What would make a person lie about having cancer? Why would someone wish that on herself?

Beautiful Dead Thing is about all that. It’s coming out in Witness this October or so and is featured in my new manuscript (one of two) with the working title “Stranger in the Dream House.”

Here’s the opening.

Beautiful Dead Thing

She found the deer skull in the shallow brook in the woods where she used to take the dogs back when she had dogs. At first it revealed itself to her as something else, a stone broken into the shape of a face, a thing worth taking a second glance at and that’s all, but then as she moved closer the fake face—the face of a man—became the real face of an animal looking up at her from the water. She didn’t hesitate. She jumped from the footbridge, moved closer and bent down. The water was cold and flecked with snow and she had to strain to free the skull from the mud. The spine rose in a long sinewy line, like the root of a difficult turnip, ending in a cluster of spiked bone. She let it drape between her hands and it reminded her of everything all at once—a broken machine, a weapon, a puzzle—except for the thing it used to be. Her shoes were soaked and she had a two mile walk back to the car, but she didn’t feel stupid in the least. The simple fact that others had noticed this grotesque treasure but decided to leave it alone did not occur to her until later. No, she was the first to see, nobody else, and how special was that?

That’s what made her call Peter. Why else but to tell this story?

 

A new story available to read in its entirety at Triquarterly. I’ve been a fan of this magazine for a long, long time and it makes me very happy to finally have a piece appearing in its pages. Enjoy at your leisure.

Triquarterly Summer Issue

It’s always exciting when Don DeLillo releases a new novel, especially now when some of America’s old guard are slowing down or outright retiring (see Munro, Alice).

Zero K looks to be especially good, a return to his old methodology after the more arch experiments of books like “Cosmopolis” or “Point Omega.” The language crackles with DeLillo’s brand of bristly New York edginess right from the opening paragraph.I love reading this stuff aloud. It’s intellectual, yes, and slightly meta, but his language almost always captures the strange poetry of the spoken word. I found it inspiring twenty years ago and I find it inspiring now.

Thanks for the new book Mr. DeLillo.

Another story from I’m Here: Alaska Stories. This one is called A Wrong in the World. It’s about the romance of escape and the lethargy of responsibility. It’s also about Othello. Sort of. But that comes in later. Here are the first few paragraphs.

We had driven across British Columbia and through Resurrection Bay and all that time my mother kept reminding me that we weren’t running, we weren’t escaping, we were going someplace, and when we got there all the hardship would be worth it. This was nineteen seventy-seven and half of the gas stations along the Alaska Highway were closed and the rest were charging crazy prices. She had begun paying with balled dollar bills and change and once just before the border—I remember this distinctly—she filled the tank, gunned the engine, and laughed as she peeled out onto the main road. “Stealing is wrong, Daniel,” she told me. “There are a lot of things that are wrong. Your father might say that this whole adventure is wrong. But sometimes you have to do those wrong things anyway. The best you can do is make it up somewhere else along the line.”

I looked up in the rearview at the gas station growing smaller and smaller. A human figure emerged, hands on its hips, and watched us go.

Her brother worked in Seward on the boats and I think she was hoping he’d have some money for us once she reached him. After, she said, she had helped him out many times when he was down and out. “Remember that time when he came with us for a few weeks in the winter? We didn’t tell you this then, of course, but he was getting out of his own bad situation. Remember your father pouring wine down the drain before he got there?”

“I don’t,” I said, which was the truth.

“Well,” she said. “He did.”

We camped so close to the road that sometimes the headlights of passing cars woke me up in the middle of the night. I was fourteen then and she joked that in a couple of years I’d be ready to work right alongside my uncle. “It’s not dangerous work if you know what you’re doing,” she said. “Better than selling cars. People should take risks, don’t you think, Daniel?”

“I think so,” I said. “I think you’re probably right.”

