Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today’s short story is, if I’m remembering correctly, the first short story we ever accepted for our lit mag. I remember reading it through once and then a second time and knowing that this is indeed a Strange Pilgrims tale. I hope you love it as much we do!

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I should have listened to the man in New Orleans who told me I needed new shoes. He shouted at me from the door of his shop like an angry Jack Russell, telling me that he could see the soles wearing thin even from there. He was a shoe salesman, so I ignored him, dismissing his warnings as a sales tactic. If I had bought new shoes, I never would have found myself in Chicago, dying barefoot on the cold marble floor of the house of God.

That was my first sin, and it was a bell tower.

I crossed the Swamp Bridge in my mom’s old Pontiac and made it all the way to Jackson before she broke down. 327,017 miles on the machine, but the last 200 were enough to kill her. She died in front of a late-night bowling alley at two in the morning, conveniently across the street from the bus stop. The bus to Memphis would be there in an hour.

I think heaven and hell started their battle in Jackson. One of them killed the engine, and the other sent the bus.

I went inside and ordered the fries. They were crinkly, soggy, and a concerning hue. The bowling alley manager had a bird tattooed on his shoulder—a falcon, I think. It looked like he had done it himself in a poorly-lit bathroom in front of a foggy mirror. He wouldn’t let me sit at the table unless I changed into bowling shoes, so I asked for the fries to-go and ate them on the curb while I waited for the bus. A couple staggered out behind me, laughing, and she vomited on his truck tire before they peeled away.

I said goodbye to my mom and her broken Pontiac, leaving them next to the bowling alley dumpster. She might have been haunting that goddamn car, because the door cut my ankle as I closed it the last time.

This was my second sin, and it was a radiating chapel with a relic.

On the bus, I sat crisscross and bled on the seats.

I used to stack blocks when I was young. Little wooden blocks, given to me by my uncle. They were simple—unpainted cubes, cylinders, and pyramids cut from pine. They were the only toys I had apart from my imagination, but those are really the only toys a girl needs. They taught me so much about the world, although I didn’t realize it at the time. They taught me how things fit together—how atoms become space become experience, and how experience shapes the body. I learned how everything must be built from the ground up, and how everything falls.

Charlie used to play with the blocks alongside me. That was back when the only thing people expected us to be was children. That was before he grew old enough to put on boots, open a Bible, and see himself differently. Back when we could run around barefoot and no one would bat an eye. When we grew tired, we could sit in the dirt out behind the porch and stack the blocks in as many different ways as we could imagine until our fingers were sore.

There was one block in particular—an arch, proportioned just right so that it fit neatly against the rectangles—that we would fight over. We called it “the Steeple.” Both of us wanted to place the Steeple at the top of our towers, like we were building some holy place. We climbed trees for the same reason. Same reason humans started walking upright. Some invisible thread ties us to the earth and to the sky. We were hardly four feet tall and already knew about the axis mundi. Truths like that are rooted in our DNA, but sometimes those roots grow sideways and tear up the garden.

I always drew my axis mundi from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head. I did that when I was a kid, dirty and barefoot, then again when I wore shoes, then again when my shoes fell apart. Charlie found his world tree inside a church. Or maybe he never had one.

If I had given Charlie the Steeple a few more times, he might have been around for me when I needed him. But I had kept the Steeple for myself. That must have been the reason he went chasing after God. I tried to be happy that he had dragged himself out of the swamp into some kind of faith, but he had left me behind, just like my dad left my mom.

The pattern on the seats of the bus looked like someone had taken my uncle’s blocks, painted them with bright colors, and thrown them into a bowl of bright blue macaroni noodles. On the road to Memphis, after I learned I couldn’t sleep, I searched the pattern for a shape that looked like the Steeple. The street lights came by in flashes, so I searched in the same rhythm. I found it at the top of my seat, right behind the head rest. To find it, I had to sit on my knees like I was in prayer.

This was my third sin, and it was stained glass.

The bus driver woke me up in Memphis, saying “ma’am” a few times and gently touching my shoulder. The first thing I saw was a mosquito on my hand.

The nearest car rental was a quarter mile from the bus stop. That quarter mile was all it took for the shoe salesman’s prophecy to come true. Apocryphal blues in Memphis.

First the right shoe, then the left—anarchy set loose on the sidewalk in front of a strip club, beneath a billboard warning me about hell. That kind of shit only happens in cartoons. I shrugged and left the soles behind like the fossilized footprints of a dinosaur.

I kept wearing the top half of the shoes like a cardboard facade on a movie set. I doubt they would have rented me a car without them. If I had taken my time and used the two legs the Lord had given me instead of getting in that rental car, I would have arrived in Chicago at a ripe old age. I could have spent all that time eye-level with other people instead of flying right past them. Maybe then I would have finally understood what Guthrie was singing about, or maybe I would have just died barefoot along the way.

That was my fourth sin, and it was a buttress.

As I crossed the Mississippi for the second time and looked out onto the flat fields of Arkansas, I thought about the Pontiac again. I wondered how long it was going to sit next to that dumpster. Maybe the man with the falcon tattoo would take it home and fix it, or maybe it was just as dead and lifeless as Mom.

Mom may have died only a few days before I left, but she started dying before I was even born. It was a slow death, 327,000 miles of it. It started when Dad lured her to Louisiana, back when she was in love. He stayed around just long enough for her to get pregnant and start to sink in the mud, then disappeared.

Dad had poisoned Mom’s world tree the day he left her, and then she spent the next twenty years taking an ax to the roots of the tree to put it out of its misery. She hacked away until there was nothing but churned swamp, then she watered it with Bushmills until the quicksand dragged her down. After her cardiac arrest, I was left with nothing but her piece of shit car, my piece of shit shoes, and a boat-load of hatred for a man I had never even met.

I stopped at a diner just short of St. Louis. The waitress looked like she belonged anywhere but there. Her silk-black hair, high cheekbones, and burgundy lipstick made her look like those LA actresses from the 90’s—the kind you would expect to see dancing in a Lynch dream. She sure sounded country, though, and I saw her take four smoke breaks during my thirty minute stop. I thought about asking her if she would let me take her away from all of this, as if we were in some kind of movie, then I remembered my shoes and I laughed.

I did tip her a little extra, not just because she was pretty, but because she was probably burning all of her cash on cigarettes. I had to slide past the other things in my pocket to get to the cash—that slip of paper with a name and an address was still there, and so was the gun tucked into my belt. I handed a wad of bills over to her. She thanked me with a pretty smile, and tucked the bills into her own belt, in the same place I had my gun.

I forgot about her when I saw that my car was stolen. Shards of glass shimmered in the parking spot, sparkling like stars telling me where I shouldn’t go.

There were two other cars on this side of the lot. A Tacoma with Arkansas tags was full of furniture, stacked twice as tall as the truck itself in a game of Jenga you would find in a Seuss book. It had truck nuts and an NRA bumper sticker.

The only other car was a hearse. It was all black, which I think is the only color they ever come in. It was parked in the handicap spot.

Truck nuts had left his doors unlocked. I was twisting the wires of the Tacoma together, trying to get a spark without much luck, when I felt someone behind me and turned in a panic.

