris Information,
or perhaps that particular person I wanted to reach wasn't
listed there or didn't have a phone: Daniella Raymonde, do you
know her work?" and he said, "Never heard of her," and the man
said, "Oh, you should, and she's been translated very well here
too. She's unbelievable, almost the best; certainly up there with the
contemporary great ones, I'd say, of the last twenty years. Now
she's dead, a year ago, lung cancer—her smoking . . . you didn't
read of it?" and he said, "As I told you—" and the man said, "It
was a small obit—typical, typical, for so fine an artist, but in The
Times, though no photo; the smoking and lung cancer I learned of
from a friend. You don't smoke, do you?" and he said, "Never.
Anyway, thanks. Raymonde, Daniella; I'll try to remember it. And
your name, sir?" and the man gave it and started going into what
he liked about Gould's work: "Not just that almost no one's heard
of you, so I feel you're like my own discovery, though you do have
an audience, believe me; I've spoken to a few people who are
acquainted with your work, and I try to hype you up whenever I
can to others, but" the this, the that: the way Gould slyly maneuvers
the archetypal incident into something original, aggressively
abuses the commonplace phrase into new meaning, withholds,
then all of a sudden unloads; the excisions, elisions, excursions:
Gould didn't know what he was talking about—"If you say so, I
guess, though most of what you're saying is news to me and not
exactly part of my work habits or mental . . . well, you know,
.process, since I never think of those things when I'm doing it or
after"—the extremes he goes to, ways he exploits the
matter-of-fact and the inconsequential and often the underexploited
and occasionally what to everyone else heretofore was unexploitable,
then coming around to the beginning again and starting
the same thing in the same way as if he never touched on it before
but making it entirely fresh and equally inimitable: "This I find
amazing if not miraculous or, let's say, because I don't want to get
too off-the-wall about this, done amazingly well, especially in the
Zanzibar piece. That one seemed an enormous breakthrough for
you and is one of your best, perhaps your best, of what I've
read—I hope it's your newest. It amalgamates everything you
do—is almost an historical pastiche of all your past styles and
themes, or ones I'm familiar with. What do you say about that,
would you agree?" and he said, "About what?" and the man said,
"About what I said," and he said, "And what was that?" and the
man said, "Please, you have to be kidding me," and he said, "Best,
worst, where it stands among the others and so forth, even if a little
of what you said I think I can now recognize in some of what
I do. But the truth is, I hate talking about any of that and feel such
talk can only be self-defeating in the long run, though I can't now
say why specifically, and in the short run—well, it can only turn
out to be something else, but I forget what I started out to say,"
and the man said, "Yes, I'm sure you did, since I doubt you forget
anything—that also comes out in your work," and he said, "I don't
see how, though eliciting an answer to that would only be selfdefeating
in another way, even if I can't specifically say how on
that one right now either"—how he does this, that, some other
things. "But I'm repeating myself now," the man said. He's in the
same field as Gould—"which you must have figured out by
now"—and he said, "No, but I'm often a little dense, so I hadn't."
"And I've had a sprinkling of success, you can say, both critical
and financial, and once even a brief torrent that drowned my
house or at least flooded my basement, so maybe even more suc-
. cess with one of my works than you ever had. But you're right:
what the hell's success anyway? And now I'm just about fin-

ished—I barely get in a smidgen of work in a month—while you,
and we're not so many years apart, seem always to be toiling, judging
by the amount of your work I've seen around the past few
years, or is that mostly old trunk stuff taken out and freshened up
and aired?" and he said, "No, I throw out everything that didn't
work or got too old," and the man said, "That's the way to do it,
discard the old, bring in the new, every day a bonne annee, isn't that
so? But I'd like to talk about a few things you've done particularly,
and if nothing else, since we probably haven't time for too
much—" and he said, "It is getting late; in fact, I'm an early
get-to-bedder, so it was late for me when we began," and the man
said, "Then just for a minute the Zanzibar piece, which is the main
reason I called you anyway, to let you know how much I loved it—
that I desperately wanted to tell you that and to discuss it; to me,
it's a true work, one that seizes my throat and continues to hold
it—and, if possible, to delve into the particulars of it a little," and
he started to say, "I don't think we have the time," but the man
immediately began to say what there was in it that even Gould
might not be aware of or have intended, "considering how remote
our subconscious is in relation to our exterior or, at best, our subcutaneous
creative selves. By the way, do you go along with anything
I've said so far or am I simply sounding like a pedantic ass
on his high horse?" and he said, "What in particular, of what you
said, did you mean?" and the man said, "Anything; subconscious,
conscious, the receiver occasionally understanding the work better
than the giver, for a variety of reasons," and he said, "I don't
know, possibly. Excuse me, I'm not trying to be ingenuous, if
that's the right word . . . disingenuous? No, ingenuous, at least for
what I want here, but it's because I'm feeling a bit tired—that
business before of its being late for me," and the man said, "Then
one more thing and I'll let you go," and immediately began analyzing
the Zanzibar piece, and Gould cut him off and said, "That
wasn't what I had in mind and I swear to you that everything I put
in I intended. I don't like to leave room for interpretation or error,
but there I go talking about what I hate talking about and have no
feel for and think is self-defeating, et cetera," and the man said,
"Even still; though while we're on that subject—" and he said,
"Of what?" and the man said, "The possibility of misinterpreting
a.piece, would you mind my speaking of one or two things—just
one, then—of what else I've come up with in a couple of your
non-Zanzibar works? And I had to look hard to find them, I want
you to know. There may be a lot of you spread around over the
years but they're mostly in out-of-the-way uncatalogued places, so
the search wasn't easy," and he said, "Okay, just one. And I don't
mean to sound curt or rude or anything, but because of the
time—well, you know—so go on." "Modality" the man used in
his first sentence on one of Gould's earliest works, and he said,
"Excuse me, wait, that word," and the man said, "Which one?"
and he said, "It could only be one—modality. I've heard or read it
ten to twenty times in my life and have looked it up in the dictionary
a number of times, and even then I didn't get what it meant,
though I probably went over and over the definition each time I
looked it up," and the man said, "The state of being modal," and
he said, "And what's that?" and the man said, "It relates to 'mode,'
the actual and unadorned word 'mode,' but in logic, music, statistics,
and other places," and he said, "Okay. And 'monad'? That's
another one, as long as we're on the mo's and I have the ear of a
guy who seems to be good at this," and the man said, "Now you're
referring principally to philosophy; Greek, in particular: the one
and only, and I say that in both definitive ways. But please, don't
try and fool me, Mr. Bookbinder, although that's only one more
thing I love in your work: the humor," and he said, "I do try for it
sometimes, but as I already said, I hate talking about my work in
any kind of way, though I thank you for calling." "And you're very
welcome. But listen, before I go—and I am going—maybe, since
I also live in this city and am now semiretired so have plenty of
spare time on my hands, and that we have similar interests and
pursuits, and for most of our lives, I'm sure—it has been that way
with me—we could—" and he said, "Really, I'm pretty much a
solitary guy. I didn't even want to have a phone. I'd rather do all
communication like this through the mail or the building's intercom.
But someone insisted I get one," and the man said, "Let me
guess who." He was about to say, Really, don't bother, when the
man said, "A girlfriend, or woman friend, we'll call her, because

for guys our age or thereabouts, 'girlfriend' would be anachronistic.
And she's divorced or separated, besides probably being quite
beautiful and intelligent, and has a young child and wanted the kid
to be able to be in touch with her at all hours—meaning when this
woman friend's staying with you," and he said, "Something like
that. You don't know her, do you? I mean, this couldn't be why
you know so much about it. This isn't her husband, by chance,
whom I've never met—only kidding again," and the man said, "I
can see that, and of course it's no to all your questions. I'm just an
avid admirer of your work, I'm sure one of many, even if most
haven't emerged from behind their walls yet, and particularly of
that Zanzibar piece, which was something, truly something. And I
felt like passing that info on to you personally. People have done
that to me with my work. Phoned me out of the sky-blue—ring
ring—you must know how it is," and he said, "Honestly, never,"
and the man said, "Then good, you've been initiated tonight with
me: 'Hello?' 'Is this Bernhard Goldstone?' 'Who's this?' 'I simply
had to phone you, Bernhard'—as you noticed, I never once called
you by your given name. I didn't think I had the right to, since I
was the one to phone you. 'And that your work has really done
something to me, Bernhard'—one even called me Bernie straight
off the bat, something I wouldn't even allow my siblings to do.
Anyway, I was usually thankful when I received such calls. Why
wouldn't I be, so long as I wasn't being rung up during a horrible
hangover or intestinal flu, let's say, or something more flagrant?
And it used to happen regularly for a number of years, though I
don't want to give you the impression it happened that often. But
not recently, since I haven't had anything out in the marketplace
for a long time, and it could be that the people who would normally
call think I'm dead or very ill. But still, once every six
months would be the average, someone would feel compelled, as
I was with you, to look my name up in the phone book—and wait'll
you get in it. I wager you'll be swamped, relatively speaking, the
next year or more, and then it'll gradually recede once the
caller-admirers learn you're not exactly welcoming their interest
with open ears. Word gets around quickly among them. You can't
imagine the little fan cells that spring up for almost everyone in
our stratum and then, if they're not nourished, dry up." "Well,
you're different from me in how you handle it, which is fine;
besides that, it'll never happen once my phone's listed. No
ungratefulness intended, but you'll be the anomaly. Anyway, it's
late now—" and the man said, "My gosh, nearly one. Does your
watch also say that or is mine running very fast? Even if it were
only half past twelve, who could have believed it? I meant to be
brief—a minute of your time, two. All right, I won't lie—I'm
unable to—five, but at the most. I didn't think you'd mind. Someone
calling to extol you and your work? How often does that happen?
With me, as I said, around every six months, when times
were good. And I didn't think I'd be the first on the phone to convey
it to you. If I had thought that I would have also thought
you'd welcome the call even more, for who doesn't respond positively
to an affirmative first? Later you can get jaded," and he said,
"Could be that you're right. Thank you, and I will now have to say
good night," and the man said, "I should too," and went on for
another ten minutes, Gould couldn't find a place in the man's talk
to interrupt and hang up: what he's done, where it's been, why he
isn't doing much of it anymore—"If you talk about wells, mine
hasn't so much run dry as been poisoned by someone's having
plunged a decomposed goat down it"—how there are similarities
not only in their ardor toward what they do, or, for him, did, but
in the subject matter too and often in the most minute particulars,
"Though know I'm not suggesting you're copying or pilfering
from me in any way. Because of our similarities, you could toss the
same charges back to me, but to be honest about it, I think you'll
find I was there before you. It's simply that we're both extremely
serious and ardent at what we do, though we're also quite funny in
our work, though tragic too, which is another thing. One piece of
yours—I forget where I found it, but it kept me up part of the
night it was so vivid, sad, and searing and familiar—not to my
work, I'm saying—even if I recall thinking at the time that I've
tackled similar themes, though in the end how many are there?—
but to life in general. What the heck was the name of it again? I'm
sorry, but it's on the tip of the tip of my tongue, just busting to
cut loose, a short title—actually, all your titles are short; not all,

ut a lot I've come across, but anyhow—since I can't remember
the title or where I first saw it—know what it did to me: literally
knocked me for a figure eight. So thank you, Gould, if I may call
you that," and then started right in on something else about
another of Gould's pieces—this one he has to admit he didn't care
for as much as the last one he mentioned, "though it was still pretty
good"—and then his own work.
—CHARLOTTE HOLMES
Refrigerator
BEHIND THE OLD REFRIGERATOR lay clumps of dust like the
remains of something that had once been alive. I saw useless
objects swaddled in grime: a ball-point pen, a swizzle stick with a
dancing poodle on top, a red plastic change purse that gapped open
when you squeezed botii sides.
"Oh," my wife said, "I used to have one of these." Crouched
in die tiny space behind die old refrigerator, Sally picked up the
change purse and squeezed the sides. It opened, revealing more
dust. She let it close, then opened it again. She looked at the change
purse as if it might speak, dien crooked her index finger and fished
a coin from inside.
"Lucky penny," she said, and brushed off the dust. "Look,
Rick, it's the year I was born." She held the penny out for my
inspection. "I wonder how long it's been back here?"
I turned the penny over in my palm, trying to remember when
they stopped making wheats. The Lincoln Memorial was on the
back of this one.
"How long since they've put somebody new on a coin?" I asked
her. She was opening and closing the change purse, looking at it
with what I can only describe as affection. You'd diink she was the
one who'd lost it back there. In the dark, dusty space where the old
refrigerator had been, she crouched like a kid. I could see where she
was letting die dark roots of her hair grow out and die sight—I
don't know why—annoyed me. I stretched my arm into the space
and rapped her on top of the head with my knuckle. "Hello in

there. Anybody home?"
"What?" she snapped, and jerked her head away. "What are you
doing?"
Six months after we bought this fixer-upper, the refrigerator broke
down. But not all at once. First, there were little signs, things you
might miss: water easing out from under the grille, milk that went
sour, ice not quite solid at the center. At least the compressor didn't
blow in the middle of summer, but no time is a good time to be
without ice. Still, we couldn't complain. The previous owner (now
dead) left the manual lying on top of the fridge, and right there in
print we could see this was a '61 model. Now, you're lucky if a
fridge lasts ten years.
At least, that's what the salesmen told us as we trudged around
the appliance stores, comparing side-by-sides and freezer-on-tops,
sliding out the snack trays, speculating what would fit on the doors.
We tried hard to see the little differences that would make this Westinghouse
superior to that Frigidaire, but in the end, we bought an
eighteen-cubic-foot Whirlpool because it was the right width and
color. I was willing to be less particular, but we only had so much
space, and Sally said the appliances had to be white.
Why argue? With Sally, I'd learned to choose my batdes. Sally
hated contradictions and jokes at her expense, hated to be josded,
bumped or roughed up in any way. I knew that. I'd already been
married to the woman for a couple of years. Knocking on her head
was not a bright idea on my part.
"That hurt," she said, though I knew it hadn't. She rubbed her
dark roots. I'd asked her to keep her hair blond, but she'd decided
it looked cheap. Standing beside her in the kitchen that Saturday
morning, watching her rub her head, I thought I saw tears in her
eyes, but maybe not. "Why are you insulting me?" she said.
"I'm not insulting you," I said automatically.
"Of course you are." She stood up, letting the change purse
close in her hand, and came out from behind the old refrigerator.
She was slim and pretty, but she'd gotten muscles from carrying
cans of paint, hammering in nails, stripping the woodwork. "Just
because I didn't answer right away, you had to be sarcastic. I'm get-
ting pretty tired of the way you're always running me down. Give
me back that penny."
I handed it over. "Running you down?" My mouth felt dry.
"What are you talking about?"
"Don't stand there and deny how you just insinuated that I'm
stupid." She dropped the penny into the change purse.
I fiddled with the countertop edge, a sharp strip of bent aluminum.
A box of ceramic tiles was in the basement, waiting to be
installed over the yellow Formica. I'd promised Sally that putting in
the new countertop would be my next project, but we both knew
she'd end up doing it instead. "Listen," I said. "I was joking. You
seemed like you'd zoned out for a while. I just wanted to get your
attention."
"That's a pretty juvenile way to go about getting my attention,"
she said. Dust coated the toes of her white sneakers, and a clump
of something bobbed on a strand of her hair that was still blond. I
reached out and closed my fingers over it.
"Dust," I said, and sifted it between my fingers.
She put her hand to her hair, where I'd touched it, over her
breast. I held my smudged fingers up so she could see legitimate
dust.
She slipped the change purse into the front pocket of her jeans.
"Where's the broom?" she snapped.
I was holding the dustpan for her when the delivery guys came
back. They strapped the old Amana onto the dolly with a wide mesh
belt. Looking at the old refrigerator that way made me sad, made
me feel like we'd made a mistake in not just having it repaired. It
looked a litde like my grandfather looked when they wheeled him
out of his old house on a gurney. Water leaked out when the delivery
guy tilted the dolly back and aimed her down the narrow hallway
toward the front door, which they'd propped open. The new
refrigerator waited on the sidewalk, surrounded by corrugated
paper. Dappled light played over its surface, and it looked tall and
lean, energy-efficient and imposing, even though inside, it was all
plastic.
Once the delivery guys were out, Sally produced the paper towels.
She mopped up the water, and by the time the guys had bumped

44
the old refrigerator down the front steps, Sally had wiped the baseboards
clean and stuffed the dirty towels into the trash. The room
smelled of old celery. I was standing there looking at the cracked
wall that had been hidden behind the refrigerator. It looked like a
continent divided into tectonic plates.
"Here." Sally handed me a wad of paper towels and a bottle of
409. "Try to be helpful, Rick. Clean the dust off the walls before the
delivery guys come back."
I sprayed a mist of cleaner over the cracked wall. Before I could
tear off a towel, the spray ran down in rivulets and made clean
tracks on the paint. Little bits of plaster flaked away as I scrubbed.
Sally was drying her hands on the dishtowel at the sink. She
peered over my shoulder. "Those are settlement cracks, you know.
Bad ones. Lots worse than the ones I fixed everywhere else," she
said.
"So what?" I said. "They're not new. You can see that. The
house isn't going to suddenly fall down." I was right, of course, so
it didn't matter what kind of spin Sally tried to put on these cracks.
I sprayed more cleaner on the wall. The wall back here was three
different colors and none of tliem was tlie clean white that Sally had
painted the rest of the kitchen. You could see that no one had ever
bothered to move the refrigerator when they painted. Several different
refrigerators had stood here in the seventy-odd years since
the house was built, each one taller than the one before it.
I said, "That's what I like about an old house. The problems
immediately jump out at you. Not like those new places we looked
at. You never know what they're hiding."
She folded the towel. "Yeah, well, this place was new once,
too," she said.
I swiped at the wall, trying to decipher what Sally meant by that
remark, and thinking how it would be to lie awake at night and hear
a house settling as dramatically as this one had. I figured that the
cracks in the plaster happened gradually, that maybe they were
noticeable only after a few decades. Otherwise, only an earthquake
could have fractured the walls so badly. I imagined a good-sized
tremor, and poor old Mrs. Robertson crawling from beneath the
dining room table to find her walls zigzagged with the cracks it had
taken Sally the better part of six months to patch and paint over.
I straightened up in the niche where the new refrigerator would
go. Because we'd measured it, I knew that it was exactly thirty-twoand-three-quarter
inches wide from baseboard to baseboard, the
only place in the kitchen where a refrigerator could reasonably be
placed. The one thing I hate about old houses is that the kitchens
are usually hopeless, studded with doors and windows that make
traffic patterns a nightmare. Looking at this one, I could see thousands
of dollars in renovation work staring out of my future.
"You know, Sally," I said. "Nobody gives a shit whether it's
clean back here or not. Nobody's going to see it."
She gave me a look and opened her mouth to say something,
but just then the delivery guys wheeled the new refrigerator into the
hall. There were two of them, a broad guy with a toothpick between
his teeth and a tall guy with a mustache. Though it was only midmorning,
the tall guy looked exhausted, and I had the feeling that
delivering refrigerators was the last thing he ever expected to be
doing with his life. But then I thought maybe this was just his day
job, that the reason he looked so tired was that at night he was a jazz
musician or an abstract expressionist or something.
"You want it in the same place, right?" the tall guy asked,
unbuckling the belt that bound the new refrigerator to the dolly.
"You see anywhere else we could put a refrigerator?" I asked,
trying to be funny, but both guys, and Sally, looked at me like they
might have a good suggestion about where I could stick the appliance.
"I just have to ask, sir," the tall guy said after a minute, maneuvering
the refrigerator off the dolly. He said this like he was used to
having to answer to people who treated him like dirt, and it didn't
mean anything. He kept himself out of it.
I felt bad that he hadn't laughed at my joke, so I tried to help
them wiggle the refrigerator into place. After a few seconds, it was
clear that I was only in the way, so I stood back against the kitchen
counter with Sally, who gave me another of her looks.
The delivery guys took Styrofoam blocks out of the crispers,
peeled tape from the sliding drawers, played around with the thermostat.
Sally talked to them the whole time, saying too much—how

long we'd lived here, what a mess die place had been in, what we'd
paid for it. You'd have thought she built the place from scratch
instead of just painting and patching it. I tried to set them straight
about Sally's talents. I pointed out the half-assed job she did painting
die old ceiling, mentioned the crooked wallpaper border in the
hall, showed them where—to save money—she'd tried to sand the
floor herself and botched it. But I don't think they were listening,
really. They were having trouble leveling the refrigerator; it tilted
pathetically to one side, and I could see how badly the kitchen floor
sloped, though I'd never really noticed diis with the old Amana.
Finally they plugged it in, and the new refrigerator began humming,
a low, startling sound I knew I'd have to get used to.
The tall guy said we shouldn't touch the thermostat for twentyfour
hours. He handed Sally a sheaf of paperwork, a manual, and a
ninety-day warranty card I knew she'd mail that very afternoon. He
said he hoped we'd be happy with our new appliance, and told us to
have a good day. I shook his hand, and Sally gave him a smile that
I suddenly realized I hadn't seen on her in a long time.
The fat guy pushed the dolly down the hall and out die front
door, with the tall guy trailing behind him, and then me, whose job
it was to close the door. I latched the screen and looked out at the
old refrigerator sitting in the bed of dieir truck. Its round-shouldered
back was to me, the coils covered in dust. Discarded, it had
become dangerous, a place to hide in a kid's game. These guys were
doing us a favor by hauling it away. Still, there was somediing
resigned about the way it sat there.
I closed the front door and stood widi my back against it. I
figured that in the kitchen, Sally would already be filling the
shelves of the new refrigerator with the bottles and jars that had
been sweating on the counter all morning. But she was too quiet.
When I tiptoed in, the refrigerator door was propped open, showing
the empty shelves. And Sally wasn't even working. She'd flipped her
lucky penny into midair and stood staring up at it with her palm out,
waiting to see how it would fall.
—MICHELE HERMAN
Love and Ethical Culture
THIS WAS THE SUMMER the coffee began to smell like dessert, or
perhaps it was the summer when women stopped buying accessories
because, thanks to the miracle of modern foundation
garments, they had cleavage instead, or the summer when all the
T-shirts said "Eat My Shorts," which may well have been the
same summer when, in addition to two hailstorms, it rained down
phony dollar bills printed on the back side with a picture of a
naked woman and a 900 phone number, so that people kept bending
down hopefully at the sight of free money and then had to
pretend their shoes needed re-tying so as not to be thought greedy
or, much worse, naive. Actually, perhaps it went as far back as the
simple season when the whole spectrum of the city's emotions,
from the highest highs to the lowest lows, could be summed up
thus: real estate and herpes.
But it doesn't matter the year; the point is, like all summers, it
was hazy, hot and humid and die East River was a glimmerless
shade of file-folder green. And Lauren (accent on the second syllable),
engaged to be married to Kenny (Ogilvy & Mather), had an
appointment witii Kenny's mother to scout out the admirable but
possibly undersized banquet hall on the top floor of the Ethical
Culture Society.
On her way there, Lauren stopped at her favorite Tex-Mex
restaurant for a quick taco salad. It was on her way to the ladies' room
to unstick the sweating jersey of her panties from her rear end that
she first spied Winston gently ladling mole onto receptive tortillas.

