“For an Asian girl, you sure are cool.”
“I know all about the 38th parallel.”
...Read MoreQuick Kills: An Interview With Lynn Lurie, Pt. II
Lynn Lurie is the author of Corner of the Dead, winner of the 2007 Juniper Prize for Fiction, University of Massachusetts Press (2008) and Quick Kills, Etruscan Press. We recently had a delightful conversation about her writing, which I am happy to share with you. You can read Part I of our conversation here.
Quick Kills (and Corner of the Dead, for that matter) resonated so much for me with the experience of having recently read Roxane Gay's An Untamed State, both in terms of fairy tale and in terms of the idea of trauma: experiencing trauma, 'recovering' from trauma, and how one can repurpose or remake that trauma as narrative, and I'd love to hear any impressions you have of her work.
I read An Untamed State without taking a break.
Short Story: Gumdrop
The Butter
Nov 26, 2014
One time you took food from my mouth and you didn’t want to but you did it because it was my tongue. That’s what I think about.
You liked me first because of that one day when Mr. Donovan asked me what I thought about some story I hadn’t read and I said it was wicked proper and when he asked me to elaborate I said it was wicked fucking proper and got sent to ISS for the rest of the day. I could feel you watching me as I walked out and that wasn’t why I did it, I was just so goddamn bored, but it was a nice side-effect. And then you got to go on that field trip to the museum and we were talking a little bit before and I said, Make sure you don’t get caught up in any line dancing or group sex or anything, and you told me I should ditch and come with you because the art teacher never double checked the list anyway and I said What for, the sculpture garden or the group sex? and you said The group sex in the sculpture garden and I thought maybe I could tolerate you after all for a little while before I lost interest, long enough to figure out why you were always alone and why you seemed to never be around at lunch and why you were always chewing up your fingernails and why you always wore your winter coat indoors and there was something in the way your eyes shot away from everything you looked at seconds after you looked at it that told my dick you’d be into it. Like you were distracted enough to fool or something, like tricking a dog into the car to go to the vet. And that’s mean but I was pretty much right.
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More News From Ferguson
News
Nov 26, 2014
“Do you want to hear something funny?” someone asked me. “This is a joke,” he told me, “with a punchline 100 days in the making.”
A member of the St. Louis police force has been charged with excessive force.
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My New Password
Beauty
Nov 26, 2014
cumberbatch
Password incorrect. Please try again.
cumberbatch
Password incorrect. Please try again.
Cumberbatch1
Password incorrect. Forgotten password?
Yes.
...Read More
The Places in Between
The Butter
Nov 26, 2014
The first woman I loved was another writer, a woman I met in my second year of university. Let’s call her Emily. She had blonde hair and blue eyes and when I first knew her she wore her hair long, parted straight down the middle. She looked like she was fifteen. She had a boyfriend and she wore shorts even when it was cold. She was sarcastic and angry and hopeful and sad. She was an excellent writer.
Is an excellent writer. She isn’t dead.
*
When I was ten years old the Vatican issued an edict allowing girls to act as altar servers. I was the first girl in my church to don the robe. We had white robes with hoods, and belts of red rope. You doubled the rope around your waist and pulled the ends through the loop so that they hung at equal lengths. We wore rough wooden crosses round our necks, carried the Bible, rang the Eucharist bells. When my sister became an altar server too we fought over who got to carry the chalice. One year she tripped and fell as she was carrying Communion wafers to the altar. The wafers spilled out of her dish like confetti.
The priest kept a large square of white cloth at the altar. When he drank from the chalice after blessing the wine, he’d use the cloth to wipe his spit away. This didn’t make sense to me even at ten; surely priests had germs too. Surely, I thought, priests had insides that bled and purged and rotted just like the insides of everyone else.
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Two Things I Find It Difficult To Believe Exist But Somehow They Do
The Internet
Nov 26, 2014
The trick to absorbing a great deal of useless information is to never close your Wikipedia tabs entirely. Always leave at least two up so you can begin a new k-hole at a moment’s notice.
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Cross-Country: On Feeling Safe
Friendship
Nov 26, 2014
Hayley Krischer’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
I traveled across country just before cell phones were widely available. My cousin in Baltimore had a cell phone, so my father instructed me to drive there from my house in New Jersey on the first leg of the trip to get it. The phone was the size of my current laptop and was wrapped in a leather bag.
“Call me every night or else I think you’ll have gotten raped,” my father said.
This was always on my father’s mind: me getting raped. Ultimatums were his way of protecting me. “If you don’t call me, I’ll call the police and tell them you stole my car.”
He wouldn’t help my friend and I open up our new tent in the backyard as a practice run before we hit the road because of this logic: if I help you open your tent and you go on your trip, you’ll get raped. It’s silly, isn’t it? To think that he could stop me from getting raped by keeping camping secrets from me? His only goal was to keep me as safe as possible. I think he secretly hoped we’d just give up and turn around.
My father didn’t know that I had already lost my virginity to someone who accepted “just get it over with” as consent. And how that same person crept his hands under my bra while I was dosed up with Tylenol Codeine after recovering from surgery. Or about that time in high school when I stopped four guys who had lured a drunk friend into a small bedroom at a party. Guys I knew. Guys I grew up with. And how I saw those guys, those boys, lift her shirt and feel their hands around her pants. “We’re just having fun,” they said as I jerked my friend’s hand, lifted her to stand and guided her out. “Party pooper,” they said.
We didn’t have anti-rape nail polish in 1992. Not that it would have made any difference. I wanted to explain to my father that it wasn’t strangers I was afraid of. It was the men that I knew.
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“Perhaps the only doo-wop song sung in Latin”
Music
Nov 26, 2014
Let’s all lie down quietly on the floor with something cool draped over our eyes and listen to this for a while.
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