He was shorter than me, even with boots on, and lanky. His head looked too large for his body, but it might have just been his long, tangled hair and wild beard that framed his face like a lion’s mane. A camouflage cap mashed his hair down and a pouch of tobacco pressed against his lip. I remembered the NRA sticker and braced myself for a quick death.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

He brushed past me, setting his spit cup on the roof of the truck and taking the wires in his hands. A few seconds later, the old machine rumbled to life. He nodded at me and spit into his cup. He walked around to the back of the truck, jostled the truck nuts off, and carried them across the lot where he attached them to the back of his hearse.

Attempting to steal the Tacoma was not my fifth sin, but it did come a few moments later when I followed the lion man toward his hearse. I forgot about my bare feet, and the broken glass.

A minute later, I was sitting in the passenger seat of the lion man’s hearse, tears streaming from my eyes while he pulled shards from between my toes.

This was my fifth sin, and it was a confessional.

Lion man’s name was Pete. I held Pete’s spit cup between my thighs while he cleaned my wounds with rubbing alcohol. Pete had been living out of his hearse for a year. He had bought it from a bankrupt funeral home for cheaper than a bicycle. He assured me there was no dead body or coffin in the back. There wouldn’t have been room, anyway, between his boxes of mass-market paperbacks, skateboards, and the dirty twin mattress he slept on. It may be the only hearse in the world that smells like weed.

Pete was headed to Sault Ste. Marie. I didn’t ask why, and he didn’t ask why I was going to Chicago, or why I was barefoot, or why I was trying to steal a truck. He just offered me a ride.

As that ugly arch fell away into the horizon behind us, he asked me to tell him stories. I thought it would be painful to talk about Mom, even more to talk about Charlie, but it seemed to help a little. Pete was a good audience, and asked me good questions.

Once, when we were in sixth grade, Charlie tried to kiss me. I think he did it because he felt like he was supposed to. I didn’t know what to do, so I pushed him away. We didn’t talk about it until high school, and then we both laughed until we couldn’t breathe.

Sometime after the kiss, I asked Mom why people kiss each other. I got way more than I wanted in an answer, since she decided that was the time to tell me about how my body worked, and how other bodies worked. I’ll give her credit: she was sober for that conversation, but still just as angry.

One thing she kept telling me was that my body was a temple. I didn’t understand that at all, but I remember hearing her praying it to herself some nights.

Pete asked me about my dad—his first bad question. I flinched, and I think he could feel that he had made a mistake. Mom—or maybe God—answered for him by splattering the hearse with rain. The storm picked up fast until the wind was howling and the wipers were sprinting to keep up.

I didn’t remember much of the Bible—certainly not as much as Charlie did. And the parts I did remember were the ones Mom used as a belt. But I remember one story about how God used a storm to kill damn near everybody. He was disappointed with what he had made, and what they had made, so he sent rain to wash it all away and start over. Like Charlie knocking over his blocks when it was time to go inside for dinner. I thought about that storm when the radio started playing that strange, wailing tone.

We almost made it to the outskirts of Chicago before that storm became truly Biblical. Pete pulled toward a highway rest stop, but he couldn’t see where the road ended and the mud began. We ran the rest of the way to the plain gray building. I imagined that I was the last of the sinners running for the gates of the ark. I wondered how many of them were running on bare, wounded feet.

I didn’t look where I was running and stumbled face-first into that sweet flood water. I thought about lying there and letting it baptize me into something new. The water was too strong for me to fight—too heavy for me to draw a line between my feet and the sky. Lion man wouldn’t have it, though. He heaved me up and dragged me toward safety, breaking the latch of the building with his shoulder.

The storm raged outside of our ark for hours. The sky was so black I couldn’t tell what time of day it was. Pete broke the glass of the vending machine, and we ate Bugles while we watched the world fall away.

My shirt was torn and covered in mud. After an hour, I was freezing, so Pete took off his jacket for me to wear. He turned away to let me change, but I just took my own tattered rags off and waited for him to turn back around.

In the dim light of the vending machine, drenched in rain, mud, and sweat, our bodies didn’t really look like temples, but we said our prayers to each other all the same. After we worshiped, I somehow managed to fall asleep with Pete’s arm around my waist, the storm lulling me to sleep.

This was my sixth sin, and it was a baptismal.

I had a dream about my dad. He wasn’t in the dream, not in so many words, but I could feel him. I was on a spaceship sailing up into the heavens. No one else was there—only me—but somehow I knew I was the last hope of the human race. I was supposed to find a new planet to colonize and keep our DNA going. Keep his DNA going, though. I felt him in my blood, salty and bitter, poisoning roots like he had done before, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the flood again. About Noah and his ark.

I found his name and address carved into the floor of the spaceship. It looked just like it did on the little slip of paper I kept tucked away in my pocket. Mom never knew that I had found that in the pages of her Bible seven years ago.

Charlie told me he was going to leave only hours before he actually did it. I was furious he hadn’t told me sooner, although looking back, I don’t know if it would have made much of a difference. He tried to explain—said something about divine calling and holy purpose—but I just kept asking him why. I needed a friend, I told him. But he needed God.

After he was gone, I found Mom’s Bible hidden in her nightstand behind the liquor. I thought maybe I could understand Charlie better. The book fell open to a page in the middle, letting loose this paper. I read the paper first and saw the name. The only thing I had ever learned about my father was his name and the pain he had caused. Mom had told me she didn’t know where he went, but there I was, staring at his name and an address in Chicago.

On the Bible page beneath it, I read only one line.

“Thou dost lay me in the dust of death.”

That little piece of paper became my Bible. I kept it in my pocket for seven years, waiting until Mom finally died, so I could finally do what I needed to do. I read it over and over to myself when I bought the gun and etched it into the metal, when I ignored the shoe salesman, when I drove the Pontiac over the Swamp Bridge, when I kept sinning along I-55.

I read it again on the floor of my spaceship while it touched down onto a new world. I realized in my dream that I was barefoot. The letters were burning my feet.

Around the name and the address, a poem was written. I had heard the poem before, but it never meant anything to me then. In the dream, though, I understood that the words condemned me.

The walls of the spaceship peeled open in front of me, forming three steps down onto green grass. The sky was blue, and I could hear birds chirping. Sweet, fresh air—cleaner than I had ever felt—filled my lungs. I was supposed to leave the spaceship, but I stayed there until I woke up.

This was my seventh sin, and it was a clerestory.

My gun was gone in the morning.

The birds woke me up first. Pete was a heavy sleeper, still snoring in harmony with the vending machine. I left him there to dream about whatever spaceship he was on.

The first dim lights of the sun sparkled on the swamp outside. I was a thousand miles from Louisiana, but a vision of a bayou had followed me even here. I started looking for the gun like I was fishing for mudbugs—jeans rolled up to my knees, ankle deep in the muck.

Something was sticking up near the root of a tree—the body of a turkey vulture, turned stiff and cold and bloated with rain. I thought it had drowned in the storm, but I saw the hilt of my gun rising from its beak. I pried it open like a clam, fighting against the stiff jaw muscles, until I held the weapon in my hand.

That was my eighth sin, and it was a monstrance.