Lauren was not of that new breed of woman, call them
Diana: Goddess of the Park, given to wearing tank tops that
exposed their manliness, shoulders like a pair of stick shifts, feet
encased in running shoes engineered like little luxury cars. No,
Lauren was not, shall we say, automotive. Of course she had the
requisite 206 bones in her body, or at least no one had informed
her otherwise, but she kept hers safely encased in a package of
well-tended, well-moisturized flesh, as pokable as nectarines and
as easily bruised.
This was during the brief flowering of an old immigrant quarter
of the city, when its soiled tenement buildings and welfare
hotels had suddenly receded into the background, making way for
youth and pesto. What happened to the old immigrants and welfare
recipients, you may wonder, though Lauren, busy planning
her honeymoon in Aruba, does not? It won't be long now before
the soiled tenements come back into focus—you can see the
boarded-up sock stores already, and oh, how well the weeds will
grow in that loamy soil, calcified by the carcasses of a thousand
inbred Akitas.
But on this particular afternoon, as the strains of the season's
big love ballad wafted out with the air conditioning from a
_dozen card shops—was this the summer that was like a virgin?
the one that was like a prayer? the one when poor Billy Jean,
whoever she was, was spurned anew every five minutes?—Lauren
was almost late for her appointment to meet Enid, her motherin-law-to-be,
at the Ethical Culture Society. Sharing Kenny was
a proposition that didn't come easily to either woman, there
being not quite enough of him to go around. But Enid the Mom
and Lauren the betrothed tried, as they say in acting school, to
stretch.
However, at the moment, Lauren was still standing in the
dark, narrow passageway between the kitchen and the ladies' room
of South of the Border, surrendering willingly to the grease on
the leather soles of her strappy sandals. Around her neck she wore
a delicate gold chain from which dangled a small hollow gold
heart, a birthday present from Kenny, and this she twirled absently
between her fingers while her gaze remained fixed on the
smooth but muscular bicep of Winston the cook.
The third time he looked up from his mole, he winked.
Meanwhile, Enid sat on the steps of the Ethical Culture Society,
awaiting her increasingly tardy daughter-in-law-to-be, Lauren. She
was not altogether sorry for the delay. Soaking up her surroundings—for
eager Enid enjoyed her periodic romps into Manhattan—
she was perusing with great interest a free summer adult-education
bulletin she'd found in a hinged box nearby. In the summer soup
around her, if you listened carefully in the lulls between car alarms,
you could almost hear the cunning minds of petty criminals hatching
the crime trend of the season—this particular July, the surreptitious
poking of female behinds with a hypodermic needle.
Unbeknownst to Enid, a dark, bearded young man who had
just dismounted from his bakery van had come to rest for a
moment on Central Park West while he adjusted the fragrant load
of semolina loaves on his shoulder. As he did, his eyes gravitated to
the palette of Enid, which covered a somewhat wider and paler
band of the color spectrum than was the norm that season. And
perhaps he was even sniffing, with his practiced nose, her complicated
scent—one part the sweet lawns of Westchester, one part
Metro-North tobacco, for this was before the stringent new
no-smoking laws had gone into effect. And for a moment, while his
warm loaves began a barely perceptible downward slide, his hungry
eyes looked and his grateful nose sniffed at Enid, who was quite
likely the only woman in Manhattan at that moment using the
adult-ed bulletin for purposes other than scooping.
To Enid, one of the select few who had never actually attended
such a class nor known anyone who had, the brochure held all the
hope of the universe {and An Evening with Zbignew Brzezinski!)
She thumbed her way through the offerings, focusing momentarily
on How to Write How-To Books, Co-Dependent Never Again, A
Tour of Sushi Palaces, and A Tour of Memorial Graffiti Walls,
whereupon her thumb landed on Beginning Italian. There had once,
briefly, been an Italian in Enid's life, and as her thumb held open the
page, her heart and several other parts palpated at the memory. It
was a lovely thumb, professionally coated three times with a deep

shade of russet polish called 'Curry Favor.'
The baker was, needless to say, an artist. And this was a time
when artists, though poor, were still cradled in the firm yet loving
arms of Kitty Carlisle Hart, who had only to pick up the phone and
say "Governor, Darling" to establish a new grant program.
At the Tex-Mex, Lauren continued her survey of the cook. She
had moved from his muscular arms to his chest, where the name
'Winston' was embroidered, so much looser and friendlier than
the cramped polo pony on Kenny's chest. She didn't notice as a
determined mother, clearly flouting the Patrons Only rule, maneuvered
a stroller to the door of the tiny restroom, no burritos on her
agenda. She continued to stand in place while busboys mumbled
apologies each time their trays bumped her, and waiters on their
busy peppering missions brushed giant pepper mills against her like,
well, yes, like erections.
And what was going on in Lauren's mind, that slim tidy Filofax?
This particular summer, 'safe sex,' which had been hovering
darkly on the horizon, was beginning to enter the lexicon. Was Lauren
doing a quick risk analysis? Checking her gold watch? Or could
it be she was skipping pages, flipping ahead to the plink plink plink
of cheap plastic buttons popping off a white dacron chef's shirt, to
the giddy surrender of dry-clean-only garments to grease and spatters
like an action painting, to the snail-trail of Estee Lauder lipstick
down and then across and then down a dry dark torso, to die smearing
of spicy sauces on tangled limbs, some big and muscular, others
pale and perfumed, while on the stove die mole rose and swelled
and eventually boiled over?
In truth, Lauren had always found black-on-white an alluring
motif, though to date her most daring experience of it had been a
pair of handmade Belgian shoes. But Lauren was in a skippingahead
mode today. She was already on the gridded rubber mat at
her feet, her flesh and Winston's slowly turning to Belgian waffles,
sizzling with heat and pain. She imagined him pinpointing, and then
pinpricking, whole networks of nerves that busy, squash-playing
Kenny had merely skimmed.
Finally, Lauren's gaze ventured shyly up to Winston's face, and
she found it smiling down at her. It seemed full of understanding
of what it meant to be Lauren. She saw kindness. She saw indulgence.
From hidden speakers, the Supremes were singing about a
love child, different from the rest.
And then Winston opened his mouth to speak. She halfexpected
him to say "Lauren, Lauren, Lauren, what are we going to
do with you?" in a way that suggested he knew exactly. She was
half-ready to be swept off her strappy sandals.
What he said instead was this: "Ladies' room free," gesturing
behind her, still smiling. His voice was as tempting as tropical oils,
and as dangerous to the heart. Even after she decoded these mysterious
words, Lauren continued to stand in wait.
Winston broke off a sprig of cilantro and, with a flourish,
handed it to her. Always the bride, Lauren held it in her two hands
in front of her and returned his smile.
And then Winston picked up his wooden spoon, used it to
wave goodbye, and ever so gently kicked the kitchen door shut.
Enid herself was a lover of many things, the more colorful the better.
In spirit (if not in physical form, for Enid was quite svelte for
an almost-mother-in-law), she was what they were calling in the personal
ads 'Rubenesque.' She loved to shop, of course, and she loved
her Hermes scarves with their little patrician patterns of horse bits.
But just this particular morning she had also fallen in love with the
hydrangea bushes in front of the small houses near the train station,
and the way they exploded each summer like balls of tutti-frutti
Italian ices. In the city she had marked with fascination the irridescence
of motor oil in the charcoal gray of the pavement, and the
aplomb of a young woman with a perfectly shaved head. She even
saw a certain beauty in the magenta-and-mint-green rainbow on the
double chins of passing pigeons. Enid would have happily carried
stale bread for them in a baggie in her big summer purse, had she
not also loved the mantle of suburban homeowner; like all good
mothers, she had taken Kenny to see "Mary Poppins" as a child and
retained a strong if subconscious image of the toothless bird lady.
Still, Enid loved strays of all kinds, longed to bring them home
for taming or for stripping and refinishing, and for this reason,

when she looked up and saw the baker gazing directly at her—this
sweaty young baker with curly, uncombed black hair and beard,
threadbare t-shirt that gave a window onto the curly black chest
hairs beneath, narrow little hips of the sort Levi's were made for,
and well-worn yellow work boots—she began to quicken and
quiver. She watched as he adjusted the tray of loaves balanced on
his shoulder, or rather, she watched the shimmy of his compact
hips and the heaving of his competent shoulders and the split-second
flight of his boots from the pavement. And when he'd accomplished
this performance, she couldn't help herself—her approval
had developed such velocity that she had to applaud.
And what of her husband, Gary the provider? Yes, Enid loved
her Gary, too. He was many things to her (although neither a heaver
nor a shimmier), and if she tried, she could barely summon to mind
the first time she saw him, in the proverbial mail room of her
father's company, when even he had worn the by-the-bootstraps
look of a stray about him, when even he had been narrow-hipped.
(Their progeny, tanned, yellow-tied Kenny, alas, carried no trace of
the hungry look, but that was Enid's oxymoron: how can one produce
a stray from one's own loins?)
In response to Enid's applause, the baker bent his knees in a
shallow bow.
Inspired, Enid ventured further: "Do you do wedding cakes?"
"Don't tell me you're getting married," said the baker in mock
horror.
He looked on approvingly as Enid's cheeks turned a bright and
becoming pink, and he thought of one of the tasks he loved most
about both baking and painting: slowly adding red to white—be it
food-coloring to a bowl of buttercream or a dab of oil paint to a
white palette—and stirring to the point of fusion.
"Those are beautiful. . ." Enid began, gesturing toward the
loaves, but then, moving her gaze toward the baker himself, she was
faced with such an array of beautiful young parts that she didn't
know how to single one out.
"I have a catalog in the back of the van," said the baker in a
friendly, salesman-like way.
Giddily, Enid contemplated this invitation, brimming with so
many of her favorite things all at once. As the baker set down his
loaves and reached out a hand to help her up, her blood redoubled
its already swift, looping course from her heart to her extremities
and back. She followed the progress of this hand as it parted the
thick air, gathering size and detail and momentum. She noted the
handsome, earthy color scheme of tan trimmed with little black
hairs. She was startled momentarily by a nearby siren, and when she
looked back at the hand, the fingers appeared to her as a whole family
of little baker dolls, slim and strong and tapered, beckoning.
The City kept admirable traffic statistics on the daily fatal and
near-fatal collisions of the public, but what of the intersection of
strangers on a steamy summer afternoon? Who recorded the
chance encounter of the girl counselor from the Y as she parted
her picnic-bound charges to let pass a boy counselor and his
rec-center soccer team? The businessman up the block just now
giving perfect directions to the lost Scandinavian tourist in search
of a restaurant called Nirvana? And who was to say that the pair
of squirrels looking this way and that as they darted up a sycamore
across the street in the park hadn't left behind a family apiece, in
different trees altogether?
The baker's hand was now a mere arm's length from Enid. Her
small sweaty hands still rested on her lap as she sat on her step
under the Ethical Culture credo. Enid had never been in the back
of a van that she could recall. It had been a long time since she had
picked out a wedding cake. So when she blocked out a quick bed
scene, she had to use her own props: the big bed in her master bedroom
with its matching peach-colored duvet cover and pillow
shams. But when she added the players, this is how it came out: herself
and Gary in the bed and the baker curled up in the corner panting
like a black Lab. She tried again. Still Gary remained in place, his
hand—as decisive in its own way as the baker's and yet as soft and
sweet as marshmallows—resting in the valley of her waist. And the
baker? This time the baker turned up in the terrarium on the dresser,
one of the parade of stray creatures Kenny had brought home as
pets over the years, forgotten to feed, and left to Enid to love.
When the baker's hand finally closed around Enid's, his calluses
on her soft palm registered with the power of a kiss and a betrayal.

54
Could it be that the baker sensed a slight shift in the balance of
Enid's weight? A change in the pink of her cheeks? Had it turned
perceptibly from a shade of desire to one of cordial regret? In any
case, he knew that this once-laughing woman, who sat now on the
stoop as still and passive as a drapery study, would not accompany
him into the back of his van (which, in addition to another load of
semolina, happened to be fitted with a futon.)
Instead, he did the decent thing. He pulled a business card from
his back pocket and handed it to her.
"If you really need a wedding cake, give me a call," he said,
patting her on the arm with his other hand. "I'd be happy to talk
to you."
Enid watched him pick up his loaves and walk away. In a
moment his narrow hips were swallowed up by the gilded lobby of
a nearby apartment house. And as she sighed, she released an ache
of mingled regret and relief into the already overburdened air. She
looked down wistfully at his card, which read "Over the River
Bakery." Had the city yet been rent asunder by the 718 area code?
In any case, the address above the phone number said Long Island
City, a name Enid knew instincdvely was on the far side of a river
she would not cross.
She enclosed the card in her shaking hand and returned to her
station: sitting on her step, waiting for the woman her only son had
chosen for his bride. And when, a few minutes later, Lauren came
rushing up, clutching something green and wilted in her hand and
wearing an expression even more put-upon than usual, Enid
embraced her like a stray.
—PAMELA A. MOSES
A Very Small Woman
AT EIGHT-THIRTY, one half hour before her shop opened for
customers, Abigail arranged the cases. Six trays of large barrettes
and combs went in cases on the left; smaller barrettes, sold in pairs,
lined the cases on the right. On the counter in the back, cloth headbands
and hair ties wrapped around cylindrical stands of faux velvet.
The headbands and hair ties did not need adjusting; these
remained out overnight. It was the barrettes that had to be reorganized.
Each evening before she locked up, Abigail stacked the trays
of barrettes on shelves in the supply room. They would, in all probability,
have been secure left out in the glass cases, but she did not
like the idea of anything showing through the front window after
dark. Not that there were any items of real value in the shop. Most
of the barrettes were tortoiseshell, others enamel or cloisonne,
painted with flowers or tiny singing birds. Many of the combs were
tortoiseshell as well, some of them scalloped with slim ridges. The
boutiques on Madison Avenue, Abigail knew, carried very expensive
accessories: sterling silver barrettes, combs of onyx and turquoise,
silk hair ribbons imported from India and Turkey and Paris. One
store in particular, she had seen, sold only items made of solid gold.
And in its central display case, balanced upon a broad crystal disc,
revolved a braided gold headband studded with chips of ruby. But
Abigail's store had none of these things. Nothing in her shop cost
more than twenty-five or maybe thirty dollars.
Arranging the cases each morning meant straightening any barrettes
or combs that had shifted out of their rows. Or sometimes a

shopper from the previous day had handled a piece and accidentally
returned it to the wrong spot. Abigail made sure that all of the
cloisonne barrettes were aligned, the heart-shaped barrettes together,
to the right of the oval ones, and the tortoise shell combs in
pairs. If a delivery had come in, room had to be made in the cases
for the new arrivals.
Abigail was forty-two, and the shop was older than she was. It
had been her mother's shop first. Every day when Abigail was a girl
she had watched from behind the counter as the customers who
came in asked her mother to take one set of barrettes out of the
cases and then another. When they did not like the barrettes they
had seen, Abigail would watch her mother bend down, unlocking
the cases, and from hunching knees pass up a pair of special new
barrettes which had come in.
While her mother had customers in the store Abigail never
spoke. She was so silent and her movements so meager that shoppers
usually came and left without the slightest awareness of her
presence. It was only a few of the regular patrons who took any
notice of her. As Abigail sat on the wooden chair against the wall,
arranging a tray of small barrettes upon her lap, she would find
them peering at her from the sides of their eyes. When she drew her
forefinger along the backs of all the barrettes in the cases—from
top to bottom, from row to row, checking that each clasp was
closed, making sure no clip had slipped out of its column into the
dividing black velveteen, she would hear the women whispering to
her mother. "She's a strange thing, isn't she?" "Isn't it odd," they
would murmur, "the way she concentrates on those little boxes of
barrettes. Other girls her age are shouting and playing and running
about." Sometimes the ladies would bring their daughters with
them. They were loud-laughing, skipping girls with hair still tousled
from the frolicking games they had left behind. Their mothers
would buy them shiny barrettes or pretty combs before they went
to the theatre or parties or evening dances.
If Abigail paused for a moment in fixing the cases—to look
after the girls as they galloped down the sidewalk, giggling to their
mothers, rattling their bags of new barrettes—her own mother
would push closed the door behind them. Then she would turn to
Abigail and say, in the even pressing of her voice which always quieted
any jangling emotions in Abigail's heart, "They're gone, they're
gone. Daughter, they're gone." And she would shake her head and
hold Abigail in her pitying eyes. "Dear, dear, don't wish to be something
you're not. Some people are made for the grand things in life.
And others of us, Abigail, would only crumble beneath them. We
are made to appreciate the details, to care for what is small. And
you, Abigail, so timid and so cautious—who are most comfortable
attending to these barrettes and combs—you are made for what is
small." And her mother would smile a litde smile and curl her hands
into a pouch.
When Abigail was a bit older, she was able to clean the barrettes
and combs as well as straighten them. With a string of cotton floss
she would thread through the thin teeth of the combs and between
the intricate clasps of the barrettes. Some of the frequent customers
now knew Abigail's name and would greet her when they
entered.
One afternoon the orange-haired woman with the fox terrier
who dropped by the shop every Friday walked straight to the chair
where Abigail was sitting, adjusting a tray of black combs. She
leaned so close that Abigail could smell the flowers of her perfume
and see the shimmers of silver in her red lipstick. "Hello, Abigail,"
she said. "I have a surprise for you." And reaching into a crinkling
bag piled with ribboned boxes, she slid out a silky scarf woven with
colors gayer and brighter than Abigail had ever seen. Purples, yellows,
and greens waltzed and sparked as she dropped the gauzy
material into Abigail's hands. "It's a present," the lady whispered. "I
hope you like it."
After the woman had left and Abigail's mother had disappeared
into the back room to stack some boxes, Abigail gently lifted the
satiny scarf to her neck. It had a slippery softness like nothing she
had ever felt, and it tingled on her skin until her spine shivered.
When she dared to glance down, the colors seemed to glow like a
wreath of light upon her dress.
"Abigail!" came her mother's wheezing gasp from the doorway
of the storage room. "What is that around your neck!" With her
hand stopped against her mouth, she walked toward Abigail. Her

head twisted from side to side in small shakes of dismay. Taking her
daughter's wrist, she led her to the countertop mirror and held it
close.
"Look! Look at this glittery scarf—how silly it looks on you!
This is the kind of scarf they sell in those luxury shops on Madison
Avenue. Dear daughter, how it overpowers you. Someone like
you, made for what is quiet, for what is small. Don't lose your head
dreaming of what you will never be. See how it makes your shoulders
slump. You can't carry it."
And Abigail did see how her shoulders sloped down and how
the bold colors made her cheeks chalk-white, and she dropped her
eyes in shame at her foolishness.
When Abigail was an adult she spent from morning until
evening in the store.
"That's good work, Abigail. That's very good work," her mother
would say after the last customer had left the store. And Abigail
would look about die shop at die tended lines of accessories, evenly
laid upon dieir padding, and at die quiet brown of the light upon die
cases and die carpet, and stillness would blanket her with the sense
that everything was as it should be.
But then one winter Abigail's mother became ill, so ill that she
could not leave her bed. Abigail would sit silently at the bedside
each night and touch a cool handkerchief to her mother's forehead,
cautiously dabbing the perspiration at the edges of her hairline.
"Such small hands, such careful little hands," her mother would
murmur. And then she would nod her head weakly and drift into
sleep.
When she died, Abigail was all alone. She opened the shop by
herself each morning and closed it by herself each night. She
changed almost nothing in die store's appearance, just making the
simple and necessary repairs. When the pale blue paint around the
windowsill began to peel and speckle the floor, Abigail gave the
frame a new coat with the half tin of matching blue she found in
the storage room. Then, when the adjusting knob on the heater
broke and Abigail could not turn it, a man from the heating company
came with his clanking box of tools and fixed it. But there was
no need to replace the white and gray wallpaper, though it buckled
at the seams. And though the frosted lamp which hung from the
ceiling had a Y-shaped crack running the side of the shade, it still
provided sufficient light. So Abigail made only the most minor
adjustments, merely ordering a few new styles of barrettes, occasionally
updating a design if an old line of clips had been discontinued.
Abigail lived where she and her mother had always lived, in the
apartment above the shop. Within the building was a staircase
which allowed her to go from the apartment to the store without
needing to step outside. Often, days would go by without her
speaking to anyone but the patrons who passed in and out of the
store. And it was possible to go week after week without venturing
beyond the boundaries of her block. Ganiaris's Market across the
street sold bread and the canned soup she always ate, and it had an
aisle with the cleansers she used to keep her shop scrubbed. Two
doors down was the Korean laundromat, and at the end of the
block, Rita's Stationery sold individual envelopes and stamps,
which Abigail purchased at the end of each month for the six bills
that came.
Sometimes, when her store was empty of customers, Abigail
would stand against the doorway and watch the women streaming
by who shopped all over the city—balancing paper bags from westside
stores with loaves of bread sprinkled with herbs and twisted in
great braids, lush flowers covered in tissue paper from downtown
florists, shoe boxes and dresses on hangers from Fifth Avenue
shops. If they were alone, they walked quickly, on their way, Abigail
could tell, to appointments, meetings, or luncheons. If they were
with friends, they laughed and traded packages and chattered about
their purchases. Sometimes Abigail would open the door a pinch
and try to smell the rich cheeses, or the sugary cakes and pies from
the costly patisseries, or the honey scent of plump crusted rolls.
And she couldn't help wondering how the daintily tied boxes of
cakes or thick bags of bread would feel tucked against her side, and
how it would be to inhale apple, plum, or sweet poppyseed tarts for
block after block after block. But such imaginings were nonsense—
these elegances were for other people, not for her. Her income was

6o
too modest for such extravagances.
Once every two months a shipment of lacquered barrettes
came to the store. On Friday morning, Abigail shifted the rows in
the small-barrette display case, fitting them together more compactly
to create an empty strip of black velveteen. Each set of the
lacquered barrettes had been folded in a square of white tissue
paper, and their decorated metal faces had stayed cool in the wrappings.
Abigail was happy with the new arrivals. The surfaces of the
clips had been hand painted, each pair unique: one cobalt, crisscrossed
with cream and dark green lines; another soft red, bordered
with leaves of white ivy. There was a silvery pair with overlapping
geometric designs and a beautiful pale yellow set with miniature
Chinese fishing boats floating upon rivers as narrow as strings, so
fine and so detailed that Abigail marveled at the human hand that
had worked with such patience and control. The barrettes shone
when laid against the deep black lining of the display case, and Abigail
sighed as she thought of how her mother would have liked
these delicate clips.
Then in the winter, early one morning, a man in a pinstriped
suit brushed in the door of the shop, greeting Abigail in a foreign
accent as he poised great lucite cases of barrettes. One tray held all
brass barrettes with amber stones, barrettes she had seen through
the windows of expensive boutiques. The pure yellow of the amber
sprayed like sunshowers upon the lucite tray. In the other tray were
sea pearl clips tipped with bone and circular barrettes of onyx
and—oh—the most beautiful silver comb shaped like a gliding butterfly
with a perfect topaz twinkling in each of its outstretched
wings. Abigail's hand hovered over it. She traced her finger along
the sleek silver outline, then bent her face down close. It was so
magnificent that her breath quickened and dampened the butterfly's
glistening wings.
"Exquisite, isn't it," said the man in the pinstriped suit. "A real
eye-catcher. And look at this." With a flourish of his wrist, he
spread a glossy catalogue upon the countertop. "Order the butterfly
comb or some other item and you qualify for the grand prize.
Quite a prize too!" With the tip of his pen he jabbed at the center
of the catalogue. "A full tray of our most extraordinary accessories,
to be delivered to your store every week!" He grinned at her as he
tore a sheet of paper from his pink pad and uncapped his pen. But
Abigail shook her head. It seemed he had her confused with owners
of shops like the ones on Madison Avenue. She couldn't possibly buy
the butterfly comb, though it would be so lovely to set against the
black lining of her comb case. And to admire each time she passed
by, and to watch how the customers would sigh at its splendor. But
the combs she sold were smaller and her accessories less expensive.
Besides, she had already ordered all that was needed for the month.
It would have been a foolish purchase, and Abigail shook her head
once more. But the man lingered before closing the trays. And then
Abigail did something unusual. In the back corner of the tray on
the left was a barrette of white plaster. One could almost miss the
clip—it did not glitter or gleam as did the other combs and barrettes
in the trays. A thin row of white plaster rosebuds. The pretty rose
petals folded over one another, and between the flowers wound a
narrow, pale pink ribbon.
"I certainly don't need it. I certainly don't need it," Abigail said
to herself as her eyes followed the spiraling pink ribbon. And anyway,
it didn't match the other items she sold, did it? Surely it would
stand out with its curving petals and its strips of satiny pink. But
before Abigail realized what she had done, she was pointing to the
rosebud barrette.
"I'll take that," she said, the words tumbling out in a hoarse
whisper.
"It's yours!" boomed the man, scribbling upon the pink paper.
"Nothing else? Are you sure?" Abigail nodded and the man plucked
the clip from the tray and set it with a click upon the counter.
A week later it was, or perhaps not even a week, that the mysterious
box arrived, wrapped in green paper plush.
"How strange," thought Abigail. This was not one of her
usual deliveries; she would have recognized the packaging. Carefully,
carefully, so as not to fray the edges, she unfolded the green
wrapping. Inside lay a wooden box with such a pretty lid—the
grain swirling like marble. Abigail opened her palm upon the surface.
In the polished wood there were sleek indentations—she
could feel them beneath her fingers. She unhinged the top, and

