HEAVEN HAS HEELS | Summer Issue 2015

SUMMER READ
Summer is the perfect time to catch up on your
favorite novels. We recently caught up with author
Andrea Lochen, who has gives us a sneak preview
of her latest book Imaginary Things (Astor + Blue
Editions).
Imaginary Things follows the “real/surreal” life of Anna
Jennings, a burned-out and broke, twenty-two-year-old
single mother who moves to her grandparents’ rural home
for the summer—escaping a bad marriage, with her fouryear-old
son, David, in tow. The sudden appearance of
shadowy dinosaurs forces Anna to admit that either she’s
lost her mind or she can see her son’s active imagination.
As David’s visions become more persistent and threatening,
Anna must learn to differentiate between which dangers
are real and which are imagined, and who she can truly
trust.
When I was seventeen years old, Patrick Gill entered my life
like a missile fired from a rocket launcher. Whoosh! And
suddenly my hair was on fire, my breast impaled, and my
clothes flaking off my body into ashes.
It probably had something to do with the fact that I
had just returned to Milwaukee after a ho-hum, “safe” year in
Salsburg, and my mom had preemptively enrolled me in an
all girls’ Catholic school, even though we weren’t practicing
Catholics. It probably also had something to do with the
fact that Patrick was the most captivating creature I had ever
seen. He had the dark, mournful features of an archangel, but
bleached blond hair with one black stripe defiantly streaking
across the back of his head at a diagonal. His lean ropy muscles
were covered in elaborate black tattoos—a wild mustang, a
hawk, a Chinese dragon, a panther, a Celtic cross.
We met in a church, of all places: the Basilica of St.
Josaphat. My class was taking a field trip, and we were shuffling
along the marble floors in our hideous uniforms (olive green
polo shirts and unflattering gray skirts) like we were walking
the green mile. Some of us clutched clipboards to our waists
with worksheets attached that demanded the answers to such
mind-numbing questions as: What church was the Basilica
commissioned to resemble? What events led to the martyrdom
of St. Josaphat? I had ditched mine almost immediately.
My friend, Pippa, had just stepped outside for a
cigarette, and I was contemplating joining her even though
cigarette smoke made my eyes itchy and watery. It was
oppressively quiet inside the church; I felt like the eyes of Jesus
and all the saints were watching me from every which angle,
and they didn’t like what they saw.
Ahead of me, Marguerite Clemens and Billie Van der
Wal, the two most popular—and therefore, most hated—girls
in the junior class, were whispering and laughing behind their
cupped hands. I followed their gaze, and there he was: lying on
a pew, stretched out on his back, his leather jacket balled up
beneath his head like a pillow. He was gazing up at the dome,
furiously scribbling in a sketchbook.