The Mississippi River once flowed north for a brief time, centuries ago, when earthquakes rocked the land and sent the currents backwards. Anyone who knows the river knows how impossible that seems, but it didn’t seem so impossible to me that day. I looked out on I-55 stretched out in front of me, winding through the hills and sparkling with rain water, and I could feel its current pulling me north.

I stole a clean shirt and some food, but I left the hearse behind. I told myself I left it to be kind to the lion man, but the car was stuck deep in the mud. It wouldn’t have gone with me, anyway.

The skyline of the city rose up toward the heavens in front of me.

All around me, as the darkness fell again, axis mundi of glass and metal stretched upward. I no longer cared about the pain in my feet. They had become a reflection of myself, smearing blood across the land. They carried me over sidewalks and streets so potholed they looked like Swiss cheese. They carried me over sharp rocks and broken glass and still-hot cigarettes—all of heaven and hell still trying to keep me away. My body was one stigmata, from my broken feet, to my tired thighs, to my hunched shoulders.

They were hunched against the misting rain that filtered through, and against the weight of my sins. I’m sure if someone had seen me—although I saw no one around—they would have thought I was a creature of some kind. My humanity had been left behind in pieces along I-55. I was a rough beast, like the poem told me I would be, my hour indeed come ‘round at last, but I was not slouching forth to be born. I was slouching forth to die.

The shadow of a bird passed over me, so large that she blocked out the rain. I turned my eyes upward and saw the steeple of a church turned blood red in the dying light.

This was my ninth and final sin. I thought it was a steeple, but it was a crypt.

In the middle of the empty city, this house of worship seemed small, but I didn’t care about the size. I cared only for the ground that it sat on. My father’s address was not a house, or an apartment. He was a church. Above the door were words etched in Latin, like his name had been etched onto my gun.

EGO AVTEM SVM VERMIS ET NON HOMO

The door was not as heavy as it should have been. The air inside smelled damp and cool, and herbal as the last smoke of incense trailed away. Nothing moved there except for me, and the wind that I pushed.

Humans are born head first, which means our feet come last. The whole picture must take shape before our feet can, and from then on, we spend our lives placing weight onto them, forcing them to carry all of our baggage while we get to look up at the sun and the stars. Mine finally gave up when they touched holy ground. They were nothing more than bloody stumps by then, but they brought me down with fury.

I crawled from there, dragging myself along the aisle, beneath the flickering candle light, toward the holy place in the center. The house of worship told me where to go, built long ago by careful hands who never knew what crimson stains would later come.

In the center of the church, beneath the highest dome, I found that name carved into the floor. My father lay buried beneath me, six feet or more below. If not for the earth between us, I could have kissed his cheek.

I think whatever we put beneath the soles of our feet becomes our worldview. If we walk in shoes, life is supported, commodified, isolated. If we walk on asphalt, life is painful, immortal, cracked.

If we walk barefoot on dirt or grass, life is familiar.

If we run barefoot in a storm, life is wrath.

If I’m right, changing your life is as easy as changing your shoes.

I never heard his voice. I was too close to death for sound to reach me. But I felt his hands on my shoulders—gentle and caring—and when he rolled me onto my back, I saw his eyes. Charlie had grown since I had last seen him, but his eyes were the same. They looked down on me from above his white collar, first with concern, then recognition, then shock.

There was a time when his eyes would have brought me comfort, but that time had slipped away from me.

My feet were broken, but I made one more axis mundi, my arm raised up toward the sky with a steeple made of metal. I gave the rest of myself to heaven and to hell, but all I had left to give was sin.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

J. NEWMAN PRITCHARD: When I was very young, my grandparents would sit with me and my sisters on a swing in their garden and we would play a storytelling game. We would each say one sentence of a story before passing it along to the next person until we reached a satisfying ending. That's certainly where I began as a storyteller. When I was much older, I began playing roleplaying games with friends. That was like unkinking a hose. Stories started to spill out faster than I could keep up, so I began writing them down, just ideas or loose outlines. At some point during undergrad, those ideas turned into true prose, and I have been writing fiction ever since. I think, because of those origins, storytelling is always inherently a collaborative process for me. I might be alone with my thoughts and the page, but I am hearing voices of other people as I write. I am hearing idioms from my southern family, strange comparisons that a friend once pointed out to me, or the weird notes that I discovered in the margins of a library book. All of that is blending together and forming the voices of my characters that sit in the room around me and whisper. I am the only one writing, but I am never writing alone.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

JNP: I think I treat my creative mind like a horse I am trying to tame. It needs to have the space to run wild and show me something I never would have guessed, but it needs a gentle hand at the reins or it might buck me off and leave me in the dust of an indecipherable draft. Each new piece often begins with just a visual or emotional image. I will jot that down quickly. If I think the piece is a short story or flash fiction, I will just start writing it. If I feel like it wants to be something longer, like a novella or a novel, I will toss around some outlines before I start working on the prose. Outlines aren't to box me in, but just to keep me focused on the story I am trying to tell. "Nine Deadly Sins on I-55" began with a mental image of someone's shoes falling apart one after the other. That was the image that kept me anchored throughout the writing process.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

JNP: There is nothing that I circle back to more than the physical space that human beings inhabit. We are embodied creatures. None of us have ever had an experience that wasn't defined by the space we occupy—the confines of our body, the limits of the walls or sky or forest, the smell lingering on surfaces, the emotions carried in the air that we breathe. When I walk into a room, the first thing I notice is the way the new environment pushes and pulls me. I want my characters and my readers to experience that vividly when they enter a story. Regardless of what kind of story I am trying to tell—whether it is horror or fantasy, grounded or speculative—I will always tell a story that “Takes Place.”

If not a writer, who would you be?

JNP: Before I started writing prose, I was (and still am) an artist. Charcoal, graphite, and ink were my mediums of choice, but I dabbled in most visual mediums. For several years, I was on track to be an architect. If that had worked out, I might not have ever tried to write prose. I am grateful that I am a writer instead of an architect, but I do consider myself to be both, even if I use a word processor instead of a CAD software these days. I still draw frequently, often illustrating scenes from my own fiction. At this point in my life, my art rarely leaves the walls of my bedroom, but it helps me spend more time in the worlds inside my head. When I can’t find the words, I can often find a picture. My love of art and architecture is certainly closely related to the embodiment I discussed above.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

JNP: I still consider myself an emerging writer, so I don't have answers to “solve” writing, and I hope I never trick myself into thinking that I do. But I have learned quite a few things. There is no correct way to be creative, so long as you are turning inward before you ever turn outward. Your creative mind is like a pot of stew on a stove. That pot is larger than you think—it is vastly deep and wildly hungry. You have to feed it. Toss everything in there. Vegetables, roots, meats, seasonings, fats. Read so many books, talk to so many people, watch international films that you have never heard of before, wander in an art museum and pretend you are someone else for a day. Or, you can take my personal favorite: sit in a crowded restaurant and eavesdrop on neighboring tables. After your creative pot is so full that it is overflowing and you simply can't handle it anymore, then you write like you are never going to stop. And keep writing, even if you think what you are writing is bad (it isn't). You can always edit a terrible first draft, but you can't edit a blank page. Lastly, never, ever, ever go near artificial intelligence: not for brainstorming, or writing, or editing. Don't touch it with a ten-foot pole. If you do, I will find you and I will fill the inside of your computer with a gallon of Nutella.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