62
with a sudden clattering it sprung back. Ob my! Oh my! What was
this? Brilliant colors of every hue, blinking, leaping so that Abigail's
hands shook. Combs and barrettes and more combs, the
most splendid Abigail had ever seen. One set of combs just like
the butterflies the man in the pinstriped suit had shown her. But
these—even more majestic. Powerful wings of gold and, swirling
through the gold, bands of deep purple amethyst. Beside the butterflies,
two gilded barrettes shaped like leopards, their jaws yawning
wide and their tongues the brightest red—garnet or, perhaps,
ruby. There were tropical bird barrettes with slender necks of
mother-of-pearl. And giant combs of arching dolphins, their bodies
enameled ocean blue and their eyes—Abigail gasped—circular
chips of diamond.
To whom did all of this belong? Clearly this was a mistake. Perhaps
a delivery for some glamorous boutique had been brought to
her shop accidentally. And then Abigail saw the card attached to the
inside of the lid. 'Congratulations!' and at the bottom of the card
the name of the company that the man in the pinstriped suit had
mentioned. The prize? But this was impossible. All she had purchased
was the rosebud barrette—the very smallest—yes, the smallest,
the least significant item in the display. She would call to let
them know. Certainly this box was not for her. But when she telephoned
the number printed on the card, they insisted the prize was
hers. So she had to explain it all again—all she had bought was a
single barrette of plaster.
"The prize is yours, ma'am," said die man on the other end of
the line. "A shipment of our finest accessories delivered to your
store each week. Enjoy!" And he hung up.
Abigail stared at the gaping box on the countertop. Even in the
filmy light of the overhead lamp its contents sparked and flickered.
Where would she keep these, and—oh—they were all so beautiful.
How could she even touch them? Her fingers trembled as she
brushed just the very edges of the luminous combs and clips. In the
far case on the right? Is that where they would go? There was some
space where the cloisonne singing birds had been—die last of
those had been sold the previous week.
How massive the prize barrettes and combs appeared upon the
black velveteen of the case. When Abigail sat across the room, in
the wooden chair against die wall, adjusting a tray of the oblong
tortoiseshell clips, she could not shift her eyes without that unfamiliar
glowing, shafts of dazzling colored light, catching at her.
"Am I imagining things?" Abigail wondered, glancing around
the shop. Anyway, perhaps the customers wouldn't even notice the
new accessories at the far end of the last case.
But they did notice them. The first customer that day was a
short-haired woman with a checkered scarf and a tweed coat.
"Oh!" she said, after she passed by the white scalloped combs
and the rectangular enamel clips and came to the gold and amethyst
butterflies, the leopards and birds, and the dolphins with diamond
eyes. "Oh! Oh! Oh!" She stopped and bent her head close to the
glass case. "These are extraordinary!" She shook her head. "Truly
extraordinary."
"I shouldn't spend the money," she said without raising her
eyes, "but they are simply too beautiful. Now how in the world will
I choose which to get!" And she stared and stared until deciding
upon a pair of swan barrettes made entirely of coral, with shiny
onyx eyes.
As she turned to leave, she said to Abigail, "Why don't you
put these combs and barrettes in the front of your store, in the
window? They are so exquisite—you should put them where
everyone will see them."
It was, she supposed, what other shop owners would do.
"Maybe I'll try it, just for today," Abigail said to herself, "just for
this afternoon." Anyway, it didn't seem to her diat passersby
glanced toward the window very often. Probably it would make no
difference. So if she didn't like them in the front of the store, she
would move them back.
After dusting the brown felt of die window shelf, Abigail set
the pairs of prize barrettes and combs at equal distances around the
border of the material. Then she returned to the tray of oblong tortoiseshell
clips. She had not finished arranging them when the shop
door swung open and three women swept in, one wearing a mink
coat and matching mink muff.
"My dear," said the woman in mink, "where did you get those

gorgeous barrettes! And those combs! They are just fabulous. Those
dolphins and the amethyst butterflies—I've never seen anything like
them!"
The three women huddled around the window display. They
asked Abigail to show them every pair of the new combs and barrettes,
and each time she lifted a set for them to see, they would
pucker their lips and coo. Each of them bad to have a pair, they told
her, giggling. "How can we resist?"
"You know," the woman with the mink muff said as Abigail
folded the gold and amethyst butterflies in two sheets of white tissue
paper, "I do almost all of my shopping up on Madison. I don't
believe I've been in your store before. Do you always have such
beautiful accessories?"
Abigail shook her head tiien nodded. "I'm getting another
delivery on Tuesday," she whispered. "Yes, next Tuesday, I think."
"Well then, we'll see you again!"
Abigail sat once more upon the wooden chair, taking the tray
of tortoiseshell clips into her lap. A woman walking by carrying
bags overflowing with wrapped boxes stopped as she caught sight
of the display. Her eyebrows arched and she leaned her forehead
against the glass. "She will want to buy a set too," thought Abigail.
And her fingers began to shiver so that she could not thread the
cotton floss between the clasps of die clips.
And more and more passersby began to stop at her window,
and to come into the store, so that often it seemed the door never
ceased swinging. Abigail sold every pair of the prize pieces before
the end of the week. And again the next Tuesday when a shipment
arrived—starfish combs dotted with flecks of yellowish tourmaline,
brushed-gold barrettes shaped as giant bows, and silk headbands
woven with beads of turquoise and agate and even opal—die new
deliveries disappeared by the following Friday. The store had never
been so crowded, and the customers began to chatter so to Abigail
that she would get dizzy.
On Friday evening, after all of the shoppers had left, she wearily
pulled the window shades. She stood upon the old, thinning mat
near the door and looked around. The light in the shop was very
dim now, and though the new barrettes and combs still shimmered,
shadows shrouded the walls and floor and ceiling. As Abigail tilted
her tired head toward her shoulder, she began to wonder if the
white and gray wallpaper was becoming a bit dingy, and she
thought, as she looked, that the edges seemed somewhat tattered.
Then she saw that die patched blue paint around the window was
faded and splotchy. These were things she had never noticed before.
So on Saturday morning she placed in the door of her shop a
sign which said 'Closed until Noon.' Then she put on her coat. And
she took down from the back closet shelf her mother's maroon hat,
worn only twice before, which was kept in a round cardboard box
to protect it from dust. Though it was December, the bright sunshine
hurt her eyes. Abigail passed the Korean laundromat. When
she got to the end of the block, she looked in the window of Rita's
Stationery to see if anyone watched her turning the corner. One
block west to Park Avenue. Then across Park, another block to
Madison.
The white stone and salmon brick buildings on the far side of
the street glistened so brilliantly that Abigail had to lift a hand to her
brow. She stood for a moment on the corner before deciding which
direction to take. Watching the zig-zagging pedestrians, she decided
to walk north—that was where most of the women carrying shopping
bags seemed to be headed. As soon as she took the corner, she
was swept into the stream of swishing coats and clipping heels and
jostling parcels. Abigail's heart thudded. After five or six blocks, she
came to an accessory store, one with a brass-trimmed door and a
great arched window. Abigail cupped her hands around her eyes. It
was the walls she noticed first. Oh, how they were papered, in the
richest, the most beautiful floral—deep red peonies, were they?—
upon a royal blue background and intertwining stems and leaves of
forest green. And the lights! Curving from the walls, shiny brass
sconces. Flame-shaped bulbs surrounded by milky glass. Behind the
counter, with one hand resting on her hip, was a woman in a silky
white blouse, her blonde hair wrapped into a twist. "She must be
the owner," thought Abigail. And as die woman walked to another
counter to help a customer, Abigail watched her footsteps—dainty,
dainty footsteps, one shoe angling ever so delicately in front of the
other.

66
She walked a few more blocks and then another storefront
caught her eye. The name of the shop stretched in splendid, flamboyant
script across the door. But what took her breath away were
the draperies—the billowing draperies standing like soft, majestic
columns at either end of the window display. Bold, woven patterns
of more colors than she could count. Colors overlapping and
streaking into one another, so that staring too closely almost made
her legs give way. Draperies! Why, her store had only window
shades, and even her apartment windows were covered only with
curtains of simple white gauze. On the way back to her shop there
was a wallpaper store. Abigail had never been in a wallpaper store
before, and she watched the customers who entered. Inside were
shelf after shelf of books. The customers took down the books
and flipped through the pages. Sometimes they carried them to a
woman standing at the counter. After a while, the store emptied of
shoppers, and Abigail decided to go in. Walking to the shelves, as
she had seen the other customers do, she removed one of the large
books. Inside were broad-striped papers and patterns of intricate
designs—clustered fruits, bouquets of marigolds, trellises covered
with honeysuckle—and papers that were not papers at all but
downy to the touch and made of cloth. And then in a book on the
second shelf, she opened to the most dazzling page—beautiful
white lilies on a royal blue background. It was almost like the
red-peony paper she had seen in the first accessory store. And certainly
as lovely. As she gazed at the elegant wallpaper, the woman
who had been standing at the counter approached.
"Take a sample with you," she smiled, folding a sheet of the
white lily paper into Abigail's bag. I'll give you the style name and
you just call me with the number of rolls you'll need."
When Abigail returned to her own store, she removed the sign
from her door. Then, holding up the sample of white lily wallpaper,
she turned from one wall to the next to the next. She could almost
picture how the walls would look covered in the paper. And how
the shop would sparkle with shiny brass sconces. Partially closing
her eyes, she could see shimmering, flowing draperies framing her
window display, and herself dressed in a silky, white blouse—her
breath caught, and her faint pulse beat rapidly in her throat.
When Abigail had entered the shop, she had placed beside the
door a rectangular package. The shipment of prize barrettes had
arrived early this week. Carrying the delivery to the counter, she
creased back the plush green wrapping and lifted the lid of the
wooden box. This time there were jeweled flowers and clips of
twining vines and turtledove barrettes with chips of sapphire in
their tails. And in the center, another set of the gold butterflies with
ribbons of rich purple amethyst. Somehow the purple stones
seemed to radiate with even more power, more depth in their glowing
than the pair which had come before. Staring at the butterflies,
at the swirls of gold and violet, Abigail tried to imagine just how the
women felt who wore such ornaments. And she could not help
wondering how the majestic butterflies would feel in her own hair.
She shook her head, yet her hand hovered over the combs. In her
palms the combs were heavy and slippery, like polished glass. How
cool and solid they felt as she slid the combs into her hair, fastening
them in place. Solid, solid as a crown might feel upon her brow.
Never, no, never before had she felt quite so elegant, never before
had she felt quite so grand. And taking two steps—dainty, dainty
footsteps, like the ones she had seen the woman in the Madison
Avenue shop take—she crossed to the countertop mirror.
So carried away by her imaginings was Abigail that she almost
did not hear the tall, sleek-haired woman and her young daughter
enter the shop.
"Hello! Hello there," said the woman, and Abigail's elbow
jerked at the sudden voice.
The woman and her daughter were holding hands. Their similar
mouths curved perfectly at the corners into half smiles. And
oh, what beautiful hair the girl had—beautiful thick, brown curls,
spiraling in shiny waves to the center of her back.
"I'm looking for some special clips for my daughter," the
woman said, glancing about at the cases, glancing at Abigail. And
then, pausing, she lifted a gloved finger to her smiling lips.
"Don't I remember you? From years ago?" She laughed suddenly.
"When I used to come here with my mother. And there was
a woman—was it jour mother—who ran the shop then? Oh, yes, I
remember she was always so busy. Always on her knees, fetching

68
barrettes from the bottom shelves of the cases. She had a silent little
girl who sat in a chair. Was that you! God, how funny that I
remember it all! Is she still here? Your mother—is she still around?"
Abigail's throat choked so that she could not speak. All she
could do was shake her head, and as she did, the giant butterfly
combs knocked clumsily against her temples.
"Oh, I'm sorry," said the woman and stroked her daughter's
curls.
Abigail shook her head again and stepped toward one of the
cases, thinking that perhaps she would show the woman the
cream-colored oval clips, but her foot caught on the edge of the old
worn mat. And arms outspread, she pitched, almost tumbling to the
floor before she grabbed at the corner of one of the cases to steady
herself.
"My goodness! What happened?" asked the woman, and she
and her daughter, with their mouths still perfectly curved, stared at
Abigail. The little girl peered up at her mother, then, fluttering her
lashes, looked down at the collar of her coat. Abigail thought, yes,
she was quite sure she could see the girl's curved mourn arcing into
a smile. And turning to her reflection in the countertop mirror, she
saw what the girl had seen. Her hair drooped in limp strands, and
from the ends, having slipped from her head, hung the two giant
butterflies. They swung wildly, dragging down her hair, so that her
face almost disappeared behind diem. And as Abigail stared at her
reflection, tears as tiny as pinheads crept to the corners of her eyes.
After the woman and her daughter were gone, Abigail fumbled
with the butterflies still tangled in her hair. Her cheeks, her neck, her
brow blushed red as she came face to face with her reflection.
What, oh what had she been diinking! "What a fool I am! What a
fool!" she said to herself. How ridiculous she looked with the great
butterfly wings outstretched. And how scrawny the giant wings
made her neck appear. And how stringy her hair against the vivid
ribbons of gold and purple. Abigail looked at her thin lips. She
looked into her own watery, pale eyes. Then, taking the gold and
amethyst butterfly combs from her hair, she wrapped them in tissue
paper and placed them back into the center of the box from
which they had come. Then she walked to the window display and
she picked up the last of the prize barrettes—two gilded leopard
barrettes with ruby tongues, a set of mother-of-pearl combs shaped
like snow geese, and three pairs of tulip clips tipped with opal. She
folded each piece in a square sheet of tissue, and when all of the
prize barrettes and combs had been put away, she lowered the box's
wooden lid.
It wasn't a very long walk—not as long as the one she had taken
that morning. A few blocks uptown and two blocks east. The
woman behind the counter at the post office seemed nice, Abigail
thought. She simply took the parcel—the box re-wrapped in its
green material and placed inside its re-taped carton—and smiled.
She could not see the note which Abigail had glued to the inside of
the package.
'I find that I can no longer use these prize barrettes
and combs. Thank you kindly for discontinuing any
furuher deliveries.'
After the rush hour commute, Lexington Avenue hummed in a
steady rhythm. Abigail heard the number ninety-eight bus lumber
to its stop at the end of the block. Mr. Ganiaris, who owned the
Greek market across the street, was cranking down his metal
storefront grating. The moon had come up. A grayish half-moon.
It was visible from the left corner of the shop by the window with
the brown-felt sill. And when Abigail turned, she saw how the
moon streaks made a quilt of light upon the glass cases. The silent
beams brushed so carefully over the narrow rows of accessories
that Abigail could not help sighing a tiny breath of contentment.
The tray of oblong tortoiseshell clips still lay upon the wooden
chair. Coiling the thread of cotton floss beside it, Abigail placed the
tray under the counter. Before she closed the shop for the night, the
barrette and comb cases had to be straightened and stacked. Abigail
traced the edge of her palm along the strips of velveteen which
divided the columns of combs. Then she checked the barrettes. If
she kept her wrist almost motionless, she could drop the tip of her

forefinger into the clasp of each clip to be sure that it was latched.
"It is fortunate that my fingers are so small," she thought to herself,
looking down at her hands, "so that they can fit between the barrettes
without upsetting the rows." In the second case of small barrettes,
two rectangles of yellow made her pause. It was a pair of the
lacquered barrettes—the ones with the miniature Chinese fishing
boats. It seemed someone had put them in the row with the
cream-colored ovals. She lifted them into her palm and replaced
them in their proper setting, between the silvery clips with the
geometric designs and the soft red pair bordered with white ivy.
-DEBRA LEVY
Museum Pieces
IF YOU ASK ME, the babies are the thing to see. Sure, the vintage WWII
German submarine is a rare treat—and it's partially submerged, so
that looking out the portholes it's real water you're seeing! But the
sub isn't so great if you suffer from claustrophobia, as I do.
Of course, there's the walk-out aquarium, offering a spectacular
underwater view of Lake Michigan. The star of the show is a
great white who likes to surprise his leering visitors—he charges
like a missile, then swerves before ramming the Plexiglas partition.
But if you ask me, he's nothing compared to those little jaundiced
wonders.
No, for my money the babies are tops, and if you go to the
museum any day but the weekend—when all the yappy, snot-nosed
kids come to visit—you can gaze at these miniature miracles for as
long as you'd like. You can even count their teeny fingers and toes
till your heart's content!
The other day I went to see the sweet, forever-dreaming
babies. It was Monday, so I got in free. Though I would have paid
full price, that's how much it meant to me. I hurried in, bypassing
the Hall of Electricity, the Exploration of Space Exhibit, the Real
Working Coal Mine. I found my way to the wall where they were
mounted and ran my finger over the cool glass. It was early, the
museum had opened only a few minutes before. The chambers
were still fingerprint- and smudge-free. There was a whole series
of babies, a regular gallery, and I went to the last one first; I mean,
the one with legs and arms and ears in place. He had a smirk on

his golden face, as if to say, I told you so. He squeezed his hands
into tiny fists and floated, suspended in a sea of formaldehyde.
His eyes were closed, naturally.
I started with him because he was the one that mattered—
although that baby with the gills for lungs always caught my eye.
The dot of conception, no bigger than the head of a needle, the
first 'baby'—if you can call it that—I always breezed right past.
Only once did I start at the beginning, and that was when I
didn't go alone. We moved right along, pointing to this one and
that. "See how it looks at six weeks, eight weeks, fifteen weeks
old!" I said, sounding like a well-trained docent. I looked lovingly
at the babies; the babies looked lovingly back.
I read each plaque aloud.
"At sixteen weeks," I said. But only one of us was listening.
"What's the point?" he said, and I said, Education. The point was
Education. Where else could we see what our lives would have
looked like, spelled out like a jigsaw puzzle?
He said, "You're crazy, you know that. Out of your fucking
mind."
I said did he know that by the end of the fourth month eyebrows
and lashes are formed?
"Shut up," he said. "For Christ's sake, shut up."
After we got home, I remembered something else I was going to
show him—my other favorite thing at the museum: the Whispering
Chamber. It's a long, dark hall. At one end is a Plexiglas wall the shape
of a praying hand, and directly opposite, thirty or forty feet away, is
its mate. In the middle of the room is nothing but dark, cool space,
the kind you don't want to leave. This is how it works. You put your
feet on the yellow footprints painted on the floor, and into that nice
big hand you whisper your secrets. The person standing next to you
can't hear a thing. Still, your secrets take flight, travel to the far end of
the darkened room, and land at the feet of a total stranger.
S P E C I A L S E C T I O N
Reinventions:
A New Look at Fairy Tales, Legends, Parables & Fables

74
—DEBORAH EDMEADES
(Self Portrait) The Artist at Home, 1995
-NEIL GAIMAN
Reflections on Myth
(with Digressions into Gardening, Comics, and Fairy Tales)
As A WRITER, and more specifically, as a writer of fiction, I deal with
myth a great deal. Always have. Probably always will.
It's not that I don't like or respect mimetic fiction; I do. But people
who make things up for a living follow our interests and our obsessions
into fiction, and mostly my interests have taken me, whether
I wanted them to or not, into the realm of myth, which is not
entirely the same as the realm of the imagination, although they
share a common border.
I remember finding a copy, as a small boy, of a paperback Tales of
the Norsemen and delighting in it as a treasure, reading it until the
binding broke and the pages flew apart like leaves. I remember the
sheer Tightness of those stories. They felt right. They felt, to my
seven-year-old mind, familiar.
"Bricks without straw are more easily made than imagination without
memories," said Lord Dunsany.
He was right, of course. Our imaginings (if they are ours) should
be based in our own lives and experiences, all our memories. But all

76
of our memories include the tales we were told as children, all the
myths, all the fairy tales, all the stories.
Without our stories we are incomplete.
The process of composting fascinates me. I am English, and share
witii many of my countrymen an amateurish fondness for, frankly,
messing around in gardens: it's not strictly gardening, rather it's the
urge that, last year, meant I got to smile proudly at the arrival of
half a dozen exotic pumpkins, each of which must have cost more
than 20 dollars to grow and each of which was manifestly inferior
to the locally grown produce. I like gardening, am proudly no good
at it, and do not mind this at all.
In gardening, die process is most of the fun, the results are secondary
(and, in my case, usually accidental).
And one learns a lot about compost: kitchen scraps and garden leftovers
and refuse diat rot down, over time, to a diick, black, clean,
nutritious dirt, teeming with life, perfect for growing things in.
Myths are compost.
They begin as religions, the most deeply held of beliefs, or as the
stories that accrete to religions as they grow.
("If he is going to keep killing people," says Joseph to Mary, speaking
of the infant Jesus in the apocryphal gospel of die Infancy, "we
are going to have to stop him going out of die house.")
And then, as the religions fall into disuse, or the stories cease to be
1 The First Gospel of the Infancy of Jesust Christ, Chapter XX v. 16: "Then said Joseph
to St. Mary, Henceforth we will not allow Him to go out of the house; for everyone
who displeases Him is killed." The host Books of the Bible (Bonanza Books, 1979)
seen as the literal truth, they become myths. And the myths compost
down to dirt, and become a fertile ground for other stories and
tales which blossom like wildflowers. Cupid and Psyche is retold
and half forgotten and remembered again and becomes Beauty and
the Beast.
Anansi the African Spider God becomes Bre'r Rabbit, whaling away
at die tar baby.
New flowers grow from the compost: bright blossoms, and alive.
Myths are obliging.
When I was writing Sandman, the story that in certain circles made
my name, I experimented with mydi continually. It was the ink that
the series was written in.
Sandman was, in many ways, an attempt to create a new mythology—
or rather, to find what it was diat I responded to in ancient pantheons
and then to try and create a fictive structure in which I could believe
as I wrote it. Something tiiat felt right, in the way that myths feel
right.
Dream, Death, Delirium, and die rest of the Endless (unworshipped,
for who would want to be worshipped in this day and age?)
were a family, like all good pandieons; each representing a different
aspect of life, each typifying a different personality.
I think, overall, die character that people responded to most was
Deatii, who I represented as a cheerful, sensible sixteen-year-old
girl—someone attractive, and fundamentally nicer, I remember my
puzzlement the first time I encountered people who professed to
believe in the characters I had created, and the feeling, half of guilt
and half of relief, when I started to get letters from readers who

had used my character Death to get through the death of a loved
one, a wife, a boyfriend, a mother, a child.
(I'm still bewildered by the people who have never read the comics
who have adopted the characters, particularly Death and Delirium,
as part of their personal iconography).
Creating a new pantheon was part of the experiment, but so was
the exploration of all other myths. (If Sandman was about one thing,
it was about the act of storytelling, and the possibly redemptive
nature of stories. But then, it's hard for a two thousand page story
to be about just one thing.)
I invented old African oral legends; I created cat myths, which cats
tell each other in the night.
In Season of Myths I decided to tackle myths head on, both to see
how they worked and how robust they were: at what point did suspension
of disbelief roll over and die. How many myths could one,
metaphorically, get into a phone booth, or get to dance on the head
of a pin?
The story was inspired loosely by something the Abbe Mugnier had
once said—that he believed that there was a Hell, because it was
church doctrine that there was a hell. He was not required to believe
that there was anyone in it. The vision of an empty Hell was one
that fascinated me.
Very well; Hell would be empty, abandoned by Lucifer (who I represented
as a fallen angel, straight out of Milton) and as prime
psychic real estate, would be wanted by various factions: I culled
some from the comics, took others from old myths—Egyptian,
Norse, Japanese—added in angels and demons and, in a final
moment of experiment I even added in some fairies, and was
astonished to find how robust the structure was; it should have
been an inedible mess, and instead (to keep the cooking metaphor)
seemed to be a pretty good gumbo. Disbelief continued to be sus-
pended and my faith in myth as something fundamentally alive
and workable was upheld.
The joy of writing Sandman was that the territory was wide-open. I
wrote it in the world of anything goes: history and geography,
superheroes and dead kings, folk-tales, houses and dreams.
Mythologies have, as I said, always fascinated me. Why we have
them. Why we need them. Whether they need us.
And comics have always dealt in myths: four-colour fantasies, which
include men in brightly coloured costumes fighting endless soap
opera battles with each other (predigested power fantasies for adolescent
males); not to mention friendly ghosts, animal people, monsters,
teenagers, aliens. Until a certain age the mythology can possess
us completely, then we grow up and leave those particular
dreams behind, for a little while or forever.
But new mythologies wait for us, here in the final moments of the
twentieth century. They abound and proliferate: urban legends of
men with hooks in lovers' lanes, hitchhikers with hairy hands and
meat cleavers, beehive hairdos crawling with vermin; serial killers
and barroom conversations; in the background our TV screens
pour disjointed images into our living rooms, feeding us old movies,
newsflashes, talk-shows, adverts; we mythologise the way we dress
and the things we say; iconic figures—rock stars and politicians,
celebrities of every shape and size; the new mythologies of magic
and science and numbers and fame.
They have their function, all the ways we try to make sense of the
world we inhabit, a world in which there are few, if any, easy
answers. Every day we attempt to understand it. And every night we
close our eyes and go to sleep, and for a few hours, quietly and
safely, we go stark staring mad.