I was imagining my father at the dealership waiting for people to come on the lot so he could jog out of the building and tell them all about the new Chryslers and Chevrolets. I wondered if he was at work right at that moment. Time had gotten all mixed up and it shocked me to realize I didn’t even know what day it was or what time it might be back there in Colorado Springs where my father possibly sat at his desk watching out through the glass wall of the building at the expanse of shiny cars and potential customers.

 

Thought I would share the opening of “A Tourist in the Land of Plenty” for those interested. If you’d like to read the complete story it will be appearing in The Southwest Review and also in the short story collection A Stranger in the Dream House.

The opening appears as follows:

The story went like this: the barn had been set aflame. The fire could be seen across the fields and by the time the police arrived the skeleton of the thing stood framed in hot light. Heat so strong the air quivered.

Campbell, the owner of the house and the one who had set fire to the barn, stood in the driveway, arms folded, stoic as a roman sentinel. He seemed to be looking inside to the heart of it, as if he were waiting for something to emerge, to flower there at its hottest point. They took him by his shoulders and pulled him away, his face blistered, hair singed, wearing the expression of an ecstatic.

Those were Tomas’s words. Stoic as a roman sentinel. And he said all this with a grin as he moved back and forth between table and counter, counter and sideboard. A very good looking man, like a movie actor in the last spasms of a career. The room spotted with people, some of them listening. Others had obviously already heard this one before but he still held their attention. He spoke to all as if from a stage.

Gregoria remembered it vividly and not just as a bystander, not a part of the audience. In the intervening years it had become her story. She was the one standing in the driveway watching the flames. She was the one who the police took by the shoulders and placed in the back of the patrol car. She was the one who did the insane thing, the thing worth talking about. She could feel the heat on her face and the madness in her skull. But she held a baby in her arms, stroking its wet hair, moving through her house from room to room and singing a song her mother had sung to her. A ridiculous song from an American TV commercial for Alka Seltzer. Oh what a relief it is. Everything scrubbed clean, the leftovers from last night’s dinner placed in colorful Tupperware in the fridge, delicately arranged even in that hidden place. Flowers and open law books on the dining room table. She moved from room to room as if searching for some little lost thing.

Working on what might become a novella. There are days when the writing comes easy and other days it’s real a struggle because I want to get this right.

This story is about a trangender woman living in Fairbanks, Alaska in the late eighties. If this story were a dive or a ice skating routine the degree of difficulty would be a nine.

Here’s a little snippet from the opening section:

Her first trip to Anchorage since everything changed: the divorce and the surgery, the pinch of her name into a different shape and then all those old friendships falling away behind her as she moved into a new life.

Looking back it seemed as if a great wave had lifted her up in an explosion of force and then thrown her down, crash, in a strange part of the beach. But it was all her choice, every bit of it. The wave was just her saying, I don’t want to live like this anymore late one night once the boys had been put to bed.

Funny that Anna should take the children to that counterfeit city considering what she had said in the heat of argument: that it was Erica who was inauthentic, a deceiver and cheat. Fake. That was one of the words thrown around in their argument, whisper-screamed so as not to wake the kids.

But they did wake the kids. They appeared in the doorway, one holding the other by the shoulder, and then Erica turned to them and said, “Hey, hey, what’s going on?” and Anna smiled and they were united in their parenthood again and both fakes, smiling deceivers shepherding the kids back to sleep.

This past year I’ve been working hard on a new collection of stories. But surprise surprise. As the writing process moved into the difficult middle stages the book cleaved into two. One of those books, I’m Here: Alaska Stories, contains 10 stories dramatizing life in Alaska and specifically the interior. I’m very happy with it.

More details about the book soon but some of the stories include A Wrong in the World, The Alphabet in Reverse, Shapeshifters, The Wolves Again, and the title story. Some of you may be familiar with a few of these pieces because of their publication in literary magazines but most of the stories are very new.

More to follow about about this collection and the other collection as well.