JNP: I don't like discussing too much about works in progress: my main motivation for writing is sharing my story with an audience, so I need to keep that motivation close to my chest to push me forward. What I can say is that my current project is a postmodern gothic horror novel. It tells the story of several individuals affected by a person's disappearance. There is a small cast of characters, a mysterious theater play, and a garden full of stone statues. This novel has already been trying to ruin my life as I have been working on it for a couple of years, drafting outline after outline. The current draft looks like a completely different story to the first one, but it still has its roots buried deep in something true. I am close to uncovering an outline that I think will carry me to the end, but I still need to toss some more things in my stew pot. Soon, though, I will be full-steam ahead.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

JNP: Ursula K Le Guin stands out above all of the rest. She was everything I admire in a great writer, artist, and person. Every time I discover something new from her, I feel entire worlds open up within my mind, like rooms I hadn't given myself permission to explore. Ever since I started reading her work, I do not think about genre in the same way. I also have an undergraduate degree in religious studies, so I have read many thinkers from many different faiths around the world. This has had a profound effect on my writing, I think, allowing the voices of my characters to bend and shape their worldviews in ways reflective of human spirituality. Other writers consistently make ripples in my writing: Mark Z. Danielewski, Shirley Jackson, James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, among others. The only storyteller I think about as often as Le Guin is David Lynch, especially when I am working on the realm of postmodern horror.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

JNP: If you enjoyed reading "Nine Deadly Sins on I-55," I can certainly recommend some films that may strike the same chords in your mind. 'Red Rock West' (1993) is a delightful noir western crime thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Lara Flynn Doyle. 'The Outrun' (2024) has been an inspiration for me this last year since I first saw it, and Saoirse Ronan delivers a spectacular performance. The Coen Brothers are my favorite directors and have influenced my writing in many ways. 'Inside Llewyn Davis' (2013) is probably the most relevant comparison to "Nine Deadly Sins on I-55", and I think you would enjoy it. One of my favorite films of all time is Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Adaptation’ (2002), and I think more people should watch it. For music, John Prine and Emmylou Harris were on repeat when I was working on this short story and will always have a permanent place in my library. I have been listening to Sunny War a lot this year, especially her songs "Ghosts" and "Whole." As for other artists, I have found so much inspiration and peace from the work of Christian Watson (@1924us on Instagram). The animation style is both startlingly unique and strangely nostalgic.

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1601)1. A man lies flat on his back, arms flung up and open, eyes shut, his sword fallen in the dirt beside him. The horse fills the entire top of the canvas, one hoof raised above him, and the only other figure, partially obscured, grips the bridle and tends the animal, untouched by whatever has happened. Though the story shows no holy presence outright, we do witness a light falling upon the man and there is some sense that there is something miraculous taking place (indeed this painting depicts the conversion of Paul from someone violent and “unholy” to apostle). There is a similar propulsive, wondrous energy channelled throughout this story…and it’s one that will stay with me for quite some time.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I hope you’re all settled in for the evening because below I’m sharing with you a new kickass brilliant story by the award-winning writer Isabel J. Kim. I first discovered her work in Clarkesworld, when I all but fell outta my chair because her story was unlike anything I’d ever read. I hope that you all too fall out of your chairs after reading “Nomenclature”, then, in the best way possible ofc!

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So God looks down from heaven and says to Cain, “You have to invent murder.”

Cain looks up from the field and says, “OK, you got it, God. What’s murder?”

And God says, “Murder is when you kill someone with intent, so you’re going to kill your brother.”

And Cain says, “What’s a brother?”

And God says, “You’re going to have to invent that first, actually.”

Sanctuary puts his armor on from the bottom up. Greaves, breastplate, gloves, helmet. Identification taught him that, before Identification was blown up in a drone strike.

“You need your hands free for as long as possible,” Ident told him, back when Sanct had just been decanted. “The buckles on the breastplate are a bitch, and after you get it on, it’s hard as fuck to bend over.”

Sanct had nodded, uncertain. He hadn’t known enough about the world to disagree with Ident. And anyway, Ident was his squad leader, so he was in charge of Sanct, and Sanct was six hours old, his brain pre-loaded with the Basic Bio™ package and the Standard Movement™ package and a handful of trade secret combat sims. Sanct didn’t know anything much about anything, other than that he was a soldier and he had been born to fight and die. So, he was imprinting hard on Ident.

“This is where you can make a joke about copulation,” Indent had said, kindly. “It makes the commanders feel more comfortable, if you do things like that.”

“What’s copulation?”

“It’s how people are made. Not us. People. You and I and all the other pieces of meat are made in the vats, but the commanders and the civvies at home are made by a male and a female copulating. The male inserts his penis into the female’s vagina. Or so I’m told. I’ve never seen a female. You won’t either. But the commanders are people, so they like to imagine we’re people too.”

“Okay, so copulation,” Sanct had said. “And my armor on from the bottom up.”

“Quick study, Sanct,” Ident had said.

Two months later, he’d be dead. Drone strike. Death from above, Ident’s limbs flying and his red Blood™ leaking out onto the desert rock. Sanct would have a perfect visual of Ident getting blown to high heaven.

“What do we do,” Sanct would whisper, shocked by the sight. This wasn’t the first time someone had died on the battlefield, but it was the first time his squad leader would have died, and he would feel something sharp and terrible in his chest. Not a physical feeling, but something else.

“Nothing,” Feign would say, before hustling Sanct and Copyright and Passage back into their vehicle and driving them back to base like a maniac while arguing with the commander over the comms, even though Sanct was supposed to be driving. And then Feign would be the new squad leader. And they wouldn’t talk about Ident again. The same way they didn’t talk about Clay and Endure and all the others who had been downed, in the two months since Sanct had been decanted.

Things that exist so far: light, darkness, life, death, mothers, fathers, god, satan, all the animals, shame, the wasteland, the garden, snakes.
Things that don’t yet exist: murder, brothers, your mother weeping, your father moaning, the act of putting the rock against the head and bashing it open.

The pieces of meat are similar to human beings in that they’re derived from a single, legally acquired pool of human DNA, although the meat’s formulation has been substantially improved on through clever technological enhancements. The meat has limbs that are swappable and more durable, their blood is Blood™, and they’re stronger, overall, with improved eyesight. The meat is decanted and is ready to go after a single week of conditioning. The pieces of meat don’t have names. They only have randomly-assigned callsigns.

Sanct doesn’t know how many conflicts the meat is deployed for. He only knows that he has been decanted into a rocky desert, where the sun is hot and it never rains and they have to slather their exposed flesh with a thick white goo before going outside, to protect them from the UV rays.

There were rumors and conspiracy theories among Sanct’s squad, that they haven’t been deployed in the Middle East or Africa or the American Southwest, that they’re on an entire planet entirely. There’s no way to know. None of them knew that much about earth, other than what was included in the Basic Bio™ package. Being on another planet would explain why they rarely saw commanders, but that fact could also have been explained by the fact that most warfare has been automated. In some ways, the meat’s presence is anachronistic.