Id
or
80
The ten volumes of Sandman were my way of talking about that.
They were my way of looking at the mythologies of the last decade
of the twentieth century; a way of talking about sex and death, fear
and belief and joy—all the things that make us dream.
We spend a third of our lives asleep, after all.
Horror and fantasy (whether in comics form or otherwise) are
often seen simply as escapist literature. Sometimes they can be—a
simple, paradoxically unimaginative literature offering quick catharsis,
a plastic dream, an easy out. But they don't have to be. When we
are lucky the fantastique offers a road-map—a guide to the territory
of the imagination, for it is the function of imaginative literature to
show us the world we know, but from a different direction.
Too often, myths are uninspected. We bring them out without looking
at what they represent, nor what they mean. Urban Legends and
the Weekly World News present us with myths in the simplest sense:
a world in which events occur according to story logic—not as they
do happen, but as they should happen.
But retelling myths is important. The act of inspecting them is
important. It is not a matter of holding a myth up as a dead thing,
desiccated and empty ("Now class, what have we learned from the
Death of Baldur?"), nor is it a matter of creating New Age self help
tomes ("The Gods Inside You! Releasing Your Inner Myth.")
Instead we have to understand that even lost and forgotten myths
are compost, in which stories grow.
What is important is to tell the stories anew, and to retell the old
stories. They are our stories, and they should be told.
I do not even begrudge the myths and the fairy stories their
bowdlerization: the purist in me may be offended by the Disney
retellings of old tales, but I am, where stories are concerned, cruelly
Darwinist: the forms of the tales that work survive, the others die
and are forgotten. It may have suited Disney's dramatic purposes to
have Sleeping Beauty prick her finger, sleep and be rescued, all in a
day, but when the tale is retold it will always be at least a hundred
years until the spell is broken—even if we have long since lost from
the Perrault story die Prince's cannibal mother; and Red Riding
Hood ends these days with a rescue, not with the child being eaten,
because that is die form of the story that has survived.
Once upon a time, Orpheus brought Eurydice back alive from
Hades. But that is not the version of the tale that has survived.
(Fairy Tales, as G.K. Chesterton once pointed out, are not true.
They are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons
exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)
Several months ago I found myself, somewhat to my own surprise,
in a distant country attending a symposium on myths and fairy tales.
I was a featured speaker, and was told that I would be addressing a
group of academics from all over the world on the subject of fairy
tales. Before this, I would listen to papers being delivered to the
group, and address a round table discussion.
I made notes for the talk I would give, and then went along to the
first presentation: I listened to academics talk wisely and intelligently
about Snow White and Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding
Hood, and I found myself becoming increasingly irritated and
dissatisfied, on a deep and profound level.
My difficulty was not with what was being said, but with the attitude
that went along with it—an attitude that implied that these tales no
longer had anything to do with us. That they were dead, cold things,
which would submit without resistance to dissection, that could be

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held up to the light and inspected from every angle, and would give
up their secrets without resistance.
Most of the people at the conference were more than willing to pay
lip service to the theory of fairy tales as stories that had begun as
entertainments that adults told adults, but became children's stories
when they went out of fashion (much as, in Professor Tolkien's
analogy, the unwanted and unfashionable furniture was moved into
the nursery: it was not that it had been intended to be children's furniture,
it was just that the adults did not want it any longer). "Why
do you write with myths and with fairy tales?" one of them asked
me.
"Because they have power," I explained, and watched the students
and academics nod doubtfully. They were willing to allow that it
might be true, as an academic exercise. They didn't believe it.
The next morning I was meant to make a formal address on the
subject of myth and fairy tales. And when the time came, I threw
away my notes, and instead of lecturing them, I read them a story.
It was a retelling of the story of Snow White, from the point of
view of the wicked queen. It asked questions like, "What kind of
a prince comes across the dead body of a girl in a glass coffin and
announces that he is in love and will be taking the body back to
his castle?" and for that matter, "What kind of a girl has skin as
white as snow, hair as black as coal, lips as red as blood, and can
lie, as if dead, for a long time?" We realize, listening to the story,
that the wicked queen was not wicked: she simply did not go far
enough; and we also realize, as the queen is imprisoned inside a
kiln, about to be roasted for the midwinter feast, that stories are
told by survivors. 2
It is one of the strongest pieces of fiction I've written, and it was
2 The story is called 'Snow, Glass, Apples.' You can find it in my collection of stories
Smoke and Mirrors or in the Eighth Annual Datlow and Windling Year's Best Fantasy
and Horror collection.
apparendy, for the listeners, a rather extreme experience. At the end
of a story that was, after all, just Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
an audience of several dozen people looked pale and troubled, as if
they had taken a gulp of something they thought was coffee, and
found that someone had laced it with wasabi, or with blood.
"As I said, these stories have power," I told them as I finished. This
time they seemed far more inclined to believe me.
7.
All too often, I write to find out what I diink about a subject, not
because I already know.
My next novel will be, for me, a way of trying to pin down myths—
the modern myths and the old myths, together—on the huge and
puzzling canvas that is the North American continent.
It has a working tide of American Gods (which is not what the book
will be called, but what it is about).
It's about the gods that people brought with them as fhey came here
from distant lands; it's about the new gods, of Car Crash and Telephone
and People Magazine, of Internet and Aeroplane, of Freeway
and Mortuary; it's about the forgotten gods, who were here before
Man, the gods of Buffalo and Passenger Pigeon, gods that sleep,
forgotten.
All the myths I care about, or have cared about, will be in there,
but there in order to try and make sense of the myths that make
America.
I have lived here for six years, and I still do not understand it: a
strange collection of home-grown myths and beliefs, the ways that
America explains itself to itself.

LJ
84
Maybe I'll make an awful mess of it all, but I can't say that worries
me as badly as I think it ought to. I look forward to putting my
thoughts into some kind of order. I look forward to learning what
I think.
Ask me with a gun to my head if I believe in them, all the gods and
myths that I write about, and I'd have to say no. Not literally. Not
in the daylight, nor in well-lighted places, with people about. But I
believe in the things they can tell us. I believe in the stories we can
tell with them.
I believe in the reflections that they show us, when they are told.
And, forget it or ignore it at your peril, it remains true: these stories
have power.
—LISA YUSKAVAGE
Katby and Elisabeth #1, 1998, monotype
COURTESY MARIANNE BOESKY GAU

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COURTESY MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY
Kathy and Elisabeth #2, 1998, monotype
COURTESY MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY
Kathy and Elisabeth, 1998, pencil on paper

tr
and Shrink, 1998, monotype
COURTESY MARIANNE BOESKY GALLERY
—RICHARD HOWARD
Gifts of the Gods
THEY ARE ALWAYS AMBIGUOUS. Worse man that, they change the
recipient—the given becomes something else. Unless you give something
back, such largesse turns out to be dangerous, even mortal.
(You are mortal, after all, what did you expect?)
Reciprocity is the unstated demand that divine giving makes on
all occasions, if there is to be no harm done; and judging from all
accounts, the gestures of reciprocity (thanksgiving, that is) had better
be prompt and complete: that is, the gifts of the gods are really
demands, as we shall remark at the end.
Here, however, I want to dissert upon two (celebrated) examples,
Helen and Midas (the golden touch), instances charged with all
the duplicity of the Greeks, who are most to be feared when it is
their gods who bear the gifts.
But first, let me point out in a general way the sort of god-given
benefactions which are the last thing in the world one comes to
desire. Take £he instance, admittedly minor, of Caeneus, the loveliest
of all the girls in Thessaly who yet refused to marry any man.
The story goes that as she was wandering on a lonely part of the
shore, she was forcibly subjected to the embraces of the god of the
sea; and that when he had enjoyed the pleasures of his new love,
Neptune said to Caeneus, still smarting from his violence, "Any gift,
none will be refused—choose your desire." "Then let me never
undergo such injury again—grant that I am no longer a woman,
and you will have given me all that I wish." And even as she spoke
these words, her voice was a man's: the god had granted Caeneus'

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prayer, declaring further that the man Caeneus should be proof
against any wound, even that of love; and Caeneus departed, spending
his days in pastimes of rapine and violence, which men enjoy.
Cunning, the god's gift, which punishes even as it rewards: here the
gift becomes a punishment in proof—as the gods invariably will
have it.
Even worse than the upshot of this gift, though I find it hard
to imagine worse myself (moral judgments are always the most
overwhelming kinds, and to be rescued from rape by inflicting it
henceforth... what a sentence!), is the very nature of a gift given by
the god Apollo to Cassandra, daughter of King Priam. Lovely as
she was, Cassandra had yet refused the god's favors, and was by
Apollo's spite given that famous gift of ever telling and even foretelling
the truth, yet never being believed. Simple the form, terrible
the event of the god's offering, for if to accept a god's gift is perilous,
to refuse it is equally so, perhaps worse still.
Now let us consider two major instances of such conduct.
1) Helen. The most beautiful woman was given to Paris as a sort
of bribe, payola for the Shepherd-Prince's judgment that the giver
(Aphrodite) was the Fairest of the three Goddesses (Athena and
Hera, the other two), who had been induced by Eris, sister of Ares
and therefore Goddess of Strife, to conduct the beauty contest
which would award the winner a golden apple. Of course
Aphrodite's promise, with divine insouciance, overlooked the fact
that Helen was already a possession, as the Greeks regarded such
things, of her husband Menelaos, off in Sparta. But suddenly there
she was in Paris's mind and heart, and he set off to obtain the further
evidence that would be in his arms as well. He succeeded, with
what consequences we know: ten years of slaughter, the death of
Paris, and Helen's uncontested return to that first hubby in Sparta.
Though there is a story that the real Helen was in Egypt for the
duration (ten years!) and that the carnage at Troy, the passions of
Paris and the carpentry of the horse were all for a phantom, a facsimile.
Such are the gifts of the gods when unpropitiated.
2) The Golden Touch. The King of Phrygia, name of Midas, had
a garden which a Satyr used to visit. Midas, curious to learn the half-
God's wisdom, mixed wine with the water of a spring in that gar-
den; the Satyr was thus made drunk and captured. For his return,
Dionysus (to whom all Satyrs must report) offered the Kng a gift
of whatever he desired. Midas desired something like electricity—
not a thing, but the way things behave: that all he touched might
become gold. The gift was granted. At first, things went rather well:
it was lovely having gold cups, gold floors, gold trees! But the discovery
that making love to golden girls was uncomfortable, to say
the least—actually painful—convinced the King to seek revocation
of the Gift. He was informed that bathing in the River Pactolus
would do the trick. Midas obeyed, Dionysus obliged, and the sands
of Pactolus produce gold flakes to this day. The gift was of course
a punishment for wanting the gift. For accepting it. Gifts of the
Gods must be given back, probably at once, and with some form of
interest, or else... In this, they are the mirror of all largesse. Give
back what is given, and (only) then may it be restored, though hardly
in the form you expect.
I am reminded that Midas failed to understand the nature of
such transactions, fortunate though he had been in the business of
abluting the golden touch. Once again he blundered with regard to
a divine manifestation, favoring Pan's music over Apollo's, whereupon
the God of Music (after all!) affixed to Midas's head the ears
of an ass. And so ashamed of this disfigurement was the King that
only the royal barber, once the royal hair and a royal turban had
concealed the god's presentation, knew for certain what Midas's
ears had become. The barber, bursting with the secret he dared not
tell another mortal soul, buried it among the reeds which ever since
have whispered, "Midas has asses' ears"—a susurration as Apollonian
as a man could wish. Or wish away.
Other examples loom: the Gods are greedy, and always busy in
the matter of their giving. That is how they manage to get it all
back. Or if not all, then enough to make them Gods. But we have
it in the language, even in English: to be gifted is a responsibility of
great hazard, whether it puts you in possession of all the gifts, like
Mozart (and Pandora), or merely one, like Paris (and Monica).

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—MARGARET SHIPLEY
Sunrise
I walk inside an opal.
Light the color of milk forms a pool
of air. Dark of my world
lightens to pale emerald.
A spark, hint of sun, sets a bonfire
on the hill's crest, fallen star
that leaps to my finger and burns.
Around me daylight is born.
Who gave me this ring, Lootie?
I am back in the scary story book:
Princess lost in goblin town.
Never mind. When the sun goes down
I'll meet the maker of opal rings
who set this fire on my finger
and know his name.
-DEBORAH LARSEN
A Gloss on Cats in Exodus
"For the Lord commanded Moses concerning the cats..."
—Christopher Smart, "For I will Consider my Cat Jeoffrey"
"No such command is mentioned in Scripture."
—X.J. Kennedy, footnote to Mr. Smart's poem
in An Introduction to Literature
But I have read the sacred chapter and the verse
and have found therein the breath of his mouth
commanding and the nod of Moses accepting the command.
I have heard the silencings of caterwauls
and the switching sounds of the long cat-o'-nine-tails.
I have seen the Israelite children hustling out
from the land of Pharaoh with the cats boxing in their bags
while hosts of catbriers whistled, suspending disbelief.
And I have, my God, seen the catboats, gaffs
and booms, on the shore of the runcible Red Sea.

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—STEPHEN CUSHMAN
The Woman Taken in Adultery
In Guercino's version, she's not so pretty
that no one could ever leave her alone,
nor so homely that she probably did it
to spite a husband's waning interest,
and nothing in John provides a clue why
this pale young woman with brown hair piled
high on a head that bows toward the ground
would shirk the seventh commandment,
no faint hint that the man she married
beat her or bored her or left her young body
hungry for months as he wandered the desert
in search of salvation. (Is he the one
behind the helmeted soldier, head tilted
so the axis of his bearded face
matches the teacher's he's craning to see,
or just another scribe or Pharisee?)
And Guercino's version leaves out
the best part, the bending down to write
with a finger in the ground, the only time
we ever see him writing. Even with all
his spoken words in red, we can't have
these few he wrote or know for sure
what they said—some divine doodling
to dramatize detachment, a scrap of scripture,
or a memo to himself: Try telling them
I'm the light of the world—though a finger
figures in Guercino's version, too,
his left pointer extended toward her,
pale as her neck, his mouth closed
beneath a modest nimbus half-circling the head
like a second day about to break from the dark
hill of his hair, as he gently pins
an old accuser in the gaze
from two jet eyes, each with a single mote
of white to puncture its night and lead one
into temptation to cuckold the world.

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-JENNIFER CARR
Green Grass
A Fable
ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a man who married a beautiful
woman and they had a house with a road that stretched out before
them looking so much like life. On the other side of the road, the
grass was greener, but maybe it was because the man who owned
it was a farmer, and in any event, the man with the beautiful wife
thought the farmer a cranky neighbor. So he looked down the
road.
Down the road was a fat woman with heavy mascara and swells
of perfume, who sat behind the clipped hedge of her driveway,
waiting for handsome married men to walk by. One day she saw the
man walk slowly past her yard, absent the little blonde woman she
sometimes saw with him at Star Market.
"Marry me!" she hissed from the hedge. She was a fat woman,
and when she said these words, they swished around in her cheeks
before she let them see air, so when they came out, they sounded
like the hushed whisper of someone's love.
"I can't marry you," said the man. "I am already married." The
man paused by the neatly paved driveway leading up to the dark
brick ranch.
"Love me!" the woman said. "Let your children call me
'Mom'!" The woman was a fat woman, but only because she'd
swallowed so much hope and so many little bugs as she mowed
her lawn each week in nice flat rows to make it green, green,
green.
"Woman!" the woman's husband yelled from the screen door of
the ranch house. "Make me dinner!" The woman's husband was not
an evil man, just overtired from working a long day delivering Coca
Cola to major universities in the area.
When the woman stood to go inside, the man noticed a strand
of faux pearls dribbling into her cleavage, and that the gold-colored
vest she wore was tight around her flowering chest. The man saw
that the woman was bursting with life, desire, hope. The man was
still young then, the age of his children now, and he thought life was
just one big thing that stretched down a road.
That night, the man went home to his beautiful wife. "I'm going to
do something, but I'm not going to tell you what because it will
make you very sad," he told her.
"Oh! I don't want to be sad!" the beautiful wife said.
"So I won't tell you," the man said. "And, anyhow, if I don't tell
you, I won't feel as guilty over what I'm about to do. I will tell you,
my beautiful wife, that I am working late."
"Oh!" the wife said. "I hurt already! Here are your two babies.
They will miss you, too."
The man looked at his two babies: boy, girl—girl, boy—the
same selection as he could find anywhere. And besides, they
seemed so skinny, so drained of desire and zest for life, that he
wanted, for a moment, to put cotton in their cheeks to make them
look cherubic. Instead, he said to his beautiful wife, "I must go
now. I have to work."
"Why?" she said as he walked down the drive. The wife was a
beautiful wife, with long blonde hair and pure hazel eyes. But as
she watched her husband walk toward the road, she wanted very
much not to hurt, to cinch the ache she felt rising in her chest. She
swallowed a breath of air then, and held it tightly in her throat until
she felt the ache subside, dissolve.
"Why?" she said again. "Why walk to work? Take the Honda."
And so the man worked for many years, and his children grew up,
as he knew they would, but had barely believed. "Why are you
always working?" they asked.
"I want to give you everything," the man told them. They were

the age he had once been, when he first saw the road. "I want you
to have everything I did not have." It was true. He did work hard,
he did want many things for them. He also wanted, very much, for
them to believe in him and his beautiful wife, the strong power of
two people raising two more. He sent them to universities of their
choice, bought them both cars, and he and his blonde wife (now
dyed) waved from the front door as the children backed out of the
drive.
A long time ago, once, he hit her. (This is not the nice part of
the fable; this is the brick oven, the wolf's teeth.) The children were
young when it happened, though they did not understand then. But
it was a long time ago, once.
Years later it came time for the daughter to have coffee with her
father. She did not want to be adult when he told her, she wanted
to slap her hands on the table and scream This Sucks! but she
kept her hands at her side because she was learning things
though she didn't want to. He told her that sometimes the fat
lady from the hedge phoned at three in the morning and woke
the beautiful wife, who now ate pastries and full dinners with
second helpings, and now had a body large enough to contain
her dormant hope.
The story didn't end because the daughter couldn't find the
moral. Besides, Christmas was coming up, then Easter and so on.
"I love you," the man told his daughter. "This is so hard."
Because the moral has yet to be found, the story hasn't ended, but
can take one of three paths:
1. The man shacks up with the fat lady from the hedge. The
week he makes the move, he learns his beautiful wife signed up for
lawn lessons, and now he's doomed to drive past the green green
grass that used to be his own.
2. The man goes back to the beautiful wife and confesses. She
acts shocked and enraged, though the truth is less than she suspected.
She even cries a little bit, and walks away from the exchange
with a mink, a diamond, a set of Calphalon pans, and the game
point for every future argument.
3. Nothing happens. How could it? Of course the man goes
back to his wife, of course they try to patch things up. The wife
does cry, she is shocked, and the man knows that this is the hairline
fracture, the eggshell on which he must walk. Somewhere in
this time he realizes that life is calculated in years and he's used
half his up.

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-JENNIE LITT
A Fable
A BOY AND A GIRL lived in a provincial city over which, swollen
with emanations from the reeking lake and factory chimneys, a
layer of clouds hung heavy and unmoving. The same clouds were
reflected in the the girl's heart because, although the boy daily
offered her his heart on the tray of his open hands, she could not
unlock the mystery of his penis. As she went about her life, its
image haunted her. She saw his penis in the dark windshield as she
drove home from teaching expository writing at the state university.
She saw his penis in the eye of her computer. The words of the
novel she was reading looked to her like miniature versions of his
penis placed end to end. Conversely, the boy could not unlock the
mystery of her vulva. He thought and thought about it, to no avail.
They lay next to each other, mutually inaccessible.
The boy was young, and easily dispirited by minor failings. He
lived imprisoned in his mind. The boy was an actor, and his teachers
frequently criticized his too-cerebral approach to characterization.
Even his movement teacher complained that he initiated all stage
movement with his head.
The girl was a few years older than the boy, and frequently anxious.
When she went to bed, she was anxious she would sleep
through her alarm. When she woke up, she was anxious she had forgotten
to note some vital appointment she could not now call to
mind. She was anxious that her breath might taste unpleasantly of
cigarette smoke when the boy kissed her.
The girl and boy spent many hours discussing Epic theatre, the
Bauhaus, early creation myths, word derivations, and Platonic
forms.
When they had used a word, they would discard it onto the pile
of used words at their feet. At first, the girl conscientiously swept
all the used words into a dustpan and threw them away after the boy
had visited her. Then she and the boy began spending more time
together. She swept less often, and carelessly. Words built up in corners
and under the bed; a fine layer sprinkled the wooden floor. The
girl and boy had to brush discarded words from the soles of their
feet before putting on their socks.
The words continued to build up. Now when the girl opened
her apartment door, words spilled onto the stairwell. She kept one
pair of word-encrusted shoes on a high shelf for daily use; her
other shoes were buried under a drift of words. She stumbled and
slid on the words like someone who tries to run on fine sand.
Her apartment took on the aspect of a beach. She and the boy
built word-castles under the hot blue ceiling. Her potted palm grew
fronds like giant wings, and bore coconuts. Gulls scavenged in the
dunes. Distantly, die girl and boy could hear the hiss of surf. It
seemed to come from no particular direction and from all directions
at once. Listening for it, the girl and boy walked for a night
and a day until they found a hissing steam radiator half-buried in the
sand.
They were hot and tired, so they rested in the sand by the radiator.
They were thirsty, but had nothing to drink. They talked of
water in parched voices for an hour, and their words built up
around them until all that could be seen of the radiator was the
curve of one silver pipe. Beyond it, the palms and short grasses
appeared wavy through the radiating steam.
It occurred to them that if they smashed the pipe, they might
each catch a mouthful or two of hot vapor. They would have preferred
coconut milk, but the coconut palm was far away, where the
path of their footprints originated. The boy had a hammer in his
pocket and the girl had a rock. They beat on the exposed pipe with
hammer and rock until it rang like a bell. They beat harder, perspiring.
The pipe rang more and more loudly.
The song of the ringing pipe traveled up their arms and vibrated

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in their chests. It resonated in their abdomens, knees, and feet. It filled
their heads and flowed out of their mouths. The song in their mouths
left no room for words. When they could beat on the pipe no longer,
they found they could not stop singing. They sang as they exhaled and
sang as they inhaled. Helplessly, they sang and sang. All of a sudden,
the pipe cracked in two, releasing a spurt of water that hissed and
steamed as it struck the hot sand.
The water spread like a dark stain across the sand. It filled the
hollows of their footprints and the sand angels they had made
when they had lain down to rest. The little pools overflowed and
trickled into one another. The hillock of sand on which the boy and
girl stood quickly became an island. A golden archipelago of sand
hillocks disappeared beneath the rising water. The boy and girl
waded in water to their ankles. The water rose around them. They
felt the sand give way to water beneath their feet. They rose with me
rising water.
Neither was a very good swimmer. They kicked off their shoes
and struggled with wet buttons. They were soon naked. They clung
to each other, treading water with their free hands, their eyes and
mouths closed against oncoming waves. They drifted for a while in
a blind panic until they felt something tickling their feet and legs.
Terrified, the girl opened her eyes. Through the clear, greenish
water, she saw a bed of purple flowers swaying on long stalks. She
let go of the boy and dove to examine them more closely. The first
flower she touched came gently from the stalk and filled her hands.
When she regained the surface, she sought the raw, white wound
she must have inflicted when she detached the flower from the
stalk, but could find no such wound.
Because the girl's hands were full of the flower, the boy had to
swim without her help. In the distance, the water seemed to grow a
darker green, and he swam toward the darker water. In that place,
submerged rock formed a high table-land on which, had he been a
little taller, he would have been able to stand. As he could not, he
dove, and found that the lip of the table-land hid a shallow cave
hung with sea-moss and mussels. He tried to swim inside it, but
pressure built in his lungs. Scrabbling at the cave walls, he kicked his
way to the surface and found that he had torn a mussel shell from
the wall, which he now held in his hand. He parted the two halves
of the shell under the water to reveal their nacreous insides and the
small, pulsing, mouth-shaped creature that lived between them.
In that world of water, they forgot they had ever known the
words 'shell' and 'flower.' They forgot everything they had ever
known. The girl saw purple points unfolding from a purple core.
The boy saw a smooth, opaline wall hinged to a smooth, opaline
wall. Each was nothing more nor less than what it was. Each was a
mystery past comprehension, seeming to encompass all things.
Each buoyed its bearer softly just beneath the water's skin.
Holding tightly to flower and shell, the boy and girl made love
under the water. They had forgotten about making love when they
forgot everything else, so that making love surprised them. The girl
thought it was the flower that seemed to be blossoming inside her.
The boy thought he had swum inside the shimmering cave of the
shell.
They drifted for a day and a night, making love intermittently,
holding tightly to the flower and the shell. Early in the morning of the
second day, they drifted into sight of land. The land had a familiar
aspect; they recognized the skyscrapers and smokestacks of their
own city. They scrambled up the smooth stones of a breakwater
and followed it past a mooring, where white boats bobbed in the
sun. Their backs to the lake, they followed the sidewalk out of the
marina, up a hill, past the ball park, past banks and county buildings,
past cinemas and laundromats and luncheonettes. The people who
passed them stared at them, then looked quickly away.
When they reached the girl's apartment, they filled a bowl with
water and put the shell and flower into it. Then the girl held the
dustpan while the boy swept, until together they had cleaned up all
the words.

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—JEANETTE WINTERSON
The Three Friends
ONCE UPON A TIME there were two friends who found a third. Liking
no one better in the whole world, they vowed to live in one palace,
sail in one ship, and fight one fight with equal arms.
After three months they decided to go on a quest.
"What shall we seek?" they asked each other.
The first said "Gold."
The second said "Wives."
The third said "That which cannot be found."
They all agreed that this last was best and so they set off in
fine array.
After a while they came to a house that celebrated ceilings and
denied floors. As they marched through the front door they were
only just in time to save themselves from dropping into a deep pit.
While they clung in terror to the wainscotting, they looked up and
saw chandeliers, bright as swords, that hung and glittered and lit the
huge room where the guests came to and fro. The room was
arranged for dinner, tables and chairs suspended from great chains.
An armoury of knives and forks laid out in case one of the eaters
knocked one into the abyss.
There was a trumpet sound and the guests began to enter the
room through a trap door in the ceiling. Some were suspended on
wires, others walked across ropes slender as youth. In this way they
were all able to join their place setting. When all were assembled, the
trumpet blew again, and the head of the table looked down and said
to the three friends, "What is it you seek?"
"That which cannot be found."
"It is not here" she answered, "but take some gold," and each
of the diners threw down a solid gold plate, rather in the manner
that the Doge of Venice used to throw his dinnerware into the canal
to show how much he despised worldly things.
Our three friends did not despise worldly things, and caught as
many of the plates as they could. Loaded down with treasure they
continued on their way, though more slowly than before.
Eventually they came to Turkey, and to the harem of Mustapha
the Blessed CIXX. Blessed he was, so piled with ladies that only his
index finger could be seen. Crooking it, he bade the three friends
come forward, and asked in a muffled voice, "What is it you seek?"
"That which cannot be found."
"It is not here," he said in a ghostly smother, "but take some
wives."
The friends were delighted, but observing the fate of
Mustapha, they did not take too many. Each took six and made
them carry the gold plates.
Helter skelter down the years the friends continued their journey,
crossing continents of history and geography, gathering by
chance the sum of the world, so that nothing was missing that
could be had.
At last they came to a tower in the middle of the sea. A man
with the face of centuries and the voice of the wind opened a narrow
window and called,
"What is it you seek?"
"That which cannot be found...found...found" and the wind
twisted their voices into the air.
"It has found you" said the man.
They heard a noise behind them like a scythe cutting the water
and when they looked they saw a ship thin as a blade gaining
towards them. The figure rowed it standing up, with one oar that
was not an oar. They saw the curve of the metal flashing, first this
side and then that. They saw the rower throw back his hood. They
saw him beckon to them and the world tilted. The sea poured away.
Who are they with fish and starfish in their hair?

I 06
—JEFF FRIEDMAN
Orpheus in Williamsburg
If my music would fall
on their ears like rain
drumming the corrugated iron
gates of the chop shop,
if it could be heard
over the boomboxes and the sirens,
over the tattoos roaming
the streets, over the gunshots
and the explosions, over the sobbing,
if it could erase the silhouettes
chalked in yellow
and white on the pavements,
if it could clean
the windows of grief
and raise the gulls
from sleep, mourning
as they circle the tanks,
if it could silence
the crack dealers on the corner
and shut the eyes
of the pit bull chained
to the iron railing under
the blinking neon cross,
then I would play on.
But this is Williamsburg,
not some hell invented
by Greek gods
over 3,000 years ago,
and no one listens
and it doesn't matter
whether I turn toward the
subway or walk on—
nothing can bring her back.

I 08
—SARAH VAN ARSDALE
Chorion and the Pleiades
It wasn't so much the night sky raising
its bulk above the dark town, or the light
fractured house to house, lamp to lamp, split
to huntress' smoky meadow firelight
and forest light of cat eye, firefly—
surely not the actual night sky, bowl
bending black and seamless over everything,
Because we don't know where the sinister
germinates, but it seems to ooze from soil,
smears from wet rocks' slippery undersides,
dank and musty and full of all that's bad.
Or maybe it just opens up the earth
in meadow's midst, and like Persephone
we all fall in.
Living on the hamlet's rim, this village
with its stone-planked walks and candled houses,
streets clogged with cattle and scattered hay,
with the smell of gristle, firesmoke, dog,
in this gravity the seven sisters
born into evil
stanched their own wounds, pressed palm to fevered head,
bit down on kerchief or flax-seed sheet
as night seeped in the casements, old dog asleep
at doorway's stoop, mother punched down in her bed.
Together, they bore what can't be borne
each one in her turn, seven feigning sleep
backs arced against what night had come to mean,
small girl hands covering their child eyes.
Seven sisters like girls everywhere, you, me
never told the moon's shape in its orbit,
never taught the shape of their own desire,
never shown the path Artemis parted in die meadow,
her dark wolves just ahead, nosing the grass.
One night beneath the sky's vast tilt and lean,
the mother, in her last expiration,
severs the sisters' slim tendril of hope,
dies in her straw bed, vomit everywhere,
and the seven sisters huddle in their room.
They hear the voice outside the door, know
its meaning, smell it now, hear the dog
lift its jowls from stone stoop, hear the latch
click up and this time they're prepared: poker
and stick, blackened urine pot and dried brick,
but for all their preparation, the man
bulks up the doorway with his laughter.
This is the story we know too well, my darling,
it's the discolored truth that's become
our companion, the stories of girls
roped out across the patches of countryside;
Pleiades drifting, unnoticed, above them,
sky bowl bending its back in agony.
Tell me we don't need divine intervention.
But in our hamlet, there appeared that night
Chorion, goddess of litde girls,
huge and imposing, like a blue-robed angel,

no
feet sandled, dark wolf-mane hair tangling down,
sharp sword of victory weighting her belt
the coat of a tiger she'd killed with her teeth
slapped over one muscled shoulder.
She stands in the room, and the man stops laughing.
He knows in this moment he's lost everything,
and Chorion opens a sack made of bear fur;
she lifts the girls in one by one, giving them each
a piece of Turkish Delight, and they are so young
and she is so big and so capable,
they all fit in her sack, and at last they are safe.
She hoists the girls up onto her back
and tells them a story, says she knows a big cow
with horns that tip out into the night
who's been wanting some riders, a passel of girls
girls who like stories, who want to go for a ride
through the night sky, escaping from evil, escaping from shame,
and she flies them up to the stars, all the way up to Bovis
and there you can see them, still to this day,
girls living a girl-life, like a brand on the shoulder
of Bovis the Cow, protected by Chorion,
the seven young sisters—you can only see six
the oldest girl, cursed with memory,
looks away from the earth.
—LAURENCE SNYDAL
Grandmother
Inside the wolf I touched his liver with my tongue.
I wrapped my fingers all around his heart
And blessed the beat of blood. I lay me down
Between his ribs and let each sighing lung
Massage the ache from these old bones. Apart
From earth, a part of older earth, I'd grown
A snout and such big eyes and teeth so bright
They shone like sunlight. There witxiin the cave
I called my home, I lay within his dream.
I don't remember why she lit the light.
I don't remember who she thought she'd save.
I think about the axe and want to scream.
in

Id
o:
112
THE COLUMBIA INTERVIEW
Rick Moody
on Hawthorne and the Black Veil
RICK MOODY HAS NOT DISAPPEARED, but at times it seems as if he's
about to. His walk is jaunty, careful, meditative; he takes large steps, then
smaller ones, cruising down the urban sidewalk; he slips in and out of crowds
with ease. You may encounter Moody at various goings-on about town—he's
out there—but one thing's for certain: he keeps his distance. Talking to him,
one senses that there's something hidden, something coalescing way down deep
inside, and it won't come out until he sits down to write.
This is, after all, the author we've come to know via The Ice Storrn, and
who continues to surprise us with his verbal pyrotechnics. But contrary to the
expectations one might form on reading his most recent novel, the magisterial
Purple America, Moody's diction is intact, unbroken. He does not stutter. He
does not let the fractured, uncontrollable world of the ultimate excess get to him.
His spoken voice is nuanced, each thought poised for a moment of meditation
before he lets it rip. And as readers of his post—Ice Storm work know, he
riffs at will. Moody acquires mileage from the forbearers of narrative profusion:
Gaddis, Faulkner, Woolf Joyce, Melville, Hawthorne.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, in particular, has engaged Moody's narrative energy
for some titne now. In fact, as we read in the author's own footnote, Hawthorne's
"The Minister's Black Veil" is based on a real-life case involving a certain
Joseph 'Handkerchief Moody, "of York, Maine," who is condemned to wear-
ing a veil because . . . well, this is what Rick Moody has been working on: the
veil. This is what we met to talk about.
We met at one of those large, cosmopolitan cafes in the West Village to
discuss his Hawthorne project. Entitled The Black Veil the book addresses
some of the issues played out as family dynamics in The Ice Storm and
Purple America. The palette has deepened, the culture—ours and
Hawthorne's—seeps in. Issues of veiling have long been a resonant force in
American literature, for, as Moody says, "Fiction itself is a kind of conceit,
and, therefore, a kind of veil. "
COLUMBIA: The Rick Moody body of work seems to be fascinated
by how culture—a particularly American culture—gets into domestic
life. I'm thinking of the Richard Nixon mask in The Ice Storm,
the looming presence of nuclear dysfunction in Purple America,
and now you're tackling Hawthorne. What is it about Hawthorne
that initially drew you to him?
RICK MOODY: A coincidence: "The Minister's Black Veil" has this
character in it, the Reverend Hooper, who, according to a footnote
by Hawthorne, is not to be confused with a certain minister
from Maine called Joseph Moody, who accidentally killed a childhood
friend and forever after wore a veil. That's what the footnote
says, and from earliest recollection my family claimed that we were
related to this guy. So I got interested in Hawthorne first and foremost
because of that coincidence. But you know, like everybody
else, I read lots of his work in school and found it really electrifying.
My family was very American
literature friendly—they always
read a lot, so it was part of my
childhood.
COLUMBIA: This new book, The
Black Veil, is a 'genealogical narrative.'
It therefore deals with the
onerous job of reinventing
Hawthorne. Issues of masking—
of veiling—have been in your
work for a while now. How do
these issues tie into the form of
genealogical narrative?

114
MOODY: Well, I think the idea of The Black Veil, on the simplest
level, is simply to suggest that American lives—in this case, my
life—are lived in conjunction with fictional narrative and through
literature. Normally we think of a sequence of events like you,
Alec, are born—wherever—in Chicago, you grow up, you go to
school, you attend the University of Chicago, you go to Columbia,
you write a book—you die. But it's much more interesting to
me to weave intertextualities into that biography: to say, for
example, that from age twelve to age fifteen you were completely
occupied with the works of—insert name of writer here, insert bad
rock-and-roll band here. So the idea of The Black Veil is to say that I
am not a mere biographical incident but rather an engagement
with certain kinds of mythology, fictional mythologies, and ... I
love this song, "Midnight Train to Georgia," by Gladys Knight &
the Pips . . . and also the collective unconsciousness. The way in
which literature reflects civilization's psychosocial development
throughout the centuries.
Let me try to simplify. What a biography is is an engagement
with mythologies. So The Black Veil says that what Hawthorne was
getting at in the story is in turn what I have been getting at my
whole life—the identical issues of masking and the way in which
these issues have informed my biography.
COLUMBIA: Of course, in your earlier work, you weren't addressing
Hawthorne directly. But your most recent published story, "The
Mansion on the Hill" (Paris Review 144), seems to be a first step to
tackling Hawthorne.
MOODY: I totally agree—it was almost done tongue-in-cheek. For
example, the character is called Andrew Wakefield, after
Hawthorne's "Wakefield." That piece is emphatically engaged with
Hawthorne, and the idea was to take these themes that lurk in
Hawthorne (and in literature before Hawthorne) and transform
them. The veil, as an image, obviously has rich physical Biblical contexts.
It's an image that we've been kicking around for a long time.
The idea of "The Mansion on the Hill" was to take that veil image
and put it in a contemporary context, which is also the idea of the
new book. The Black Veil, the book by Rick Moody, is more nonfiction
than it is fiction, but the idea is still to take these themes and
just recontextualize diem in the present.
COLUMBIA: So it's about your family mythologizing itself as the
Moodys—whether or not you and Joseph 'Handkerchief Moody,
of York, Maine—the Moody of Hawthorne's day—are related at
all?
MOODY: Yeah, turns out he's not related to me, notwithstanding my
grandfather's claims.
COLUMBIA: So how does this fit into the larger canvas of American
transformation, which has obsessed authors from Hawthorne to
DeLillo—for example, the baseball in Underworld?
MOODY: It has everything to do witii how people imagine and confabulate
lineage in this country. Since we're a nation whose manifest
history only stretches back 222 years, we find ourselves—and have
often found ourselves in the arts—looking for lineage and looking
for ways to have a long, glorious history. In the nineteenth century,
that meant that art aspired to be continental, to go back to Europe.
Obviously, this happens in families, too, and the American vogue
for genealogy is a vogue for a kind of historical glory. What's interesting
in The Black Veil is the fact that my family claimed to be
related to this guy, and we aren't, but our history nonetheless goes
back as far as 'Handkerchief Moody's family does, except that the
history of my family is an inglorious history. We did nothing. We
raised sheep.
So it's not a glorious history at all. But part of narrative's ambition
is always to provide that glory. To ennoble character. To
humanize.
COLUMBIA: The family narrative as a terrain wherein larger cultural
issues are played out?
II

Ill
116
MOODY: Even Hawthorne was obsessed with this material. Not only
within his own family, who were magistrates and judges during the
Salem Witch trials—he writes about that at length in the 'Custom
House' chapter in The Scarlet Letter—but on the part of his characters,
too. The Marble Faun, for example, has a passage in the middle
where one of the protagonists is given a genealogy that goes back
to pre-history—goes all the way back to the Roman Empire. It's an
incredibly fanciful and nakedly ambitious attempt on Hawthorne's
part. If I gave a character a history that went back to the Stone Age,
I'd seem crazy. But that's what Hawthorne does.
COLUMBIA: This brings up the issue of language—cultural language.
The recent Rick Moody sentence, for example, echoes
Hawthorne's voice and expands on it in terms of cadence, rhythm,
thematic pallor.
MOODY: For the project, really. I mean, obviously my prose has been
dense and sort of old-fashioned in some ways after Hawthorne's,
though Joyce and Woolf are models too, and that has to do with
having read a lot in literary history, particularly American literary
history. In this project it makes good sense to stay close to the language
that Hawthorne used—the nineteenth-century tongue. But I
agree with you, in the larger sense, that any kind of genealogical
ambition will perforce involve a linguistic genealogy in the same
way.
COLUMBIA: You mention something like that in a recently published
excerpt from The Black Veil, "In Guns We Trust": "Still, there's a
language to this massacre stuff, a tongue; there's catechism, call and
response; and at the margins of this febrile language hovers the
community, distracted in its lamentations."
I sense a very Hawthornian feel to that sentence. But the question
of lamentation, the dark pallor, is present also in "The Mansion
on the Hill" and "Demonology," and in your earlier stories,
"The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven" and even "The
James Dean Garage Band"—in which you write, "You could pass
from one life to the next without a sound." How does this notion
of transmutation—of living on and surviving—play out in The
Black Veil?
MOODY: I don't drink the darkness in my work is particularly
Hawthornian, because I was engaged with these images long before
I was thinking direcdy about Hawthorne. And there's a rich history
of dark imagery in the American literature mat I have favored all
along. However, if you remember Melville's essay about
Hawthorne, a lot of it is devoted to the color black, and I think the
famous argument that Melville's essay is really about Melville and
not Hawthorne is valid in that the blackness is really Melville's.
Whichever way you deal with this line of reasoning, blackness—in
the sense that Melville uses the word—is endemic to good American
literature and always has been.
COLUMBIA: Didn't Hawthorne disappear—withdraw toward the end?
MOODY: Oh, he totally withdrew. He was in seclusion until he was
forty and he got married and then he was out in the world for
another fifteen, twenty years. And then, for reasons that are mysterious,
he became incredibly depressed and kind of recreated his earlier
seclusion in the last four years of his life, going so far as to build
an attic onto his house that was like the horrible cell that he had
written in when he was young, which he referred to as 'the castle
dismal'
COLUMBIA: A Borgesian kind of thing going on there.
MOODY: Borges was very into Hawdiorne. You would dunk that
Hawtiiorne would want to escape from this monastic part of his
life, but in fact he found it psychically comfortable, and late in life
intentionally recreated it. It's said by some people that he had an
undiagnosed cancer and was actually just very, very ill. He was quite
young when he died—in his early sixties, I think. And he just died.
No one knew what was going on. He just became more and more
kind of withdrawn and he died.

118
COLUMBIA: Maybe he was trying to assume the veil.
MOODY: He always had the veil on. Melville's famous observation
after Hawthorne's death—he said it to Hawthorne's son-in-law, I
believe—was "I know what his secret was," which implies retroactively
that there was something that was being concealed, something
that was being veiled all along. The allure of such a thought has
kept busy many a biographer. Some people think he had a sexual
relationship with one of his sisters. There seems to be ample, ample
evidence that, if not actively homosexual, Hawthorne was definitely
attracted to other men, and mere's an intense energy in his relationship
to Melville. People have suggested that homosexuality
might be part of the secret. But I think the truth of the veil is that the
veil doesn't reduce to a single image, that the veil is built into language,
is part of what it means to traffic in signifiers, part of what
it means to be a writer. Hawthorne's awful insight into his own
character was that the material of language was interceding between
him and the people he was trying to be intimate with. Late in life,
he realized that even his very close relationship to his wife couldn't
deliver the closeness that he desired. And I think that's what the
withdrawing is about. It's a recognition of what it really means to
be human.
COLUMBIA: In Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil," it's rumor,
town speculation, that changes the veil into something altogether
other. What is this other thing?
MOODY: I think that the veil as an image is melancholy, that the
story is about—if not secret sins, which it won't come out and
say—at least the grief that goes with the understanding of the kind
of posdapsarian struggle of human life. That doesn't mean it's a
puritanical story; that means that it's a psychological story.
Likewise, my book, The Black Veil, is about conscience. It's
about the way in which die culture that I come from, which is
northeastern WASP culture, is suffused with guilty conscience.
That's the way my people are. Everyone feels guilty. They all feel
remorseful about stuff, even if they committed no crime. You
know, any time I read about a criminal in the paper I feel that I must
have done the crime myself.
COLUMBIA: Have you, through the writing of mis book, come to
some kind of new aesthetic of the veil?
MOODY: No. Really, I'm writing this book because it's such a bitch
to write a novel right after you've finished a novel. This book is an
interregnum before I get back to writing more fiction. And because
I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. I proposed an
article on "The Black Veil" to Grand Street in 1987. So, I've been
thinking about this for eleven years. Now I can finally get it out of
my system.
In terms of aesthetic, it's my conviction that some of the artifice
of fiction makes me impatient. I have been looking for ways to
confound it. And one way to confound it is to limit yourself to the
truth.
COLUMBIA: Hawthorne's tale is a parable. And parables often have
some kind of moral component attached to them, even if it's tangential.
Your Black Veil blends fact and fiction, but relies more on
fact, or supposed fact.
MOODY: Right. I don't think my book's a parable, though. I think
that the argument that the story's a parable is hard to sustain. Unless
what it teaches you is not to look for simple solutions.
COLUMBIA: Wearing the veil "feels like hell," you write, because
once veiled one is beyond "the society of languages and explanations."
How does being veiled, being implicitly beyond language and explanation,
counteract the excavation of the past, the construction of
your own mythos?
MOODY: If you follow my argument this far, you have to agree that
I can't really answer this question, because what's beyond language is
beyond language. I can't tell you about it, except by analogy. When I
II

120
say it feels "like hell," though, I mean literally, in the theological
sense, because banishment to hell is banishment to the place
beyond explanation.
COLUMBIA: It's not just American, the veil. It's larger, more pervasive,
right? The stakes are greater.
MOODY: Certainly, the Muslim reliance on the veil is fascinating
and mysterious. A week or so ago, I was over on Atlantic Avenue
in this excellent vegetable market, and I turned around and almost
tripped over two women wearing full veil. You could see their
eyes, nothing more. It's startling. As an image, it has tremendous
force.
COLUMBIA: A cultural force?
MOODY: Well, it's their cultural inheritance. And our Western attitude
is always to be drawn to unveil that which is veiled. But in
some ways the veil both disguises and constitutes. Think about
Jackie O.'s veil, you know, in the cortege . . . you can see through
the veil. So it's not telling you anything that you don't know, and
yet it nonetheless confers this immense power on her when she's
wearing it.
COLUMBIA: Today, sometimes it seems like the veil has lost some of
its inherent power.
MOODY: It's a style—to a certain extent. The fact that it's a style
shouldn't, you know, obviate its symbolic heft.
COLUMBIA: The whole notion of religion here is fascinating. Of
course, you edited Joyful Noise, an anthology of contemporary writing
about the New Testament, and "In Guns We Trust" seems to
me to suggest that cults are very much involved here, even religiously
so.
MOODY: It goes back to this question of what is a shared mythology.
Sociological entities have to have a collective unconscious reservoir
of narratives and myths that enforce group identity. Individual
communities each have constituted mythologies.
COLUMBIA: Family reunions—that kind of thing?
MOODY: Yeah. Definitely.
COLUMBIA: Is there a difference between familial mythologies and
cultural mythologies? I mean, part of the burden of your 'veil' is
that to some extent your lineage is an imagined lineage, which might
not be exact. What, then, about the collective lineage of all things
American?
MOODY: I think the only difference here is of scale. American cultural
mythology is just an assemblage of 250 million discrete mythologies,
although there are legislative and police apparatuses to persuade
you otherwise. Individual mythologies are more flexible, because individuals,
unlike institutions, don't need incessantly to maximize power.
COLUMBIA: And writers, after all, are obsessed with individualism,
and to some extent have to draw upon what has been published
before. They have to log into the collective lineage.
MOODY: Yeah. Our burden and our job is to understand these
mythologies and how they work and what comes out of them.
That kind of role isn't given to that many people. It's an exciting
part of the job.
COLUMBIA: Part of the point in The Black Veil is to solve a murder.
In Hawthorne's fiction, it's never really known exactly why Parson
Hooper had to assume the veil—in the world of fiction it's an allegorical
thing. Whereas in the realm of history, of 'your' family history,
Rev. Joseph 'Handkerchief Moody assumed the veil because
he shot a childhood friend, Ebenezer Preble.
The black veil is, in this sense, that which we swathe ourselves in,
to give the impression that we have an identity—but do we, really?

122
MOODY: An interesting question. Of course, Deleuze and Guattari
would say that identity is a construct, a tendency to act in certain
ways, but not a guarantee to behave reliably. Your suggestion is that
beneath Hooper's veil he has no face at all, and although that is a
compelling literary image, there is in all likelihood a self under there
somewhere. The question is to what degree the narrator of "The
Minister's Black Veil" gives us access to Hooper's identity. I see the
narrator in alliance with the good people of Milford, and thus not
privy to the internal conflicts of Hooper. We see only the myriad
interpretations of the veil. Interpreations ventured by the villagers.
Interpretations ventured from the outside.
Joseph Moody, however, assumed the veil post-traumatically,
and that seems to me coherent and explicable, and not worthy of
excessive interpretation. To put it another way, Ebenezer Preble was
actually killed. That moment is not a metaphor, and I would like to
reclaim the severity of it as an instant, if possible. I recognize
myself as an interpreter, as my grandfather and father were interpreters
of this instant of Ebenezer's death, but I would like to point
my text, if possible, beyond mere interpretation, in the direction of
the actual event. Hawthorne's method was completely different.
COLUMBIA: What, then, is this elusive identity? How does the American
family construct its own identity in relation to that of the culture
at large?
MOODY: If I could answer the question of what identity is or how
it works, I would be too smart and too busy to be here talking to
you. My sense is that identity is in layers, but that there are no innermost
layers. No layer or convolution is more central or more preferable
to any other. Possibly, the rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari,
again, are a good image for it. A structure that endlessly repeats and
reproduces according to context with no center or origin. The same
would probably be the case in the interpenetration of family and
culture. Family cannibalizes culture in order to understand itself, but
culture, in the end, is simply an assemblage of all actual familial tendencies,
right? So which came first?
COLUMBIA: Last question. In a recent verse collage, "It Generally
Leads A Solitary Life Or Lives In Pairs," published in The New Yorker,
you write, "I intend to reclaim my family life for my family."
Make it personal, but from historical things, right? I mean, The
Black Veil is not just your own personal genealogical narrative; it's
also the narrative of the construction of the American family's
identity.
MOODY: Right. The passage you quote is attributible to the President
of the United States, of course. What better example is there
of the American family?
—ALEC MICHOD

124
—DAVID MARSHALL CHAN
from
Memoirs of a Boy Detective
Mythologies: One
EVEN AS A YOUNG BOY I saw my future as a teen detective. And so
I fooled myself into believing it was my destiny to find clues written
in the sand, hidden meanings in the curve in the road, and I
understood my fate to lie in one day losing myself in cases like the
Mystery of the Chinese Junk, sailing out into dark harbors and discovering
flashing mystery lights, looking out across the slowly crashing
waves and seeing my future and my past reflected there in the water.
Solving mysteries became an addiction, the mystery life a drug I
couldn't kick. Those youth mysteries were like heroin: once hooked,
we were detectives for life, always chasing the dragon, never able to
leave that world where clues arrived unannounced and strangers
were always hidden in shadows. The end of each mystery was never
enough, because as soon as one case was over another arrived in the
form of a note in an old clock, a key inscribed into a tree, a manuscript
in a stone garden. Accompanying more seasoned sleuths on
cases, I would always be struck by a sense of jamais vu: the feeling
of not having experienced a place or action before but knowing I
should have. The whole Mystery of the Chinese Junk case was like that,
like being drowned in an unlived history that should have been
familiar and recognizable, because that was why I was there in the
first place—to find special meaning in old Chinese proverbs like
"Boat with no eyes cannot see!" to locate hidden clues on our dragon
boat of eyes and scales, to outsmart all the strange Chinese men
suddenly popping out of the woodwork all over Bayport. "Good
grief another one?" Chet muttered, seeing the man we would know as
Ti Ming approaching our docked boat, the Golden Treasure. He was
dapperly dressed in a white summer suit and straw hat, come here
to persuade us boy sleuths to sell our mystery boat for a generous
sum and, when politely refused, to offer a barely-veiled threat:
"There is an old Chinese saying that bad luck follows those who will not be reasonable,
" Ti Ming warned, his eyes slitted with annoyance. Again
with the old sayings, I said to myself, wanting to rewrite my life as
a blank slate, my history disappearing like rain falling into the ocean.
There was a mystery surrounding our boat, something about it that
all the suspects like fisherman Clams Daggett, Ti Ming, and all the
other Chinese men wanted—that much was as clear as water. The
first time our boat was tampered with, we had a full boatload of
passengers and a hole cut into the bottom of the Golden Treasure, the
work of saboteurs for sure. With buckets and fast hands, we worked
frantically to prevent the boat from overflowing with water before
we could steer ourselves back to the safety of the pier in Bayport.
More trouble followed, and the second time we faced danger out at
sea we boy sleuths were alone on board, far out into the fogdrenched
waters when our engine suddenly and mysteriously quit; it
was an eerie sensation, lying still on the water, cut off from the outside
world. We took turns ringing the junk's bell to signal for help,
and from time to time muffled sounds drifted through the swirling
mist. Adrift, surrounded by fog, we couldn't see any sign of land,
and it was easy to pretend we were the last boy detectives on earth.
Peering over the railing, all we could make out was the lapping of
waves alongside the stalled boat—white foam, kelp, and occasionally
disks of perfectly clear water, like perfect circles of eternity
passing by. Frank said they looked like whale prints, footprints left
in the ocean by whales when they surfaced near the top of the water
to breathe and exhale, and that seemed as good an explanation as
any to that mystery. I remembered public school field trips in Los
Angeles, when our class would ride a school bus down to San Pedro
Harbor to go whale watching, spotting humpback grey whales out