“They lost their taste for dying,” Right had said. “But they didn’t lose their taste for killing. And you wanna hear my theories?”

Copyright knew more about what was going on than anyone else, because Right had an in with a commander who called on the off-hours. Sanct and the others figured it was probably some sort of strange romance, although romance was maybe the wrong word. Right and the Commander mostly had long, secret conversations over the comms, and occasionally Right was called in for a special mission that he would return from, tight-lipped.

Sanct never asked about what happened with the commander. They all had topics they didn’t want to touch. Right’s commander, Feign’s soap carvings, Sanct’s reaction to Ident’s death.

“Sure,” Sanct said.

“The civvies like to watch. Nah. Like’s not the right word. We look like them, right? They can….what’s the word, empathize, with us dying. And other than us, it’s all machines and code and shit. It doesn’t feel like a fight, a real fight with stakes, if you cripple a landship or a drone. But us, we’re full of Blood-Tee-Em. We’re a good watch. You can feel like your team’s really winning, when we take a base. And when we die, you can feel sorry for us.”

Sanct considered this. It would explain why they were issued rifles, instead of ion cannons and beamers. It would explain why they existed at all.

“If they felt so sorry about us, they shouldn’t have us out here,” Sanct said, and it came out wistful because even Sanct, less than four months old, understood that it was their lot to fight and die. If they weren’t made for this, they wouldn’t have been made for anything at all.

And despite everything, Sanct is glad to have been decanted.

Cain goes home after God’s command. He eats dinner with his mother and his father. Abel is somewhere in the hills and valleys, with his flock, and won’t be home until dark.

And Eve says, “You look tired, Cain. Are you alright?”

And Cain says, “God asked me to do some stuff, and I don’t know about it.”

And Eve says, “Oh that guy.”

And Cain doesn’t ask her to elaborate, because his mother is using that tone she uses when she talks about the cows having escaped the pasture, the rain having ruined the drying laundry, the dog having shit inside. Which is to say, when she talks about a natural phenomenon that she can’t argue with, only able to deal with in the aftermath.

And Cain eats his dinner and thinks about Abel. His father doesn’t say anything. For the entirety of Cain’s life, Adam has seemed a little defeated.

Sanct’s life is split into downtime and uptime. Downtime is for sleep, showers, eating real food, watching propaganda, playing card games with increasingly complex rules. Uptime is for digesting mandates from the commanders and piling into vehicles and driving out to combat zones, for readying their rifles, for shooting. It’s for planning maneuvers with landships and drones and readying traps and strike points. It’s for trying to recover territory. It’s for sitting behind a brick wall, three in the morning, heart in Sanct’s mouth while he hears shelling in the distance.

By month eleven, Sanct’s the second-oldest member of his squad. He no longer drives the vehicle—the honor of the safest seat is reserved for the youngest piece of meat. Instead, Sanct runs comms and tactics, which should be Right’s job, but Right’s their gunner, since he’s shit at reading. Probably there was something wrong with his Basic Bio™ download.

But it works out okay, because Right’s a good shot.

Today they’re being deployed for a longer mission—a week, trying to recapture a supply depot that command thinks has been abandoned. Right’s late, though, which is aggravating. Sanct just grits his teeth and flips through the maps and the mission briefing, because realistically, it doesn’t matter if they’re half an hour late getting out. They’ll drive a little faster and it’ll be fine.

Right finally jogs over.

“Sorry, my commander called,” he says, swinging over the side of the vehicle and getting cozy up next to Sanct and the gun mounted on the open back of their ride. “Start the car, Popular!”

Pop starts the vehicle, arcing them out of the hanger and into the burning desert. Sanct stashes his papers and glances at Right.

“Your commander give you anything useful?”

“Nah. Just wanted some attention before I headed out.”

“Hm,” Sanct says. They’re eating ground fast, but it would still be a long drive. He was sore, still, from the last deployment. He had gotten a real bad full-body bruise from when half a building had fallen on him. Right had risked his life dragging him out of that situation. They’re the two oldest in their squad, now. They’ve known each other for the entirety of Sanct’s life. “Why’s he like you, anyway?”

Right shrugs. Folds his legs, wincing as he changes position.

“It’s not romantic. Sorry if that loses you any bets.”

“Oh yeah?” Sanct says, his interest piqued.

“He just likes to talk. I apparently look exactly like his dead son,” Right says. “Fucked, right?”

“Yeah,” Sanct says, for lack of anything else he can say. The wind whistles around them. They have to lean close together to speak.

“He says he wants to get me out of here,” Right says, quietly, against Sanct’s cheek. “But I’m pretty sure he’s full of shit. I bet he’s said that to dozens of guys that have my face. His son’s face. Whatever.”

“Could all have been you,” Sanct says.

“You know I don’t believe that stuff,” Right says, and then the wind picks up, and it’s too loud to talk anymore, so they don’t.

A lot of the meat believes in reincarnation. They say that the stuff that makes you you is still in the gene pool, and eventually your combination will be reassembled, and then you’ll get printed and decanted again.

They say that unlike everything else in the universe, the meat is destined to come around again. There’s only so many neural patterns and body types that have been preprogrammed into the vats, and eventually, something exactly like you will be printed, and it will be the perfect shape for your soul to re-inhabit.

There’s guys that get really spiritual about it. There’s a smuggled book on Buddhism that gets passed around the barracks. A Bible, too, and a book of Norse mythology.

Sanct read them all, but he doesn’t know if he believes in any of it.

After dinner, Cain sits on a bale of hay and looks at the fields and the orchards and the great velvet sky above the basin of the valley that his brother is herding sheep in, and he sees the speck of his brother among the sheep and he can faintly imagine that he hears his brother singing.

Cain gets up and begins walking toward the valley. God has called him. He’s supposed to answer.

The next day, their vehicle pulls a tripwire as they’re rolling past an aquifer. Automatic turrets spring from the ground and start shooting at the squad.

“Duck,” Sanct shouts, and everyone crashes to the floor, except for Pop, who frantically puts the vehicle in reverse and slams his foot on the acceleration. Right begins inching shakily his way over to the gun mounted on the back.

“Don’t—” Sanct says. Over the edge of the vehicle he can see that there are reinforcements, coming to back up the turrets.

“They’re going to radio in that they saw us unless we get them now,” Right shouts, and hauls himself up to brace against the gun. “Get down!”

Sanct dives back down. He hears the whine of the staccato scream of the big gun above him as it charges up and then Right fires, one, two, three times. Sanct peeks over the edge of the vehicle. One turret down. Couple of assholes coming right at them. Sanct spins his rifle from his back into his arms and takes a couple of shots, gritting his teeth as Blood™ blooms on the adversaries’ uniforms. Hope springs in Sanct’s heart. Maybe this will be easy.

And then he hears two more shots, one after another, and then he’s not paying attention to anything at all because their vehicle is swinging wildly and next to him, Right’s bloody body is falling and ragdolling out of the vehicle and it’s happening too fast for Sanct to say or do anything, and Sanct is gripping the side of the vehicle as it spins out of control and he hears shots, and for a long moment the world is just a smear of color and noise until the vehicle

“Pop’s dead,” Waste shouts from the front. Sanct looks over the edge, and Waste is leaned over with his hands on the steering wheel, half-sitting on Pop’s dead body as he pushes down on the acceleration with his foot.