126
on the Pacific Ocean, returning to school with stories of seeing out
on the harbor the Love Boat sailing away and the cast of CHiPs
filming nearby, Erik Estrada and his publicist stepping aboard for a
moment to greet us inner city school children and hand out autographed
photos. And although the magic of that day would not last,
as if everything Ponch must eventually fade away, we were left
touched by the memory of that moment and its infinite possibilities,
possibilities I've been searching for throughout all my mysteries:
perfect solutions and days so ferociously full of grace, not mysteries
filled with deju vu orjamais vu or any feelings equally frenchy
and not adding up, but the kind of mystery where the ominous letter
found tucked in the old clock that chimes once every hour reads
"A. great day lies ahead in the not too distant future" and you can believe
it. Floating out in the fog by Rocky Isle, anchorless and receiving no
reply to our calls for help, we seemed lost in time and could imagine
any of our fellow sleuths appearing out of the thick mists to
save us, even those we could not save ourselves. There were so
many ghosts of the past, like Billy Wild and the Grace Sisters and
Matthew Fate, and also ghosts of the present and future, those we
knew would be casualties of the mysteries like the Lucky Wongs,
victims of an unsolved plane crash, and the Arson Twins, two brilliant
mute sisters in jail, and Dave Fearless, the Trouble Twins,
Tommy Tomorrow. Like my idol Daniel Hope and like so many
before them, out of the wreckage of their lives they built some
small bit of grace. Daniel Hope, despite being only a couple years
older than myself and the Hardys, was my role model, the kind of
sleuth I've always tried to emulate; he became a detective despite
abandonment by his parents and a childhood spent in orphanages
and foster homes, but like too many of us, lost the game of chasing
the dragon, losing himself in quiet despair and rage to become
another casualty of the mysteries. I wanted so much to be just like
him, but without the anger, and without the desperation. I was still
looking for something in the mysteries that could save me. And so
we begin again, to the moment I first stepped onto the Golden Treasure.
'Welcome aboard, honored guest, "Joe said solemnly, bowing low in
an Oriental manner, and being a good-humored Chinese-American
lad I chuckled and responded: "Boy, that's corny enough for a Grade D
movie about China!" And then we found the cuff-link of rare blue
amber, which must have fallen from a masked suspect during a
struggle on the boat's deck. We later found another blue amber
cuff-link, the twin to the first one, outside a cave in the woods, lying
in the dirt alongside a trail of footprints that we followed until they
connected with tire marks or faded out altogether. Somehow I
knew that blue amber was called 'tiger soul' in old Chinese legends,
that it was believed that when a tiger died, its spirit penetrated the
earth and turned to amber. The mystery life transformed our souls
too; living through it made us hard as rock inside, living statues of
boy and girl detectives. Looking out across the water as we were
finally towed back to shore by a coast guard boat, I knew I didn't
want to be so hard and angry just to get through this life, I didn't
want to always be in need of rescue. Tony Prito was waiting
for us on the pier as lightning flashed in the sky and from underneath
shelter he called out to us: "Hurry, fellas! The sky's going to fall
any second."
Mythologies:
The first time I met Frank and Joe Hardy I was a body buried in
leaves, a corpse lying in Dead Men's Forest. I was pretending to be
dead, covered in a layer of dried leaves while their buddies Tommy,
Nina, Chet and Nancy led them to the scene of their discovery. Joe
reached down and touched my face, brushing the dead leaves from
my closed eyes, and as he did so I opened my eyes and smiled. I rose
from that ocean of leaves and that was the beginning of the mysteries.
From then on I was an occasional sleuth, the trusted partner
when the going got tough; I saw the world that full-time boy detectives
like Frank and Joe saw everyday, and I became a part of that.
Like them, I began to see clues everywhere: mysterious colored
bubbles in the summer air, messages written in the sand, footprints
heading east, then disappearing in the haunted forest, strange bright

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lights in die night sky. It was these sort of mystery lights that our
pals Biff Hooper and Tony Prito spotted during the Mystery of the
Chinese Junk, confirming the strange old beachcomber Clams
Daggett's contention of seeing lights over Rocky Isle. 'We saw them,
too—they were blinking on and off, as if someone was sending a message in
secret code!" Tony revealed in an excited voice. So one rainy night we
boys slept in our boat the Golden Treasure, taking turns watching and
waiting for the lights to appear. 'Wow!" Joe cried out, startling the
rest of us awake. "There they are. Let's get going, fellows! Now's our chance
to find out who's sending secret signals from Rocky Isle." I was assigned the
task of staying on board our boat to guard it, watching as my
friends rushed blindly out into the rain towards the end of the wet
pier where a group of masked men jumped out of die shadows and
confronted them. My fear for diem was short-lived, because just
then I heard lightning overhead. For a moment, I was on fire. "The
Golden Treasure has been hit!!" I heard someone scream in the distance.
I was burning. After what happened, I would recall the day die mysterious
Chinese man Chin Gok appeared at the Hardys' home, stating
that he represented a religious group in China who wanted to
buy the Golden Treasure because it was a sacred boat of theological
and historical importance. As we pondered the idea, just then the
telephone rang; Frank answered it and looked at us excitedly: 'Wow!
Wait till you guys hear this!!" he whispered. It was a telegram from Ti
Ming, one of the other strange Chinese men wanting our boat, say-
ing "Don't sell the Hai Hua at any price or the curse it carries will descend
upon you." So our boat was eidier blessed or cursed, and we didn't
know which story to believe. After being struck by lightning, I
began to believe it was both: I was hit by lightning and set on fire,
but I survived. One of the boat's dragon eyes took the brunt of the
hit—the lightning destroyed it and burned die jacket I was wearing.
But I escaped disaster, one of those people about whom they could
say: And he walked away. He lived to tell the tale. And by joining the cult
of boy detectives, I was trying to walk away from a past, to rewrite
a life. Bayport and the Los Angeles I came from—it was a tale of
two cities. That L.A. was not how it is today, remade by retroactive
continuity into Silver Lake, a place of tattooed and body-pierced
artists. Back then, it was a place you wouldn't want so permanendy
carved into yourself: it was a place existing only to escape. All my
life I've tried to rewrite myself, looking for the tool to make it happen—I
was Jan Brady searching for a typewriter that dropped its j/'s,
a boy detective searching for the source that produced a typewritten
clue. In the Chinese Junk case we received just such a note; for
a while we suspected Clams Daggett, the weird old fisherman who
haunted the bay, and we even broke into his house while Chet distracted
him, to check on his typewriter. What we found was a house
full of junk: piles of notes and books stacked high, stacks of back
issue magazines piled about the floor, a museum of items salvaged
while beachcombing—a boat anchor with a broken fluke, numerous
carvings of driftwood, coils of hemp line—and, sitting atop an
old orange crate, an old beaten typewriter that most definitely didn't
match the one we were looking for. The odd house was bursting
with an old man's weird imagination—the books and magazines
revealed the old kook was a voracious reader, and stranger yet, the
piles of pages stacked next to his typewriter revealed that he was
writing what appeared to be a Tom Clancy-type novel. I read a section:
it was about a man living near the beach, confronted by government
conspiracy mysteries and butting heads with a band of
know-it-all kids who were apparently clueless about the scope of
the web of espionage and intrigue surrounding their little world; the
man was depicted as not perfect, just an average joe trying to keep
sane in an insane world. Like the protagonist of that book, I was
trying to keep my head above it all, even when I knew all along—
whether under water or buried beneath leaves—I was always close
to drowning.
Mythologies: Three
As future detectives, we stood out from other children growing up.
We were the ones who went to school with black fingerprint dust
staining our hands, the ones drowsy from nights spent looking over

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130
clues. We were the children who never met a corpse we didn't find
interesting, the ones other children hated because we had to know
all the answers. Somehow we knew we were heading someplace
with our overactive curiosity, even if we didn't know for sure where.
We were Becoming X, we told ourselves, and someday we would
know what that meant. And then came the day when we were
rewarded. One by one we were blindfolded and led down stairs.
When we could see once again, we were in a smoky room of dim
lights—it smelled like magic. We took the pledge of the secret society
of teen sleuths, learned the secret codes and signals, memorized
sacred oaths and rituals. We received a special spyglass and were
schooled in all the secret handshakes. We would place our coven of
mystery solvers above all else: our government, god and family. X
became known: we were true detectives at last. Our fingers were
pricked and our blood smeared on a photo of Diana Wise, one of
the first teen detectives to die in service, fallen during The Mystery in
the Hidden Woods. We held the photo of the girl sleuth in our hands
and it was set on fire. From that moment on, we were changed, our
earlier ordinary lives now buried and forgotten like a relic of the
past. We left that life like a burning building.
Mythologies: Nine
We were a dying breed. Our detective tribe was dwindling, heading
towards the year 2000 and into the next millennium with our numbers
growing smaller each year. One day we will be gone entirely—
a time will come when all that remains are hidden clues to our previous
existence, vestiges like the clues to those 50-year-old, 100year-old
mysteries we'd encounter: cases left unsolved for decades,
reappearing by chance in times when no one is left to care about the
solving. There was a spookiness to those cases—each a mystery
with only a center and nothing else to it, all meaning grown old and
brittle, the value of finding a solution lost. 75-year-old unsolved
Exhibit 3
Active Teen Detective Population in the U.S.
(figures for 1998-2002 are projected)
I Active Sleuths Source: Marshall Brady Archives
child murders, where the child if alive would be no more, having
disappeared into grizzled old age.
Our imminent extinction is inevitable, according to figures
compiled by Marshall Brady, librarian boy detective and archivist for
the group. The active teen detective population, which includes us
in our 20's who remain alive, has shown a steady decrease since the
early 1980's, with projected figures for the new millennium showing
this trend continuing. Like animals, we are dying out.
In my youth, there was an ebb and flow to life, like the graphs
and charts that now mark our decline. We knew we were not the
first, and we would not be the last. On every adventure we'd discover
some new sleuth, a new friend with his or her own special
gimmicks and way of solving cases. Now the idea of the last teen
detective on earth—looking for answers in the thin light left as to
the whereabouts of those before him or her—is not so incredible.
One day this last sleuth might dig us up from the ground. Like

132
dinosaurs, all that would be left of us is piles of bones in the teen
sleuth graveyard.
And maybe that would be the last mystery: the last teen sleuth
could lie down and die then and there, the very final mystery solved.
Our story will have ended, the last of us come home to join us, the
new millennium's light shining on old bones.
Mythologies: Twenty-One
The Bronze Garden: A Lost Story
In the fading light of the day, sitting at the edge of the gardens, the
boy rushes to finish his entry in his red journal. Nearby are the statues—the
figures of glass and bronze and gold and stone which
inhabit these gardens. None of the statues smile, but in the sun they
glisten and at night they glimmer, each one a girl or boy caught in
motion, frozen. At times, the boy thinks, they appear to whisper to
one another, as if planning in secrecy their long-awaited escape from
this garden into which they had once blundered and been trapped.
The boy continues to write, and he begins a passage about how he
came here, to the gardens. He writes about the house where he lives
now, about the food that is plentiful and his free time spent doing
whatever he pleases, about his new clothes and all the things, material
and immaterial, that he now has. And then, this passage written,
the boy ponders his situation, wondering how he could ever have
lived without these things, and then a look of fear grows upon his
face, suddenly, because he realizes that he can still remember that life
before, how it was.
The boy orders his mind to stop thinking about the past, and
he continues writing. s4s important as a boy's first sex is a boy's first money,
he writes, recalling the thrill and novelty of a bank deposit, the wild
sensation of having money in the bank to call one's own, and while
the thought that what he has now is not really his briefly enters the
boy's mind, he pushes it away, distracted by the fading of the light
as thunderclouds appear overhead.
/ need a raincoat, the boy thinks, and he continues to write until
the heavy raindrops fall and the ink on the recently written page
smears, the words a blur now, unreadable. And finally, the boy
decides: / need to get out of the rain.
The next day, after the rain has passed, the boy walks out into the
garden of bronze. The statues, he sees, are all wet and glistening,
and he feels among them an energy, as if it were possible at any
moment for all of them to break free of their enchantment, to
awaken from their dreaming.
The boy moves towards the center of the garden, to find the
statue that seems to call to him. He finds it, the statue of the boy
that resembles him—the statue that is like looking in a mirror. He
runs his hands over its hair of sculpted bronze, he brushes the wet
leaves off its face, and he sees his own face there.
The boy touches the statue, tries to picture the living person it
once was, tries to imagine the being of flesh and blood, the person
full of fears and wants and temptations.
And the boy knows that if he stays here he will one day become
like this also: a boy frozen in a pose, a body caught in bronze and
planted here in the gardens. The boy knows all this, but he also
knows that for anything worth having, there is always the price.

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144
—AIMEE BENDER
Els a Minor
ELSA WENT TO SEE THE DOCTOR FOR DEPRESSION.
"I have disappeared," she told him, "I feel invisible. No one
sees me. Your secretary never even called my name."
"Then how did you get in here?" he asked.
"I walked right past him," Elsa said, "I even sneezed, but he
didn't say a word."
The doctor shifted once in his chair and looked past Elsa to the
door. His forehead was deep in thought.
"Elsa," he said after a minute, "I believe I have just the thing
for you."
He reached into his top desk drawer and, after shuffling a few
things around, removed from it a *.
"Elsa," he said, presenting it to her solemnly, "I feel certain that
this is the answer to your troubles."
"An asterisk?" Elsa asked, voice rising in confusion.
"No, no," said the doctor, "it's a * for you, Elsa. A guiding *."
She sank down deeper into the leather chair. The * was on a
scissors-cut corner of lined paper, college ruled, with one notebook
hole showing. It looked very ordinary. "What will I do with a typewritten
*?" she asked, "how will that make me less invisible?" She
felt her body moving towards tears. She did not want to cry. She
cried so much lately. She had even stopped drinking water except
little sips during meals because she thought this might curb the
problem. It didn't. Now she just cried and was dehydrated, too.
The doctor coughed. "Elsa," he said, "one never knows about
the hidden power of a *. Have a little faith, and I'm sure it will be
of use."
So Elsa left the brown office with the * and went into the day.
The sun was glaring and Third Street was filled with visible types:
sweat-glazed taxi drivers who honked, women in dark sunglasses,
short children with tall balloons. Elsa weaved her way through the
crowd, eyes on the sidewalk. She closed her hands like a prayer over
the*.
Well, she thought, a * belongs in the sky. She looked up. The
day was overcast. Bending her knees, she threw her * up into the
air, over the heads of the people, into the clouds. She watched it
closely, hoping it would rise, that somehow it would magically lift
itself high, soar past the clouds and fix onto the dome above
her—then it could be her guardian *, her * to wish on, her own
special constellation complete with notebook hole and lines. Elsa
Minor. But the paper just fluttered down into the street, side to
side on the air like a pendulum, and Elsa had to risk her life in traffic
to get it back. Not one of the sweaty drivers honked at her.
She slid the slightly dirtied * into her pocket and found a phone
booth near a fish shop on Wilshire.
"Dr. ," she told the telephone receiver, "I really don't think
this is working."
"Elsa," he replied, "you're trying too hard. Let the * guide you.
Don't guide the *."
She hung up the phone. She looked at the little piece of paper.
"Guide me," she said to it. It sat calmly on her palm, corners curling
slightly in the wind.
It blew off her hand into the fish shop. Thrilled at this sign of
destiny, Elsa followed it inside, peeling it carefully off the tile. In the
back of the store, past rows and rows of glassy fish eyes, she found
a starfish on ice. She put her little * on top of the starfish. This is
it, she said to herself encouragingly, here it is, right here. The solution
to my woes. She stared at the * on the starfish, trying to find
the combination comforting, five tiny prongs on five triangle legs,
her darling piggy-back paper. She felt worse. It made her feel worse
that this lovely starfish was dead on ice in a fish store and she'd

146
never heard of anyone eating starfish, so clearly it was dead for no
reason. She picked up a piece of ice and rubbed it to water in her
fingers. No one asked if she needed help.
Returning the slightly wet * to her pocket, she left the store. On
the street, she passed a homeless man wrapped in an afghan and
asked him: would you have any use for a typewritten *? and he said
No and in fact looked offended. She gave him a dollar. He offered
to clean her windows, but she said: I have no windows on me, I'm
just a person. This seemed to offend him more. He gave her back
her dollar.
She called up Dr. again. "I'm so unhappy," she said when
he picked up.
It was his machine. She listened to the whole message, and
when it beeped, she said it louder. "I'm so unhappy," she stated.
"This is Elsa here." He didn't pick up. She thought he might be lecturing
the secretary for letting her in at all. What do you mean you
didn't see her? he'd be saying. And the secretary would shake his
head over and over. There was no one, he'd say, I have great vision.
I am Mr. 20/20, and that waiting room was empty.
Crossing the intersection, the smell of fish still heavy in her
nose, Elsa followed Wilshire westward, towards the water. She
could see the straight line of ocean split into blue batons by the
buildings. She walked the three blocks, found the slope downward,
and walked in heavy steps until she was right at the water's edge.
Waves crashed down, leaving skins of sizzling foam on the sand.
"Everything is so big," she told a fast jogger with a walkman
on, "it's all so big and this * is so small."
She sat down on the wet sand. Water crept inside her pants. She
removed the * from her pocket, to protect it from smearing, and
examined it. It was smaller than a fly. It did not twinkle a bit.
A man passed by, holding an E.
"Hello," he said, "what do you have there?"
She turned the paper around and showed him.
"Oh, a *," he said, "that's nice. I've just received an E." He held
it up. It was the size of his thumb, and made of gray plastic.
"From Dr. ?" Elsa asked.
"No," he said, dodging the creeping foam, "no, it came in die mail."
"Really?" Elsa cocked her head to one side. "Was it postmarked?"
He shook his head. "No," he said, "no postmark but there was
a stamp."
"Curious," she said, "I've never received a letter in the mail
before—I mean I've received a letter, but not a letter—you know
what I mean." She looked down.
"I know," he said, "me neither."
She looked up again. He was watching her. "You know, my
name begins with that," she said, pointing. "My name is Elsa."
"Really?" he said. He walked next to her. "Can I sit down,
Elsa?" She nodded. He shifted a little on the sand. "Wet," he said.
He held up his E and she held up her *.
Leaning forward, he wrote with his index finger in the wet
sand. Elsa looked on with interest. He wrote E and then spelled
out S-T-A-R.
"E-star," said Elsa.
"Easter?" he said.
She felt that quick sickening feeling of despair leak into her
body again. "But I'm Jewish," she said. Her eyes started to overflow.
The man glanced at her and looked back at the word. A sand
crab scurried out from the point of the A.
"Wait," he said, "wait, Elsa, we can change it." He filled in the
E with wet sand.
Elsa watched, sniffling a bit. "Try it at the end," she said.
He did. "There." He looked at her. "See, there we go."
Now it said S-T-A-R E.
"How funny that is," said Elsa, hugging her knees to her chest.
"Of all things to spell."
The man wiped his hands on his shirt.
"But stare at what?" she asked, "that part is unclear."
Twisting a bit, he faced her. Foam continued to sputter nearby.
He fixed his brown eyes on hers.
Elsa squirmed a little. "You can stare at the ocean," she said,
"you don't have to pick me, I mean, I'm going to stare at the lifeguard
station, see, there it is, it's empty."
"I don't want to stare at a lifeguard station," he said, "that's bor-

148
ing. Your left eye is bigger than your right."
"That's true." Elsa's voice wavered.
"Now your eyes are watering up again."
"I know." A couple more tears spilled out.
"What is it?" he asked. His forehead wrinkled. "Should I stop?"
"No," Elsa said, wiping her cheek, "please don't. I love it." Her
eyes flickered back and forth, from lifeguard station to his face,
finally settling on his shoulder.
"There's a stain on your shirt," she said.
"Your ears are uneven."
"It looks like tomato."
"There's something about your teeth," he offered.
"Please," she said, "please, tell."
"They're all jammed together."
"You're right." Elsa smiled, revealing the crowd. Another jogger
breathed by.
"I blinked," she told him.
"I saw. Your eyelashes are short," he said, and she laughed.
—JAMES PENHA
Dust and Stone
adapted from 'Sangkuriang,' an Indonesian folk tale
AFTER A RIVAL'S MAGIC TRANSFORMED a young Wizard into a common
dog, the latter went out from his village to the jungle where he
attempted to revoke his canine form through self-metamorphosis.
This sorcery failed, as would all conjurations requiring the twitch of
a thumb or the pointing of an index finger.
But luckily, the Wizard did retain enough vocal control to
shape his barks into words. Abetted by the spin of a tail or the
point of a snout, he tried casting some simpler spells. His abracadabra
halted a sparrow in mid-air. His astaga turned dew into
lace. An orchid whistled to his magic lyrics. But the Wizard failed
miserably to articulate the enchanted tongue-twister meant to gild
a great teak. He howled like an adolescent hound. The tree shook
wildly before it fell, destroying a nest of siamang monkeys hidden
in its branches and clobbering a man making his way through the
jungle.
The Wizard had always railed against harmful magic; indeed,
this was the argument that had so enraged his evil rival. Guilt-ridden
now, the Wizard ran to help the monkeys. He found them weepy
but unhurt. The dog apologized for his carelessness and promised
the aid of his talents, such as they were, forever. No pledges, however,
could revive the human. The Wizard-dog followed the man's
scent so that he might make amends to the family whose head he
had killed.

Ul
a.
150
When night cloaked die small hut on die riverbank, Nur felt her
nervous heart beat even more rapidly. Her husband had not yet
returned. Nur feared he had tarried too long at the waning, where he
loved to talk, to gamble, and to drink palm wine.
"If he comes home drunk," Nur said to the night, "and beats
me again, I'll ... I'll ... do something." She picked up a carving
knife from the kitchen table and wrapped it in the folds of her
sarong.
That a woman as virtuous and long-suffering as Nur considered
attacking another being, even in self-defense, was evidence of
the cruelty widi which her husband treated his 'little pig.'
In truth, Nur was hardly a handsome woman, and many eligible
men had ignored her virtues in search of pretty faces and supple
bodies.
When Nur had passed her thirtieth virginal year, her father
promised her to Yusri, the village lout who had, by way of inheritance,
an ample dowry to offer.
Nur complied without objection. What other choice had she?
She consoled herself with dreams of the children she would bear
and love.
Yusri dashed these dreams. When drink didn't defuse her husband's
potency, chance or genetics failed him. Tonight, Nur knew,
any attentions offered by her husband would hurt. She sat trembling
when she heard footsteps disturb die gravel outside her home.
But instead of a belch and a bellow, a scratching sounded upon the
door. A yelp. An oddly sung "Hello, I have news of the man of this
house."
Nur approached the door, but didn't open it for fear of a trickster.
"What news?" she shouted.
As much as his announcement deserved face-to-face delivery,
the Wizard-dog recognized the wisdom in speaking before being
seen: "The man of this house is dead. Killed by my carelessness. I
stand ready to make restitution."
Blood reddened Nur's face. "If what you say of my husband is
so, I think I should pay you. But how shall I believe this news?"
The Wizard replied, "If you have stomach for strong evidence,
madam, open the door an iota and see."
Nur narrowly opened the door. She saw the finger that had so
often struck her cheek. And around it her husband's marriage band.
The Wizard apologized for the grisly evidence, but, he explained, he
could offer nothing else so conclusive.
"And surely my grisly marriage is likewise sundered," cried Nur.
She swung wide the door to welcome her deliverer. "Dog? Talking
dog? I am deceived by magicians. Oh, my husband is not really
dead! Kill me now before my words are reported to him." Nur collapsed
in a pitiable pile.
The Wizard gently licked her face to revive and reassure her.
"Magicians are at work in the world, but desperate lady, you are a
widow in fact."
Nur looked into the dog's eyes. She saw humanity. And because
she did, the Wizard realized that at midnight he might try, to be
human again.
While sharing the dinner prepared for her late husband, Nur
heard the Wizard's tale of his own transformation through to the
ultimate demise of her husband. Unsure of his nocturnal power,
the dog did not hint at what he hoped might take place at twelve
o'clock.
Anticipating her most peaceful rest in years, Nur lay on her bed.
She invited die Wizard to curl up at an edge of the mattress.
Long before dawn, Nur dreamed of a dog whimpering for
mankind. A dream and no dream: the Wizard-dog that midnight
bayed an ancient cry for humanity!
Nur was not certain that she had awakened when she saw her
bedfellow stretch himself into a young man of extraordinary beauty,
naked as the dog he had been.
"Are you dog or god or devil or man?" Nur asked.
"Had I the power of a god or a devil, I should make myself
man for good, but only in your eyes between midnight and dawn
can I appear human. For the rest I remain a dog."
"You look like a god."
"I am the one whom you wish to see."
"I see you. I know I do. What shall I call you?"
"Wizard, a name appropriate to all my lives. And how shall we
spend these hours before dawn?"

152
The question was polite, if rhetorical. Nur deserved the love of
a good man, and she wanted a child. Wizard lived as a man only for
her. And only for a few hours each night.
When at dawn the sound of the threshing of the rice thundered
with the power of every wife of every homestead in the area,
Wizard, a dog, recoiled panting into a corner of Nur's bed. Nur petted
him, nuzzled him, and told him she knew he would soon be a
father.
Nur's pregnancy caused no scandal in the village since all
assumed the child was the legacy of Nur's late husband. But the
neighbors did notice that, in pregnancy, Nur had taken on a glow
that obscured her ugliness.
Impending motherhood did beautify Nur, but more important
was the Wizard's incantation: "Dear Nur, just as I am the one whom
you see, so you shall be the one whom I see: at each midnight a
woman perfectly lovely and forever young ... at each dawn even
lovelier and more vibrant."
Suhardi, like all sons, thought his mother eternally beautiful. In
order to care for her, by the age of twelve, he had taken on the
chores of a young man twice his age. He had resolved to live up to
the reputation of his late father Yusri, the bold and canny hunter
his mother had imagined for him in dozens of tales that nurtured
his childhood.
As she created a legendary Yusri for Suhar to love, Nur hid
from the boy any hint of the nightly visits by his biological father
to her room.
One afternoon, Suhar roamed the jungle with his slingshot
and a bag of well-chosen stones tied in a sack around his waist.
He had often killed a jungle chicken or a savory peacock with a
single rock. But this day, he allowed several such birds to survive
his passing. He needed a new challenge. Near the river, he heard
the call of the siamang monkeys in the canopy. Siamang! What a
wonderful treat to fry and drop into the curry sauce tonight! How
his mother would smile when she tasted real red meat! How
proud he would make her! How well he would wear his father's
mantle!
Suhar hid among the stalks of bamboo at the riverside until he
was sure the monkeys had forgotten him. Quietly he felt for a rock
and placed it in the girdle of his sling. He aimed it at the big male
jabbering atop a thick branch. Suhar stretched the band and let the
stone fly.
The monkey screamed in pain and fell writhing to the ground.
Suhar raced toward him.
Simian cries roused Wizard from his daytime lair in the jungle.
Awakened too were the dog's promises. He raced to aid the monkeys.
Finding a siamang winded and wounded, the Wizard offered
a healing spell. Within minutes, the monkey and his tribe escaped.
And so Suhardi settled for a dog, using another hefty stone from his
bag to kill it.
Suhardi butchered the animal on the spot. At home, while his
mother took in the sun-dried laundry, he fried the meat with garlic,
onion, and chili and slipped it into the pot of curry sauce simmering
on the fire.
Later, at dinner, Suhar swallowed a grin along with his rice as
he awaited his mother's discovery.
"Oh? Oh! what a wonder greets my tongue, Suhar. I didn't prepare
anything this succulent in my stew. Did you bag another bird?
No, no. This is no fowl. Although we haven't had it in months, I
know meat when I taste it! Oh, my son, have you graduated to a
mastery over rabbits?"
"Not so common, mother. My prey was a siamang monkey, but
instead I found a dog."
The blood drained from Nur's face as die curry spilled from her
fingers. "You found a dog? You mean you killed a dog?"
Suhardi nodded, unsure how to take the strain in his mother's
voice.
"You mean we are eating a dog?"
"Yes, mother, I have provided for you as my father would
have."
Nur slowly rose, raised her hands prayerfully to her face, and
paused. After a quiet moment, she dropped her hands into the bowl

154
of curry, raised up a pile of meat, sobbed loudly, and buried her
face into the dog.
"Mother?"
"Leave me alone."
"Mother?"
"LEAVE ME ... alone."
Suhardi, confused and pained, left the table and the hut. He
spent the night walking the jungle, talking to himself and to the
father he thought was his.
When he returned at dawn, he found his mother in front of
their hut.
Nur of course had hoped that her son had killed a dog other
than her lover, other than his father. But when Wizard failed to find
her bed that night for the first time since they had met, she knew
what their son had done. And she knew she could neither bear to
tell him nor bear to live with the parricide.
"You will leave me and this house now, Suhardi, never to
return. I pray you are your father's son, for if so, you will find a way
to survive." Nur entered the house, and closed the door between
her son and her.
It was fifteen years before Suhar disobeyed his mother's edict. In
that time he proved himself something of a wizard in charm and
commerce. The rich and powerful become used to getting what
they want, and Suhar decided he wanted to recapture the blessing
of his mother. He dressed himself in princely habiliments and gathered
in a casket the jewels of his collection of gems. He meant to
dazzle Nur. So as not to alert the countryside or, too far in advance,
his mother, he traveled in a simple coach with only a driver for an
entourage.
How easily he directed the coachman through well-remembered
paths of the jungle to the door of his childhood home. Suhar
left the coach, approached the door, straightened his array, slicked
his hair, paused, swallowed, and knocked.
A sweetly youthful voice responded "In a moment." The
female who opened the door looked no more than sixteen—and
was, thought Suhar, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Forgetting
all but the casket in his hands and the face in his vision,
Suhar offered his cache of jewels to the girl and said, "You shall be
my wife."
"I cannot, sire."
"Why not? You cannot yet have a husband. Are you already
promised? My wealth alters pledges."
"I am not married. I am not promised. Nor shall I be to you,
sire. Please save your gifts. I have no need for jewels."
"Where is the woman of this house? Where is my mother, Ibu
Nur? If you are in her charge, you may wear these jewels yet."
"Only the spirit of Ibu Nur, " said the girl, "inhabits this house.
Her body is no more."
Suhar wept for his mother, for he failed to discern the girl's dissembling.
She was herself Nur, altered by the beneficent spell of
her loving Wizard. Nur, of course, recognized Suhardi and would
in no way submit to him.
Every day, one of Suhar's retainers, summoned by a messenger,
brought new gifts to lay at the doorway of the modest cottage: silks
and orchids, perfumes and holy waters, cattle and birds of paradise.
And every evening, Suhar proposed. Villagers gathered to watch the
colorful drama as, centuries later, their descendants would assemble
to watch flickers of light on a sail. Nur appreciated the discretion of
her friends and neighbors in not revealing the truth of her identity
to the persistent suitor, but she despaired that her life had become
a carnival.
And so one evening, in response to Suhar's ninety-ninth plea—
preceded by the presentation of a pink tiger from Borneo—Nur
told Suhar, "I will marry you tomorrow.
"But only if you prove yourself. Material gifts mean little. However,
if you can devote yourself to a project special to me, I shall
yield.
"Before tomorrow's dawn—before you hear the sound of the
threshing of the rice thundering with the power of every wife of
every homestead in the area . . . sculpt that great granite island in
the center of the river into the image of a magnificent dog."
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"I can do it. I will do it. What sort of dog?" asked Suhar.
"Choose one from your own imagination or from your memory.
Have you the memory of a dog?"
"I do—one seen just before I left this house fifteen years ago."
"Recreate it. There in the river. Finish it before dawn, and I
shall marry you."
Suhar gathered together the ninety-nine retainers who had
remained in the village after delivering the various gifts. None
were sculptors, but Suhar organized them to carry out the chores
that, under Suhar's direction, could make massive his memory of
a dog.
Nur sat beneath a tree by the shore of the river. She shook to
see the rapid progress of the project. By nine o'clock, the Wizard's
paws took their stand on the island; by ten, the moonlight shone
between its face and its body; by eleven, its tail pointed to the
southern cross; by midnight, Nur discerned carved spots along
the back of the great animal. By three, even though an overcast
sky darkened the night, Nur apprehended the Wizard's aspect.
Fearing for her gamble and her fate, she left the river and made
for the village.
Meanwhile, Suhar smiled confidently atop the Wizard's head
where he chiseled the last details. The race would be tight, but Suhar
knew the finish would precede dawn.
In tlie midst of his carving of the droop of the Wizard's ear,
he heard what he hoped was merely the echo of his work. He suspended
the taps of his tools so mat he might listen for silence. Still
he heard the echo. "Quiet! Cease working!" he yelled to his men,
even though he knew the project would thus lose precious minutes
of labor. The echo continued. It was of course no echo.
Suhar cast his gaze toward the horizon. Cloud cover made
the progress of the sun indistinct, but the smell and shadow of
dusty smoke confirmed Suhar's fear: Every housewife of every
homestead was threshing rice. The day had begun. It must be
dawn.
Suhar leaned on the unfinished ear. When the sun finally
burned through the haze, he saw the plumes of rice dust whisper to
the sky. And Suhar quietly left the island, the river, the village, and
the jungle forever.
Nur distributed Suhardi's neglected gifts among her neighbors
to thank them for their willingness to begin their labors ten minutes
early. Nur herself lived quietly in the shadow of the great stone dog
until time, powerless to age her, nonetheless took Nur to itself and
to the Wizard.
157

158
-FELICIA MITCHELL
Venus of Meadowview
My body was round once,
my stomach an inner tube
in the sea of my pregnancy.
Even my legs inflated
to keep me afloat with child
as I looked down and watched
my breasts drifting away from
my center of gravity to my son's.
Now there is nothing left,
save a few ripples of flesh
and some silver streaks
that emerge when I bathe.
But I remember my belly floating.
I remember holding onto it for dear life.
—FELICIA MITCHELL
Nudist Lady with Swan Sunglasses
after Diane Arbus
I didn't come to this camp
to advertise my body,
just to let it air out
and loose all its stays.
So when that swan leapt at me
like my own tomcat in heat,
I was annoyed.
But I can tell you now,
swans do not sing sweetly
before they die.
The sound is more like
a tire going flat,
or flatulence.
These glasses are my trophy.
I carved them from what was left
of that swan's bill and bones
after I got through with him.
They don't really count
as clothes.

UI
160
-ANNETTE SLOAN —CHARLES HARPER WEBB
Calamity Jane
Ask who she was and what she did,
no one will know exactly, except
she rode a time and place
when legends were as makeshift
as the towns. A frontier says
So Far and then To Here,
prodigality then tedium. The cowboys
called her scout and later, whore.
But that much anyone might guess.
Better to learn the anecdotes
that she contrived beside the point,
after the fact of her endurance.
Who was outnumbered, shooting from behind
the wagon wheel? Who jumped from the silo
of the burning barn? How could she answer
Martha Jane Canary Burke, Anjelica Huston,
or Doris Day?
My dear, if I were your biographer
I'd say who names herself so cleverly
will be her own worst luck. When you
have your baby in a cave, Wild Bill
will ride over the horizon to respectability,
and you will join a circus.
The girl, your only child, sent to school in England,
tosses out your letters scarcely read,
finding them long and cautionary
and always sentimental.
Rat Defeated in a Landslide
When he's nominated, pundits are amazed. What were the
party bosses thinking?
But Rat is confident. He knows where the country should
go, and how to get there.
He knows how to mark his territory with urine. His huge
balls pendulate for all to see.
He campaigns well, equally at home in gutter or chateau. He
eats offal as easily as lobster quiche.
"I'm a survivor," he says. Yet he is capable of sacrifice, like
his siblings who died for research.
True, some people hate his tail. But a mink sleeve can cover that.
His biggest drawback is his name. "Don't trust that rat," people
warn. "What a rat," they say of enemies.
Well, he can rise above such prejudice. His success will wash
away all memory of plague and typhus, lice and fleas, chewed furniture,
babies gnawed to death in cribs, nibbled wires causing
conflagrations!
Our nation's floundering; Rat offers solid ground. Our nation's
clueless; Rat has answers. Our nation's flailing aimlessly; Rat has a plan.
He makes a nest by shredding newspapers that predict his
defeat. Election day, he votes early, then returns to the nest, where
he waits with his family for the returns.
Exit polls have him losing 9 to 1. "You could run a cockroach
and get ten percent," one commentator quips as state after state
slips down his opponent's hole.
The final vote: 50 to 0. The first shut-out in U.S. history.
Rat congratulates his opponent, and graciously accepts the
people's will.
Not so the bosses. "Rat—you're finished," they rail, pluck him
up by the neck, and drop him in a cage with the new candidate
they're grooming: handsome, muscular, seven-foot-long Snake.
16

UI
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—YOJO (AMY SHAW)
Ragnarock
Snow met November's left-over grass
nervously, stayed for a second, and left
a drop of water for winter to drink.
All I can remember is a sleepy Norse legend
of snow falling, never stopping—
most quiet
gentle
white
apocalypse.
It's 4 AM: Your eyelids trusting
my fingers—Your hipbones
hiding between
my thighs—your face
opening up for
mine. You
were letting me love
into you I was
sure I could
hear the snow.
—MARY O'CONNELL
Saint Catherine Laboure
A MONARCH BUTTERFLY. Skull and crossbones. An exploding heart.
Red roses. Wylie Coyote. Zoe's Exotic Skin Art and Piercing is wallpapered
with beautiful possibilities. Welcome. Sprite or Coffee?
Take a look inside the binder on the coffee table, where you'll find
photographs of piercings: eyebrow, tongue, nipple, clitoral hood,
and the famed Prince Albert, worth taking a peek at if you've never
been with a well-pierced man.
But you're shaking your head. You have no interest in punching
another hole in your body; you'll stick with your pierced ears and
nose. How sad you look! Despondent, really. All this gray and rain.
Yes, I think a tattoo would cheer you up. You're clutching a rumpled
picture of the yin yang sign, big as a silver dollar, which you'd like
tattooed on your lower back. Perfect! Follow me to the back room,
my inner sanctum. Sit here on the padded table, which is swathed in
hygienic paper. Yes, it is rather like a gynecologist's office, but I think
you'll find getting a tattoo more pleasurable than a pap smear. And
I am an immaculate worker—there is zero risk of infection. Look at
the Comet-scrubbed counters and sink! I use only disposable needles
and ink caps, and my tattoo gun is fresh from the autoclave,
where devilish heat renders all instruments sterile.
Relax. Take off your shirt, leave on your bra.
You're having second thoughts about the yin yang sign?
Instead, you might honor your favorite band by tattooing the Seven
Year Bitch logo on your ankle? I'm not so into these new bands; I'm
a Stevie Wonder woman myself. I'll have to take your word that
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Seven Year Bitch is the bomb. But cruelly, the road from au courant
to corny is unpredictable. Imagine a middle-aged lady like me with
the Rolling Stones tongue licking her veiny ankle or the "Keep on
Truckin"' sign tattooed on her ass.
Forgive me. I see this last image troubles you.
Let me suggest another possibility, for in truth, I am more
than a skin artist. I am Saint Catherine Laboure, and the glorious
miraculous medallion is my trademark design. Clearly, though, I
have revealed myself too soon, because I see the smirk beyond
your smile, the phrase forming in your mind: Oh holy shit, it's Our
Lady of the Tattoo Parlor.
But wait, look at the yin yang sign in your hand. Watch it lose
its black and white symmetry as it transforms into your mother's
senior yearbook picture. She is one year younger than you are now
and seized by teenage lushness: her hair flows in perfect, glossy
waves, her skin is a dream. You've admired your mother's angora
sweater, but you've never noticed her necklace, a thin chain anchoring
a small silver medallion. Look closely: carved in the medallion is
a picture of die Virgin Mary arced by the words, 0 Blessed Mother,
protect us 1 .'On the flip side of the medallion, a delicate M intertwines
a cross, and there are two hearts, one crowned and one pierced with
a sword. Stars float in the background. This is a miraculous medallion,
conceived by none other than the Blessed Virgin Mother herself.
Your own mother wore her medallion religiously until the winter
morning she flung it into the frigid waters of Lake Okaboji.
Your hands tremble. I didn't mean to starde you with my saintly
animation. I sought you out because your sorrow has been mine.
Your mother died two years ago today of a heart attack—a death for
old men who enjoy fatty pork sandwiches and Lucky Strikes, not a
thirty-four-year-old vegetarian. You sit in lecture halls and wonder
again and again, until the wondering becomes its own yearning language—why
would God allow your motfier to die? She was your
whole family. Your father is merely a check that comes once a month,
a distant figure in the background of your childhood snapshots. You
imagined that at college you would metamorphasize into a whole new
creature: clever, beautiful, mysterious and happy. But in this new
place, your sorrow is so fresh. Your mother has died all over again.
This morning you skipped your classes and strolled downtown,
fixing your pained, gentle gaze at the shop windows. You stared
through the frosted glass at Ray's Guns and Ammo, watching a man
in an orange hunting vest point a rifle at the deer head mounted
above the cash register. You stopped at the Love Garden and
flipped wearily through the used CD's. At Sugartown Traders you
tugged on a vintage cocktail dress, though all your joints mysteriously
ached. The dress was too small. At Paradise cafe, you sat at
the bar and popped a few dexatrim before ordering a double
expresso and turtle cheesecake. And then you walked next door, to
Zoe's Exotic Skin Arts, and found me waiting.
I hope my knowledge doesn't frighten you. And I'm sorry I
convinced you to take off your shirt and then startled you. In retrospect
it seems like a boy's cruel trick. Now, while I snap on my
rubber gloves, let me assure you that this is not a mere alien
encounter. You are, in fact, having an authentic religious visitation.
And to think you laughed at news reports of that lady in Oregon
who claimed her stone statue of the Virgin wept salty tears and
blood! Certainly you are not being tapped for sainthood, nor am I
about to relay a cryptic message from the Lord. I'm only here to
influence your choice of a tattoo, my contribution to the story of
your body. While a dermatologist can blast away the tattoo, this procedure
is painful, and has uncertain results, for what is seared into
the skin is always remembered.
Seared! That's just a figure of speech. A tattoo is a mere ink
injection. And your tattoo will be so beautiful! Nearly as gorgeous
as the event that inspired it, which is my own story.
I was born in France in 1806 and baptized as Zoe Laboure. I
enjoyed a happy infancy and early childhood until I was eight years
old, and my mother died. My father did not understand the hard
sorrows of a child, and so my consolation during this dark time was
my beloved sister Louisa. But two years after my mother died,
Louisa left home to join the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de
Paul. And then my life spiraled into perpetual housework and
despair. It was cooking meals for my father and the two of us eating
in silence; it was me at the kitchen window, drinking cold tea and
praying for my sister to return. And so I dreamed of joining the Sis-
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166
ters of Charity, not because a passion for Jesus flamed in my heart,
or because I felt particularly suited to the vocation. I simply missed
my sister and imagined a happier life with her. My father raised
much opposition to my joining Louisa, for with me gone, who
would care for him? Finally, at the great age of twenty-four, with his
grudging permission, I joined the Sisters.
My first morning at Saint Vincent de Paul, the Reverend Mother
granted my sister and me a rare private visit in the garden. I flung
myself onto Louisa and held her for one glorious second. After all
our years apart, there we were: the Laboure girls, shrouded from the
world by a heaven of buttercups, snowball hydrangea, roses and
sprays of wild blue veronica. But Louisa broke the spell with a dry
kiss to my cheek. She pulled my hands from her waist.
"I shall love you no more than my other sisters of Saint Vincent
de Paul," Louisa announced.
I stepped back and looked at her with my mouth hanging open,
recalling tender scenes from our girlhood: Louisa and I lying in the
cold grass with our mother on a starry autumn night, a simple game
called hide the boot that sent us into hysterics, die triumphant day
our skinny torn cat wandered back home, waking on Saint Valentine's
day to find our bed covered with pale pink hearts our mother
had cut from tissue paper and sprinkled with confectioner's sugar.
"But Louisa," I said, "we really are sisters."
Her girlhood beauty was gone. A wrinkle gripped the skin
between her eyebrows like a hawk's claw.
"Poor, poor Zoe," she whispered imperiously, "you have much
to learn."
She was right. I had not prepared myself for the rigors of the
convent: the incessant structure of prayers and physical labor, the
lack of sleep, the enforced silences, the mental instability shared by
many of my new sisters. Life at home seemed easy compared with
this new austerity. But I stayed the course. I struggled through my
postulancy, and was given the name of Catherine. Ballooned by the
starchy food and wearing an ivory muslin gown and a crown of
roses, I marched myself down the chapel aisle and married that
silent, far-off bridegroom, Jesus Christ. And then the sisters—my
sisters—packed the dress away for the next girl, and shaved my head.
That night, as I shivered beneath my blanket, I heard another
sister singing. At Saint Vincent de Paul, we slept dorm-style,
ten cots lined up on either side of the room. In the darkness, I
couldn't tell who was singing, or if anyone else was awake to hear
the Ave Maria, heaven's best siren song. Though her voice was
deepened by an obvious chest cold and muffled by a pillow, the
beauty of the sister's song pulled me out of my bed: Ave Maria,
gratia plena, dominus tecum. I stood on the cold floor, wanting to
dive into the Ave Maria over and over, until my body released my
soul like a winter bird soaring past the dark night. When her
singing stopped, I walked out of the cold room, though it was
forbidden, and went to our chapel to pray.
I flung myself in front of the altar.
"Jesus, Son of God," I whispered, "Oh, let me join my mother
in heaven."
The smell of warm peppermint made me lift my head. A column
of pink light funneled down upon the statue of the Virgin
Mary to the left of the altar. A translucent white band, delicate as
spun sugar, ribbonned the space where the light shone from the
ceiling. And then she appeared, wearing the same drab gray robe as
all of us sisters at Saint Vincent de Paul. I do not remember
whether her feet descended first, or if she appeared to me all at
once, whole, in the queer, candied light.
As she floated down toward the statue of the Virgin—
adorned in the usual sky-blue robe—she imitated its oddly
coquettish grin.
I laughed with pure delight! Her feet touched the floor with a
slight thud, and then she crouched down and touched my forehead.
"Zoe," she said.
I sat up.
"Is it you?" I asked.
She nodded. Her fingers were a shade cold, but she smelled of
Christmas cookies, and the sound of my childhood name warmed
me. She took my hand and wasted no time in telling me her request.
The Virgin Mary wanted a medal struck in her honor.
"This is how I would like the medal to appear, Zoe." She cast
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168
pupil and iris had been in her left eye now showed the letter M
intertwining the cross; in her right eye were two hearts, one
crowned and one pierced with a sword, against a background of
stars.
I stared into her eyes, memorizing die patterns, then nodded.
Mary blinked and her eyes returned to their previous cocoa brown.
Just for that second I studied her face. She was very beautiful, but
in a regular way. She had pores.
"Whoever wears the medal in good faith shall receive great
graces from God," she said.
Then, reading my heart, she agreed that the silences imposed at
the convent were silly. In direct opposition to Sister Clare, she said
that idle chatter did, in fact, please God immensely. She confessed
that she loved to talk for hours on end. And though the Bible
claimed she told no one about the visit from the Archangel Gabriel
heralding her immaculate conception, that was not true. Long
before she told Joseph, she had told her mother.
"Mama alternately flew about the house screaming, 'No! It's
asking too much of you!' and then hugging me close to her, telling
me she knew I was a special girl, always." Mary sighed blissfully, and
shut her eyes.
I felt a stab of jealousy, thinking of the glory of her life. Mary.
The Queen of the Universe. The perpetual IT girl. The mother of
the savior being comforted by her own sainted mother was just too
much for me. I inventoried my sorry life: my mother dying in my
girlhood, the lonely life at home with my father, my sister's recent
betrayal and other miseries at Saint Vincent de Paul.
The Blessed Mother looked up at the altar, at the carved naked
Jesus languishing on the cross, his head twisted in sensual agony.
Mary frowned. "I've certainly never cared for that pose."
"Is that right? I've always hated it, too. When I was a child it
made me weep."
"You can't imagine how it felt to see him—my baby!—all
strung up like that." She brought her hand to her mouth. "Given a
choice, I would never have given my son up for a cause. Of course,
when the archangel Gabriel appeared to me, he didn't tell me the
details. Gabriel didn't tell me I would someday see my son tortured.
You can be quite sure he left out that litde tidbit. But Zoe, God is
good. I've known such happiness in my life compared to the sorrow.
I have known true ecstasy. But the crucifixion! I can't let it go.
Oh, How I longed to fly unto the cross and cover his beaten body
with my own."
Mary looked around the dismal chapel, at the peeling walls, the
wax posies on the altar, the scarred wooden floor that carried the
smell of standing water.
"Zoe Laboure," she said, and kissed my hand with such tenderness
that my anxieties vaporized. "I know a girl's life is hard."
She waved her hands at the statue of her likeness, and then at her
son on the cross. "I still don't know why all these strange things
happened to me. I was a regular girl. Why was it me?"
"Oh Mary," I said, emboldened by the Blessed Mother's own
questions, "why did God take my mother when she was so young?"
I meant when / was so young. "What about his infinite mercy?"
Mary's eyes filled with tears. Perhaps I had expected that she
would say God had spirited away my mother because he wanted to
enjoy her kindness and humor, but seeing my perpetual suffering, he
realized his error and would have her resurrected in approximately
three days, or that Mary would raise her left hand toward the heavens
and oh, a miracle far sweeter than seeing the Blessed Mother—my
own mother would float down to me.
Mary took my hand and whispered, "So many mysteries of
faith have not been revealed to me. I'm sorry, Zoe. I know how
hard it is to be the one left behind."
She kissed me again, then stood on tiptoe and floated off the
floor.
"Zoe, an M intertwining a cross and two hearts, one forever
crowned and one forever pierced." The translucent cone of pink
light appeared, surrounding her again. "Stars float in the background."
When she raised her hand to wave goodbye, black licorice
whips sprouted from her fingertips and dropped on the chapel
floor. As I puzzled over that, she continued her pinata wave, and
fat, peppered shrimp fell from the soft skin between her thumb and
forefinger.