Pop’s head dangles. Blood™ oozes out of the side of his neck. Sanct feels a sick numb feeling in his stomach. There’s Blood™ in the back of the vehicle, too, where Right was shot, where he fell. It’s all over where it smeared against the low walls before Right was tossed out.

It happened so fast. It always happens so fast. Sanct is never going to see Right again.

“We going back, Sanct?” Waste asks. He’s still got his foot on the acceleration. Nobody’s chasing them, at least.

Right. Sanct’s in charge now. Sanct’s in charge and Right and Pop are dead, and its all the fucking bastards fault and it’s a day’s drive back to base, and he has to decide what they’re going to do next. He’s the oldest, now. Right is never going to get back to his commander.

If they go back, they’re just going to have to report what happened, and they’re going to have to come back out and the situation is just going to get worse.

“No,” Sanct says. “We didn’t need the whole team for this one. We keep going.”

They drive through the rest of the day and the rest of the night. They decide to dump Pop’s body at sunset. Until then, it lies in the back of the vehicle, and Sanct drives, because Waste’s hands are shaking too much after the first few miles. They don’t clean the Blood™ off of the upholstery and dashboard—they only have so much water to spare. Sanct’s hands are tacky by mile number ten. They drive in silence. The sun begins to go down, slowly, at first, and then all at once.

Sanct pulls over near a rock formation. They drag Pop’s body across the sand. They set it facing the setting sun. They close it’s eyes. They head back to the vehicle. Sanct sits heavily down in the drivers’ seat. He doesn’t know if it’s better or worse, that they don’t have Right’s body. The way it ragdolled was terrible.

“Is it always like this?” Waste asks.

“No. Only sometimes.”

“I wish I were dead,” Waste says. “Instead of. Them.”

“It’ll be better in the morning,” Sanct says, and wishes that he had anything better to say, that he believed like some of the others did, that everyone would be reincarnated, that they would live and die again. But all he has are platitudes. The same ones that Ident used to tell him, though, when Sanct got scared. When Clay and Endure were killed. It would be better in the morning.

“Okay,” Waste says. “Do you want me to drive?”

Sanct shakes his head. He starts the engine. They continue.

The rest of the trip is bizarrely peaceful, as if they’re receiving some cosmic recompense for the death of half their squad. Sanct tries not to think about it. He’ll think about it later. He should be used to this by now—they’ve rotated so many pieces of meat out of his squad—but he never is. It always feels different. It’s always a surprise.

Their luck runs out as they approach the supply depot. It’s not abandoned. There are turrets at the corners, vehicles visible behind a barricade, and when Sanct pulls up his heat vision goggles, it’s clear that there are multiple lifesigns inside. Sanct swears. The depot was supposed to be empty. The survivors from the earlier aquifer shootout must have called ahead.

“We heading back?” Waste says.

Sanct hesitates. If they return, they’ll just be sent out again, with two new freshly decanted pieces of meat. The supply depot might be better guarded by then, and there might be more ambushes along the road now that the other side knows that they’re trying to take the depot. And then what? Freshly decanted meat, dead.

He shakes his head. “We’re calling in a drone strike.”

“We can do that?”

“Not usually,” Sanct says. Sanct is eleven months old, though. Sanct understands relationships, and how they change what people are going to do. “I’m going to call Copyright’s commander.”

At the edge of the valley, where the grass turns to rock and sand, Cain sees Abel. He’s a small figure down in the valley. Cain recognizes Abel by the crook of his staff among the sheep, and then by the cloak that their mother has woven for him. It isn’t very good. All their clothes are poorly made. Nobody has made clothes before their mother.

And Abel waves his staff and calls, “Cain!”

And Cain waves back, rock in his hand, and says, “Abel!”

The commander listens to Sanct’s explanation without interrupting. When Sanct is done, the commander speaks in a calm, measured tone.

“In half an hour, there will be a drone flying overhead with a precision payload. Make sure that you’re at least two hundred meters away.”

“Copy that. Thank you.”

Sanct leans back against his seat, the tension leaching out of his muscles. Reinforcements are coming. He’s not going to have to lead Waste to his death.

“Was it bad, when he died?” the commander asks.

“It wasn’t bad,” Sanct lies.

Cain’s killed a lot of things. Bugs. Snakes. Lizards. Sheep. A dog, once, when it attacked him first. He’s reaped sheaf after sheaf of grain, if that counts as killing anything. His parents have told him that every single thing on earth is alive, and that all of them were created by God. God has not provided any guidance on the subject.

Nobody else on the earth has a brother, other than Cain, other than Abel. Cain thinks that killing Abel is going to be different than killing the dog. But he doesn’t know. He’s never had a brother before. Nobody has.

And Abel calls out, “Why do you have a rock?”

The drone streaks overhead. From its belly a black speck drops and hits the supply depot and there’s a bright, beautiful plume of flame. Dense clouds of black smoke billow from the windows and broken ceilings.

Sanct and Waste watch the supply depot smolder. The fire begins to flicker out. The smoke trails into the bright blue of the sky. Sanct gets the heat vision goggles out and squints through them. There’s too much ambient warmth to tell if there’s anyone still alive. Sanct unlocks the vehicle, strapping his weapons to his back and to his belt.

“If I’m not back in an hour, drive back without me,” he says, and hoists himself out.

And Cain looks down at his brother and thinks about light, darkness, life, death, his mother, his father, God, all the animals, and the story that his mother once told him about paradise and the snake and his father, when he asked why she was so sad. And he thinks about his sickle. And he thinks about his flail. And he thinks about his hoe, and the rocks he digs out of the ground, and he thinks about how strong he is, from the days in the field. How the human arm is engineered for throwing.

And Cain thinks about Abel. How soft Abel’s head is. What is a brother? What does a brother matter to him?

The rock is warm in his hands.

Sanct walks through the bombed-out ruins of the supply depot. The exterior walls are still intact. Inside, the structure is a ruin. Sanct wonders about the waste of it all. The original plan had been to take the depot clean, but he supposes that destroying it and preventing the enemy from having it is better. He glances through the heat vision goggles every few meters. So far, there isn’t anything that looks like a live body. He steps over a corpse, and then a second one. There’s Blood™ and ash on the floors.

He gets nearly to the other side of the building before he raises the heat vision goggles and sees the figure on the other side of the wall, hot and alive. Sanct angles himself against the wall and peers through the open door. Yes. There he is. One survivor, then. It could have been worse.

Sanct lines up his shot. He doesn’t think. He shoots. There is a high whine, and then the sound of someone collapsing, swearing. Sanct waits for the ensuing silence. It doesn’t occur.

Sanct sighs. Rolls his shoulders. Walks outside with his rifle in hand, ready to deal the finishing blow. After this is over, he’ll go out to his vehicle, and then him and Waste will head back to base.

And God, standing next to Cain like he always does, says: “Look, it is crucial that you invent the act of putting the rock against the head and bashing it open.”
And Cain says: “Can I do that to a sheep, instead?”
And God says: “No. It’s got to be a person.”