170
"Bye, Zoe Laboure," she called down to me.
I blanketed the bottom of my robe to catch the hot fish.
As she ascended further, laughing, her bare feet split open,
revealing bright layers of tightly furled daffodil blossoms that
bloomed as they showered upon me.
And then she was gone. I sat on the wooden floor and
devoured the shrimp. I had last eaten peppered shrimp with my
mother, on my seventh birthday. When she arrived home with the
shrimp still sizzling beneath the butcher paper, we caved in to temptation
and did not save it for dinner. We ate on the front porch,
sucking our burned fingers. In the yard the year's first daffodils
bloomed earlier than usual, because, my mother said, it was my
birthday. Just as I swallowed the last bite of shrimp, she produced
two sticks of black licorice from the pocket of her skirt. I crushed
up against her soft body as I ate the candy. With my mouth full of
sugar, and the fresh air smelling faintly of my mother's goat's milk
soap, dreamy happiness swelled inside my body like a thousand
blooms. But then I had a terrible feeling of desperation, already
missing the sweetness of the moment, diough I had not moved one
inch and my mother was now massaging the crown of my head with
her fingertips.
She cupped my chin in her hand. "What's wrong, birthday
girl?"
That the Virgin Mary had watched this scene and remembered
it gave me the most glorious sense of being loved, of being closely
observed. A protection from loneliness.
I feel the muscles tensing under your skin. You must forgive me
for bullying you with my story, for my insistence on the tattoo of the
miraculous medallion. Now I'm swabbing your back with Bactine.
Does it sting? Imagine how beautiful the medallion will be on your
back: the M intertwining the cross and the two hearts, one crowned
and one pierced, with stars floating in the background. The likeness
of the Virgin and the message which adorn your mother's medallion
are a jeweler's gorgeous detail. The Virgin Mother did not request a
likeness of herself, and those words, Ob mother protect me, are sketched
in all our brains. And I know you prefer subtlety; I know you are not
particularly holy, that you feel strange adorning your body with reli-
gious symbols. You're the girl who owns pope-on-a rope soap, the
girl who wants to start a fast food restaurant serving deep-fried
Eucharist wafers cuz' once you taste the crispy, crunchy body of
Christ, you just can't stop snacking.
Well.
The morning after Mary's visitation, I rose at four o'clock with
the other sisters and went to the chapel to pray the rosary. I'd hidden
the daffodils inside my pillow case and a licorice stick was
tucked in the arm of my robe. Each time I lowered my mouth to
my hands, whispering prayers into my rosary beads, I took a bite of
my private Eucharist. At dawn, as the last nub of licorice melted on
my tongue, the sun shot a gleaming ray through the patched hole in
the roof, illuminating a yellow petal in front of the altar.
"Blessed art thou among women!" I screamed, "and blessed is
the fruit of thy womb Jesus!"
As the other sisters turned to stare at me, I laughed with ecstasy,
fearing I might ascend to the chapel ceiling like Mary. I marveled
at their innocence and longed to tell them the truth about my joy.
But jealousy abounded at Saint Vincent de Paul—many sisters were
hell-bent on sainthood. I knew the visitation from Mary would create
an inferno of envy, so I confided only in the parish priest from
my childhood. He believed me, and appealed to the bishop, who
appealed to the archbishop, who appealed to one of the Pope's
henchman, who appealed to the Pope. The medal was struck.
After this interlude, my life was uneventful. As Sister Catherine,
I faded into a typical life of submission and duty. I prayed. I learned
to care for the sick and dying, though I questioned God's power and
his impulse for cruelty, especially in the case of children. I prayed,
there was nothing else for it. I prayed for Louisa to love me as she
had when we were children, but her heart was too full of the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I prayed that I might love Jesus Christ
with all my heart, because sadly, I could only conjure a modest adoration
for our savior. It was Mary that I loved, Mary who revealed
herself in the chapel: She was supposed to be the cheerleader for the
whole deal, but in her immaculate heart she felt bitterness, for she
had not wanted her son to suffer. And so I carried the gift of her
truthful kindness with me always. Whether I was happily strolling

u
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172
through the spring gardens at Saint Vincent de Paul, touching the
soft skins of tulips and breathing the fertile air, or clenched with
rheumatism, scrubbing the stone floors on a thundery day, I felt the
presence of the Blessed Mother: her laughter, her perpetual observation,
her love. I was not alone in the world.
I'm ready to start. Don't flinch! So, you say that piercing your
nose was exquisitely painful, that you hate even getting a flu shot.
Interesting. I'm not claiming that your nose ring didn't sting, but
consider the suffering of the martyred girl saints: Agnes raised her
neck to the sword; Lucy ripped out her eyes; Agatha let the Roman
soldiers lop off her breasts. In comparison, a tattoo is an angel's
kiss. And the modern tattoo gun is a wonder. After a few seconds
of discomfort, your body adjusts to the rhythmic movement of the
needle. Then, all you feel is a warm, electric buzz.
But I see this news disappoints you. You wanted the pain. You
wanted to make your suffering tangible, say, a broken bone, a shard
of glass in your eye, the swelter of a fresh tattoo. This would never
match the agony of your new and everlasting loneliness. Last night
you stared at the amber bottle of allergy pills nestled in the bottom
of your make-up bag, imagining swallowing a fistful. And walking
past the gun shop this morning, you had to wonder: would there
be a second, suspended between this world and the next, where
you listened to your cochleas' screaming, your skull crumbling like
marzipan? You would never actually do this. You understand that
you will not always feel this quicksand misery as you trudge
through your day, that the future surely holds some unknown happiness.
But the road from here to there seems so exhausting—
you're not sure if you have the energy or inclination. You need the
tattoo of the miraculous medallion to serve as a signal, a prophecy,
a visible sign of the Blessed Mother's love, written on your skin,
to remind you that she watches over you, to remind you that I,
Zoe, watch over you, that I feel the zoom of your giddy days and
labor over your sad days, that I have examined your trials and
found them interesting, that I have not found you foolish, and that
I have loved you in my way, my distant, saintly way.
And tattooed to your skin, the medallion will never be lost or
tossed away like your mother's. The winter of her senior year in
high school, your mother held the medal between her thumb and
forefinger, sliding it back and forth on the thin silver chain, praying.
She prayed for blood, a thousand prayers, until the entire day
became a prayer, each sheet corner tucked into the mattress, every
algebra problem solved, every time she pulled a brush through her
hair: Oh Gracious Mother, I didn't even like him, I hardly knew him, Hail
Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee, I'd drunk four vodka tonics, never
was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or
sought your intercession was left unaided.
She pressed her fingers to the medallion, and prayed, please
Blessed Mother, give me my life. And still the blood did not come.
After her fateful doctor's appointment, your mother drove out to
Lake Okaboji. She parked her car and roamed the snowy beach.
The water was shallow where it banked, so jumping was not an
option. But walking into one's own watery death had a pleasing Joan
of Arc quality. She imagined the drowsy pleasure of dying, before
her body, the secret of her body, became nothing more tlian a pretty
husk in a white satin casket.
Your mother yanked the necklace off by the medallion, yelled,
"Thanks for nothing, bitch," and sailed it into the lake. Then, waving
her hands over her head and screaming, she closed her eyes and
scrambled down the bank.
The water didn't even feel cold, though it was hard to pull her
feet up, to walk, as her snow boots filled with water and her fakefur
parka swallowed what seemed like half the lake. She tripped and
crashed into the water, and when she tried to stand, the weight of
the parka pulled her back down and the thought of a baby pulled
her back down. The weight of her new prayers oh why, why, if Jesus
could cure lepers and make the blind see, why didn 't he help me help me Blessed
Mother why didn't you love me pulled her back down, and her heart
quickened as she felt the icy water all around her, gaining on her.
She thought to unzip the parka, but her fingers had stiffened from
the cold, and she couldn't work the zipper. She wiggled her arms
out of the sleeves and managed to pull the parka over her head,
crashing back into the water twice before finally freeing herself.
Now the water had risen to the top of her knee-high boots, pinning
her to the lake's bottom. She reached below the water and pulled

174
her boots off, and in her stocking feet, crying, she tripped back up
the bank.
Freezing and defeated, and with snow crunching under her feet
sharp as glass, she ran back to her car. She started the engine,
stripped off her cold clothes and pressed her toes to the heat vents
on the dash. She grabbed a spiral notebook from the back seat and
hugged it to her bare chest as she watched her parka float across die
lake like a doomed animal. Her rubber boots bobbed along cheerfully.
One week later an ice fisherman caught a ten-pound northern
pike. When he cleaned it, his knife scraped up on your mother's
medallion. Would you believe that his wife ate the fish and completely
recovered from breast cancer?
But glorious mysteries eluded your mother. For her, there was
nine months of pregnancy, the excruciating miracle of birth, the
wariness of caring for a newborn. Then, one morning the next winter,
she pushed your stroller along the snowy beach of Lake Okaboji.
The paddle boats were docked at the lagoon, and your mother
envisioned the two of you, in matching green bikinis, going for a
ride the next summer. With the last ten pounds of her pregnancy
weight gone she would be sleek as a cat. She put the brake on your
stroller and sat at a picnic table, thinking about her dreary job at the
office supply store; she envied her friends off at college, free to
smoke pot and eat carrot cake at will. The world was passing her by,
while she changed diapers and sold staplers. But then she looked
down at you. She remembered that terrible day the winter before,
the pull of the water all around her. She kissed your mittened hand.
I didn't know how much I would love you, she whispered. The sun flared
out over the frozen lake, and you were squinting at the bright whiteness.
Ice crystals fringed your dark eyelashes, and when you turned
your worried, jeweled gaze to your mother, she gasped. Exhilarated
by your baby beauty, joy suddenly rushed through her, and your
mother picked you up and held your face to hers. The nortih wind
had carved your cheeks into blistery roses. My baby, your mother
cried, my baby, and plunged you into the air over her head.
Though her exhilaration warmed you, you felt dizzy, and your
new brain formed the thought: Oh mother, protect me.
You're nodding now, you are ready for your tattoo. It is kind of
you to submit. And you're smiling like a believer, like I can rid you
of all your miseries. My original idea was that the medallion tattooed
to your skin might leech away all sadness, pull it out of your
heart, so you could always be happy. But I am a minor saint, and
there is no cure for sorrow. A girl's life is an endless pilgrimage of
joy and grief. All I can give you is the tattoo of the miraculous
medallion, without pain or swelling. I'm taking off these latex
gloves. Yes, I'm putting the tattoo gun down now. When you walk
out of Zoe's Exotic Skin Arts you will have the medallion on your
back, a glory beneath your clothes. My saint's trick, my minor miracle,
is that I need no needles, no cotton to blot the blood as I work.
In this second, as I press my palm on your back, the Mother's love
is made visible. Feel it now, on your skin, an M intertwining the
cross and the two hearts, one crowned and one pierced. Stars float
in die background.

176
—KURT HOFFMAN
The Giant
THE GIANT POSES before the sunset. His chin points this way, his
cap points that way, and the nose just sticks out. His jagged silhouette
masks a rose-lit sky streaked by row after parallel row of darkening
purple clouds. Crickets and spring peepers open their sleepy
eyes and begin their night's work, filling the air with tiny dots of
noise. An enormous flock of sparrows lifts over a hill as the cool
of evening sets in. Soon all will be black, but until then, the purest
black is our protagonist quivering in profile, rubbing his chest as if
to soothe a wounded feeling.
"Once I was alive," he says dolefully. We politely sit in the mud and
cock our heads attentively.
"I get the memories," he continues, "golden fogs filled with joyful
children and frisking puppies, Mother's smiling face tucking me in,
tables filled with candy, the rumbling, bumping trucks filled with
soldiers winking at us and laughing as they went off to commandeer
the marvelous machines which filled the sky.
"After dinner on a long summer's day, my sister and I would join the
clamorous, mad army of wee folk swarming die streets, hand in
hand, singing anthems, wearing wildflowers in our hair. Our crude
stones burst windows into twinkling, twittering shards, as we
cheered. How the wind blew, tearing month after month off the calendar,
till we were bigger and stronger than we could have ever
imagined. What could stop us? As it happened, one day a dappled
pony gave my belly a nasty kick, and I died a few hours later.
"Those last hours were perhaps the finest of my short, little life,"
offers the Giant. "Gathered around me were my beautiful, slateeyed
mother, my teacher (Mrs. Rose), and all the other children. I
lay on clean white sheets. Mr. Glenn, the postman, took a picture of
me with a large camera. The smell of approaching autumn was alive
in the air. Birds sang wild songs. Witii tears in my eyes, I looked at
the people I would be leaving behind. The children made a presentation,
singing a last song to me ('On the Ship of the Elements').
My mother touched my cheek gently with her hand. Though she
tried to be strong, tears hung at the corners of her eyes. She kissed
me goodbye, and then she and Mrs. Rose pulled the sheet over my
head. I heard them all file away. In the stillness, my gut throbbed
with pain. I stretched my arms out flat at my sides, closed my eyes
and died.
"As might be expected of a child, my ideas about deadi were
grandiose, and it was with anger that I greeted the realization that I
was not now climbing a grand celestial staircase to face judgement
before a mighty deity.
"Perhaps my brain was continuing to function in some marginal
way, and the afterlife would be the experience of this rotting organ.
I was stumbling through an indecipherable welter of colors, wet to
my shins in muck. Smells connoting food, rotting flesh, or metal filings
twisted past. In a moment, there was clarity. I was in a woodland
landscape, remarkable for its saturated colors. And I was now
fourteen feet tall. I plunged into the forest to solve the problem of
my nudity."
The giant's rustic boots are roughly sewn together from tree bark
and animal hide. Crude burlap trousers tied with crimson rope conceal
his sex. His chest wears months of sweat and grime, the repellant
effect of which is offset by a jaunty red kerchief tied round his
neck.

I78
He sits down and falls into a long silence. Listening to him, many
of our crowd have become entirely immobile. Becoming aware that
the giant's story has ended, their heads slowly swivel towards him.
This is too much for some, and blood begins leaking out from tears
in their necks. A few heads can be heard falling to the ground with
a muffled thud.
The giant looks embarrassed. His long chin, ever broadcasting the
impression of stalwart masculinity, seems a mockery of the vulnerable
figure, his cheeks dampened by tears, his hand forcing its way
to his brow as if to deflect our skeptical gaze.
A frigid little moon edges across the sky, casting a pale glow on the
crouching hulk.
At daybreak, we throw the glum giant into our great machine, where
he is cut into a thousand multicolor cubes of gelatin. Through the
towns and villages we go, feeding the cubes to children. One by
one, joy vanishes from each little face, replaced by angry listlessness.
In this way we form our army. They become policemen, wardens,
soldiers, teachers and the like. Soon all mankind is subject to our
strange wishes, and hell's kingdom on earth is secured once again.
-DEBORAH EDMEADES
(Self Portrait) The Artist at Home, 1995

i8o
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
AIMEE BENDER is the author of a collection of short stories, The Girl in the
Flammable Skirt. She lives in Los Angeles and is at work on a novel.
JENNIFER CARR'S fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie
Schooner, Fish Stories, The Nebraska Review, Black Dirt, and Calyx. Her nonfiction
has appeared in Poets & Writers. She previously won the Sophie de
Liedel fellowship, sponsored by the Ploughshares International Fiction Writing
Seminar.
DAVID MARSHALL CHAN'S stories have appeared in BOMB and COLUM-
BIA, where he was previously awarded the fiction award. He grew up in
Los Angeles, where most of his stories take place, in an area now popularly
known as Silver Lake, and attended high school a few years ahead of
Leonardo DiCaprio and a few years behind Hollywood Madam Heidi
Fleiss. He holds degrees from Yale University and the graduate program in
writing at the University of California. This is the first appearance of work
from his novel, Memoirs of a Boy Detective, and he has also completed a book
of stories, Goblin Fruit. He can be contacted at davidmchan@yahoo.com.
STEPHEN CUSHMAN'S first volume of poems, Blue Pajamas, came out from
LSU in 1998. Professor of English at the University of Virginia, he is the
author of William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure (1985), Fictions
of Form in American Poetry (1993), and Bloody Promenade, a meditation on verbal
and visual images from the Civil War, forthcoming in 1999.
STEPHEN DIXON has published twelve collections of stories and seven
novels since 1976. His twentieth and twenty-first books of fiction will be
coming out this April: SLEEP, a collection of 22 stories, from Coffee
House Press, and 30, a fragmented novel from Henry Holt, from which
"The Phone" is taken. He's also published about 450 short stories. He has
been teaching at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University for
nineteen years and is looking for a guardian angel to get him out of teaching
before he collapses from pedagogical fatigue.
Born in Britain, DEBORAH EDMEADES lived in South Africa for many years
and is now a New York-based performance and multi-media artist. She's
the founder and director of the Museum of the Muse and has shown work
at Franklin Furnace in Exile, PS 122, The Knitting Factory, Wow Cafe,
Dixon Place, The MIX Film Festival, and Exit Art, among other venues,
mostly in New York City.
JEFF FRIEDMAN'S work has appeared in many literary magazines, including
Poetry, The Missouri Review, Ironweed, The Antioch Review, The American
Poetry Review, Press, and New England Review. His second collection of poetry,
Scattering the Ashes, has recently been published by Carnegie Mellon University
Press.
NEIL GAIMAN is listed in the Dictionary of Uterary Biography as one of the top
ten post-modern writers in America today. He was awarded a World Fantasy
Award for Sandman #19. His most recent novel is STARDUST, a fairy
tale for adults. He speaks fluent English, but his accent is suspect.
MICHELE HERMAN, a nonfiction graduate of the Columbia Writing Division,
lives in New York City with her husband and two sons. By day she
writes articles and essays for publications including Metropolis and Family
Life. Her fiction has appeared in ACM and is forthcoming in Pearl.
KURT HOFFMAN studied spelling and grammar at St. Rita's School in Staten
Island. He is now permitted to live separately from his parents.
CHARLOTTE HOLMES teaches in the MFA Program at Penn State. Her short
stories have appeared in Epoch, Grand Street, New Letters, The New Yorker,
Story, and other magazines. Her collection, Gifts and Other Stories, is available
from Confluence Press.
RICHARD HOWARD'S eleventh book of poetry, Trappings, will be published
in 1999. He is currently teaching, among other things, a course in reviewing
in the Writing Division of Columbia University's School of the Arts.
COLIN HUNT was born in New York in 1973. He attended Cooper Union
and received his MFA from Columbia University. He had his first solo
show in 1998 at the Roger Smith Gallery in New York City.
KIMBERLEY JOHNSON earned an MA at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars,
and an MFA at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work
has appeared in The New Yorker and New England Review. She is currently
pursuing a Ph.D in English at Berkeley.
SYBIL KOLLAR'S poetry chapbook, In Rooms We Come And Go, was published
by Somers Rocks Press in 1998. Her work has appeared in anthologies
and numerous literary magazines. She received a New York Foundation
for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and was recently awarded writing
residencies in Germany and Scotland.

182
DEBORAH LARSEN holds the Merle S. Boyer Chair in Poetry at Gettysburg
College. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Wallace
Stevens Fellow at Yale and has published a book-length poetic sequence,
Stitching Porcelain: After Matteo Ricci in Sixteenth-Century China (New Directions).
Work is forthcoming in The Hollins Critic, Uterary Imagination, and
The New Yorker.
DEBRA LEVY'S work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, South Dakota
Review, Sun Dog: The Southeast Review, Glimmer Train, and others.
JENNIE LITT'S work has appeared in The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas, Indiana
Review, The Blue Moon Review, Speak, and Fireweed. When not working on her
novel, she caters fancy dinner parties for rich people. She lives in New
York City.
STEPHEN MCLEOD'S poems have recently appeared in The Paris Review,
Ploughshares, Southwest Review, and Western Humanities Review. Other publications
include Agni, American Poetry Review, Poetry East, and Shenandoah. He is
an Assistant District Attorney for Kings County (Brooklyn). He lives in
New York City.
DIANE MEHTA is a New York-based poet and critic. Her poems are forthcoming
in Agni, the Antioch Review, and Open City.
FELICIA MITCHELL teaches creative writing at Emory & Henry College. Her
poems have appeared in a variety of journals, and she is the author of
Words & Quilts, A Selection of Quilt Poems and Case Mysteries.
RICK MOODY is the author of The Ice Storm, Purple America and other works.
PAMELA A. MOSES grew up in New Jersey and attended Brown University.
After receiving an M.A. in English from Georgetown University, she
moved to New York City, where she currently lives. She taught English for
three years at The Nightingale-Bamford School and is now writing and
working as an English and writing tutor.
MARY O'CONNELL is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Her stories
have appeared in COLUMBIA, The Crescent Review, MidAmerican
Review, Room of One's Own, The Sun and West Branch. She is working on a
novel about the life of Saint Therese of Lisieux.
A native New Yorker, JAMES PENHA teaches at the Jakarta International
School in Indonesia. Among his recent publications are an essay in the
National Conference of Teachers of English volume Voices in the Eng
Classroom, poems in the Pudding House anthology Prayers to Protest, and a
retelling of "The Frog Prince of Bali" in Thema.
KEVIN PILKINGTON is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence
College and teaches workshops at the New School for Social Research. His
collection Spare Change was the 1997 La Jolla Poets Press Book Series
Award Winner. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa
Review, Boston Review and Red Rock Review.
MARIE PONSOT'S fourth book of poems, The Bird Catcher, was published
by Knopf in 1998. She is a native New Yorker who has enjoyed teaching
in the graduate programs at Queens College, Beijing United University,
Columbia University, and the Poetry Center of the YMHA in New York.
Among her awards are an NEA Creative Writing grant and the Shaughnessy
Medal of the Modern Language Association.
MARGARET SHIPLEY has published two collections of poems, Burning the
Trees and The Ught Angels, and a novel, The Sound of the Sun. A chapbook,
The Root and the Leaf won the Durham Award. Recent work appears in Field
and River Styx. She lives in St. Louis.
ANNETTE SLOAN is Distinguished Lecturer at Marywood University in
Scranton, Pennsylvania. She has received a grant from the Pennsylvania
Council on the Arts, and her most recent publications were in Spoon River
and Comstock Review. Two years ago, she placed first in the Chester E. Jones
Poetry Competition.
LAURENCE SNYDAL is a poet, musician, and professional cook. His poetry
has appeared in such magazines as Blue Unicorn, Caperock, lyric, and Gulf
Stream. He has also published two nonfiction books which are guides for
new fathers. He is presently involved in resurrecting a ninety-year-old Victorian
(a house, not a personage).
ALEXANDRA SOCARIDES will complete her MFA in Poetry at Sarah
Lawrence College this Spring. She currently teaches at The Hettick-Martin
Institute and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
SARAH VAN ARSDALE'S first novel, Toward Amnesia, was published by
Riverhead Books/Putnam. She is currently completing a second novel and
a collection of essays on the human body and the locus of the soul. She
teaches English at the University of Vermont and Vermont College.

184
CHARLES HARPER WEBB'S poems and prose-poems have appeared in
American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review, and The Best American
Poetry. His book Reading the Water (Northeastern University Press) won
the 1997 S.F. Morse Poetry Prize and the 1998 Kate Tufts Discovery
Award. He received a Whiting Writer's Award in 1998.
JEANETTE WINTERSON is the author of Sexing the Cherry, Oranges Are Not the
Only Fruit, and The Passion, which won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys
Memorial Prize. "The Three Friends" will appear in her collection, The
World and Other Places, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1999.
THOMAS WOODRUFF is an artist living in New York City.
YOJO (AMY SHAW) is currendy killing time in Columbus, Ohio, waiting for
something to happen.
LISA YUSKAVAOE was born in Philadelphia. She received her BFA from
Temple University and her MFA from Yale. She is represented by Marianne
Boesky Gallery in New York and has had recent solo exhibitions at Studio
Guenzani in Milan and the Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica.
Her next exhibition will be at greengrass in London in 1999.
Poems by MARTHA ZWEIG have appeared recently or are forthcoming in
Northwest Review, Poetry Northwest, The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, The Kenyon
Review, Boston Review, and New Letters, among others. Her chapbook, Powers,
won a statewide competition and was published by Vermont Council on
the Arts. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Passing Strange, will be
published by Wesleyan University Press in Spring 1999. She received her
MFA from Warren Wilson College.
COLUMBIA ANNOUNCES
UPCOMING BENEFITS
Sunday February 21, 1999
Poet MARIE HOWE and novelist MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM will read recent
work. This event will be held at Fez Under Time Cafe, 380 Lafayette
Street, New York. Admission: $ 10, $7 students.
Sunday, April 18, 1999
Novelist FRANCINE PROSE and poet and novelist NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER
will read from recent books. Location to be announced; contact us at (212)
854-4216 or arts-litjournal@columbia.edu for more information.
I 999 ANNUAL CONT
COLUMBIA is proud to announce our Annual Fiction and Poetry Contests,
established to recognize outstanding works of fiction and poetry.
Entry Guidelines: Please send no more than five poems at a time, or
one short story. Fiction submissions should not exceed twenty doublespaced
pages. All entries must be accompanied by a $12 reading fee for
each story or batch of five poems; fee includes a copy of the issue in
which winners are announced (an $8 value.) Winners in each category will
receive $250, plus publication in the Summer 1999 COLUMBIA: A Journal
of Literature and Art.
Judges for 1999 are MARY GORDON for fiction and ALFRED CORN
for poetry. Entries should be addressed to Annual Contest,' COLUMBIA,
2960 Broadway, Room 415 Dodge Hall, Columbia University, New
York, NY 10027. The deadline for entry is March 15, 1999. No e-mail
submissions, please!
In addition to general-interest prose and poetry, COLUMBIA is soliciting
work for a special section entided:
"Beyond Sportswriting: Spectatarship, Exhaustion, Competition."
We seek fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and art which explores the subject
of athletics beyond the realm of reportage carried by most daily
papers. We are looking for work that examines die athletic experience in
its broadest possible terms: from pro football and basketball to croquet
and capture-the-flag; and from the team to the individual athlete. We seek
work on competitive and non-competitive activities alike; on exertion and
endurance and failure; on spectatorship and desire and the portrayal of
athletics in literature and film.
Submit to: Summer Theme, COLUMBIA, 2960 Broadway, Room 415
Dodge Hall, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027. The deadline for
submissions is April 15, 1999- No e-mail submissions, please!