And Sanct looks at the stranger, and the stranger looks at him, and the stranger is bleeding from his thigh and there is a growing pool of Blood™ around him, and Sanct understands at that moment.

The zealots are right. They’re all made of the same meat. The same gene pool and presets. The same faces and the same bodies and the same DNA being printed out on Sanct’s side, on this stranger’s side, on all the sides of every conflict. Every piece of meat.

This stranger has Ident’s face.

And Cain says, “You know, I think my mom was right about you when she said that she loves you but doesn’t like you.”
And God says, “I don’t care if you like me. Do you love me?”
And Cain says, “I don’t know what love is. That hasn’t been invented yet.”
And God says, “Shit. Fuck. Whoops. Hold on one second.”
And Cain feels a pain in his heart so great that he feels like he is dying.

“Can you make this quick?” the stranger that looks like Ident wheezes. He’s unarmed. He’s wearing downtime clothing. He looks exactly like Ident did, before Ident died.

There is sweat and white sludge dripping into Sanct’s eyes. He wipes them. He looks up at the sky. The drones. The birds. The beating sun. Where are the commanders and the civvies and all the people who are people might be watching them right now? Sanct’s thoughts are all bleary, smeared with exhaustion There are drones high in the sky and there is a camera on his helmet and maybe the same thing on not-Ident’s helmet. Is anyone looking? Is anyone ever looking?

“Hey, man,” Not-Ident says. “We don’t have all day here. C’mon. I don’t need any foreplay. Don’t fucking draw this out, kid.”

And Sanct, looks back down. He wonders, despairingly, rifle held ready in his arms like a warm lover, if a crass vocabulary is genetic. He puts his finger on the trigger. He closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to watch this. And besides. He’s one meter away. His aim doesn’t need to be perfect.

“Now, Cain,” God says.

Cain has never disobeyed God before. He feels love like a deep stupid painful throb in his heart. He closes his eyes.

Sanct opens his eyes. He throws down his rifle. He unbuckles his gloves and his body armor. His breastplate falls to the ground. He strips his sweaty, stained uniform, and then his sweaty undershirt that had once been bleach-white. He ties the undershirt to the barrel of his gun. He jams the gun into the sand. He leans down and heaves not-Ident’s body over his shoulder.

“Hold on to me,” he says. “Don’t fucking bite.”

“The hell are you doing?” Not-Ident wheezes.

“Doesn’t matter, you’re probably going to die either way. I probably nicked an artery”

Sanct hefts Not-Ident’s weight. His shoulders are killing him. Not-Ident is heavy as hell.

“You’re insane,” Not-Ident says.

“Nah,” Sanct says. “You look exactly like someone I used to care about. All my friends are dead. And I’m done with this shit. I’m tired. Aren’t you tired?”

Silence for a moment, before Not-Ident coughs wetly.

“Yeah. I’m tired.”

Sanct looks to the sky.

“I’m done with this shit,” he says again, to the sun, to the drones, to anyone else who is watching. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

And then Sanct turns and starts walking. He grips the white flag like it is a life buoy. He is taking one step after another, away from his vehicle, away from Waste, away from the bombed-out supply depot. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He doesn’t know if there’s anyone else out there. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. He doesn’t know if Not-Ident is going to die.

Sanct takes step after step. He is waiting for Right’s commander to kill him with a remote drone strike. He is waiting for anyone to stop him.

“What do they call you?” Sanct asks.

“History. Tory, to my friends.”

“I’m Sanct.”

“Hi,” Tory says, and then coughs again. “Again. I just want to make it clear. You’re crazy, and we’re both going to be dead.”

“Yeah. But right now, we’re alive. So shut the fuck up, and let me carry you.”

And Tory laughs, wheezing, and it’s strong enough that Sanct thinks that his Blood™ might have clotted and Tory’s not going to bleed out immediately. And right now they’re both alive, and they still have a couple liters of water and the desert is vast and deep and there is no one immediately coming to kill them, and Sanct is choosing not to kill anyone ever again.

And Cain bashes God in the head with a rock, and wanders into the desert.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

ISABEL J. KIM: I started writing with a pretty conventional story: I was a kid, and a teacher gave me praise for my fiction. Shout out Dr. Horn from Warren Middle School, you set me on a path that led me to such strange places as “writing short science fiction stories.” I started writing stories with more than superficial meaning mostly because I have a hard time writing stories that don’t have any meaning, in fact, I am probably too didactic in my fiction and have actively been working to pull that aspect back, to middling effect. I think part of the reason why I do this, though, is that I have a hard time explaining my thoughts through a traditional essay format, and sometimes I feel that I’m the recipient of a particularly strange curse: I can only say how I feel through the lens of a 4000 word science fiction story, a format that nobody asked me to write (well, now people ask me to write them, but for a long time they didn’t!).

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

IJK: I went full time as an author a little over a year ago, and since then any semblance of a consistent routine has regrettably dissipated, despite my best efforts. Things happen when they happen, I work pretty much every day at any time between 7am and midnight, but I do less work per day than I used to, when I had a more traditional job. I do try to write during “normal” work hours, just to match my partner’s schedule. I also have different drafting cadences for novels and short fiction—since you've got a piece of my short fiction here, I’ll talk about that process. I usually start with one vivid, clear scene or concept that I want to scaffold a story around, which usually isn’t enough to carry the entire narrative, and then I start trying to think about what other concepts might go well in that story. I collect these ideas like a crow collects shiny stones, and these ideas will kind of just be in my brain for weeks or months or years until I have enough pieces that fit together into something cohesive and more interesting than just the sum of their parts. Then I start writing, and it usually goes pretty quickly after that.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

IJK: Doubling, bodysharing, death of the self, being overtaken by an alien entity or having to commune with that entity, tremendously strange ethical dilemmas, leaps of faith. I have no idea why all my themes are so strange. In real life I’m fairly cheerful! For a while I was also including the word “fluorescent” in everything I published, but I’ve stopped doing that for now.

If not a writer, who would you be?

IJK: Easy but boring answer: Biglaw corporate transactional attorney, specifically in a leveraged finance or M&A group. That was my profession before I took my own leap of faith.

I became a lawyer because I felt like I should get a "real job," when I was younger, and I liked it enough that I would go back to that. Before I was a lawyer, though, I was thinking about getting an MFA, though, and in that case I would have been doing conceptual installation art and making no money. There were a lot of lives I considered inhabiting when I was twenty-two, okay.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

IJK: I’ve both received and would like to pass along this piece of advice: Quantity over quality. Write more stories, get your reps in, learn where you always stutter. This is more effective at quickly improving your craft than endlessly polishing a single narrative ever is. Ideas are cheap, work on your execution. Also, you can recycle those ideas into different executions over time.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

IJK: I’m working on my second novel draft! My first novel, SUBLIMATION, is out on June 2nd, and I am truly in the trenches working on the next book I owe my publisher. Everyone says that second books are harder and I didn’t believe them, but this draft? This draft wants to kill me. With hammers. If it doesn’t kill me, though, this book will be fun for people to read. I’ve been pitching it as Piranesi meets the Backrooms, and it is about a mall in an alternate reality that goes on forever, and it is about how empire and cultures replicate themselves. It’s also about losing your girlfriend at the mall.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

IJK: In no particular order: Kazuo Ishiguro, Masaaki Yuasa, Wes Anderson, the Wachowski sisters, Kelly Link, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Ted Chiang, Porpentine Charity Heartscape. And some specific works–Catch-22, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Homestuck, Futurama, OFF, 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss. I am, for better or for worse, a product of my time and also of the internet. And I’m probably forgetting people and media, too.

Many of the names and pieces of media on this list have shown me how to create a perfect traditional narrative, and then, how to break a traditional narrative in an effective way. The other thing that many of these creatives have shown me is how you can use humor effectively, and how humor and horror are two sides of the same coin.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

IJK: DAK0TA by Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries—this was one of the first pieces of video art that made me think of text as an artform. It plays with time and text and music, and it’s a little dated now (it’s quite old, I first saw it a decade ago), but I think it still holds up as an experience.

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Notes on Art

I remember first seeing this painting and thinking, wait wait Willliam Blake writes such good poems and he’s a great artist. But of course, talent is in a way a divine gift, and indeed in The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve1, Blake draws away the layers of divinity in the figures depicted here. We witness Cain fleeing into the wilderness with his hair seemingly on fire, mouth open in a howl, while Adam and Eve cradle the body of their dead son. There is a crack in the veil of light, of God, and evil has sprouted yes, but also there is family, and heartbreak, and as you ponder Cain’s interiority, just…humanity. This is exactly what Isabel J. Kim is so darn good at. She gives us strange, ancient, biblical even (as you saw in Nomenclature) characters and tales, and yet it is always their humanity, however marred, that shines through.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, when Shannan and I first read this story, we read it again together out-loud and though I know we were in our living room in front of a screen, I distinctly remember feeling transported right into the midst of this crazy dinner party. Now, we invite you to join in!

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We found the lamp in Youngstown, Ohio.

We weren’t supposed to be in Youngstown, which was our childhood home. We’d made a list of what to avoid in our thirties, and it included Ohio. For a time we succeeded. We didn’t want the new build with a large lot or the long commute or school politics for five-year-olds. We didn’t believe in single-family neighborhoods. We didn’t want to live near her folks or my folks, and we also didn’t worship our careers. We despised anyone buying an SUV, but also anyone whose entire identity was their electric status on wheels. We didn’t want to be our older brothers and sisters even more than we didn’t want to be our parents: neither the right suburb with the dependable income and the blooming stomach, nor the wrong borough with the men wearing beanies in summer and everyone flaunting their jean shorts and bespoke tattoos. We didn’t need every restaurant to sell local ales, and we didn’t preen about liking bad beer as some sort of authenticity gambit. We didn’t visit coffee shops that thought every seat should be a kind of middle-finger to relaxing. Benches everywhere, and no cushions. We ordered these shops’ coffee to go.

We didn’t want the material of materialism or the trends of trendiness.

At first, we only wanted each other.

Then we had children. And we wanted them, too.

Now, tonight, we were going to have a dinner party.

“Huh,” said Melissa.

We were in the basement of our cul-de-sac home. Our two children were at my parents’.

“Huh,” Melissa repeated. “There’s a small door here.”

I disagreed. I said, “No, there isn’t.” This wasn’t my first trip to the basement.

“Look,” said Melissa, and pushed aside some boxes.

“Huh,” I said.

The door was square and wooden and barely tall enough to crawl into. It wasn’t locked.

“We have to,” said Melissa.

“We do,” I agreed.

She turned the old brass knob and pulled.

There wasn’t anything but a shelf. On the shelf was a lamp from ancient Persia.

“Peter is going to love this,” said Melissa.

“I love it,” I said.

We found the tablecloth we’d been searching for in the first place and brought it upstairs with the lamp. It was almost time for dinner.

“Okay, okay,” I said, above the noise of conversation. “Before dessert, we want everyone to see something.”

Melissa brought in the lamp on a platter and set it in the center of the table. The two couples present were also married with children.

“What is that?” asked Peter. “It looks like Aladdin’s lamp.”

“It might be!” said Melissa. “It just appeared in our basement.”

“You know how basements are,” I said, which made everyone laugh. I felt very good about getting this laugh and also about the lamp and my wife and the house we never wanted in a town I never thought I’d have to see again. I felt wonderful.

“Let’s try it,” said Sarah, who was married to Peter. “Or have you already tried it?”

“We were waiting,” I said.

“It’s a little small,” said Keeleigh.

“But beautiful,” said Brandon, her husband. “Who should try it first?”

“As hosts, we are happy to defer,” said Melissa. She was always proper.

“I think Peter is the oldest,” said Sarah.

“Age before beauty,” said Brandon. He beat me to it, but I laughed with everyone else all the same. I laughed the longest even.

Peter lifted the lamp from the center of the table and examined it. He bumped his glasses up his forehead even though he wasn’t a professor or anything. He was an internal auditor. But he was one of those guys, very into history and reading and so on. Always a new documentary he wanted to discuss.

With the handle in his left hand, he rubbed the lamp in a counterclockwise motion.

“Counterclockwise?” I asked.

“Maybe you’re right,” said Peter, when nothing happened. He rubbed it again, this time in a clockwise direction.

A clockwise direction. A clock. A wise direction. A navel is not a tick but tap I went in the center.

“Ah!” we all shouted. Not screamed.

“Honey,” said Melissa, a wife. My wife. “Honey,” she said. “Quit rubbing your tummy.”

“Stomach,” I said. I didn’t like baby talk when the children were away.

Tap, I went. Tap on the belly button, I went. I went—

“What, um,” I said, “what the hell is happening?”

The lamp released vapor and hissed when Peter had rubbed the way that was correct, the wise clock’s way as Ah said—I mean as I said. The vapor? Hence our almost shouting. But tap, I went. Hop on one foot I went. The words, my thought-words, they word thought me order out of, but wrong. “Hell is what?” I said.

“Other people!” said Brandon, triumphant.

“What did you do, darling?” asked Sarah, Peter’s wife.

“Nothing! I didn’t even get to make a wish.”

My tapping stopped.

“Thar wastrel,” I spake, as like the pirate as a pea to its pod-mate. “Ye had me as a fool in yer foul melon.”

I was a-foot and steady, and if I but made constant in my deployment of the buccaneer swag, I could set each sail of the mind to wind and fare forth in good thought. F— me, methinks. It bespooked me. I groaned as the wee man Brandon and his knave, the man-jack wish-caster, also took to feet, though Brandon could nay demand equal ground, being always an easy miss of the cutlass should one swipe at arm’s height. Whoosh. Him ye must stoop at before ye behead.

“Get him some water.”

“Something stronger, surely.”

“Have a seat,” one or the other, twin blanks both of them, said, misfiring and misfiring.

Peter put the lamp down and my thoughts snapped into place.

“Jiminy Cricket,” I said. “That was worse than being drunk.”

“I certainly didn’t wish for that.”

“Yeah, we’ve all seen you drunk,” said Brandon, stealing more of the night’s laughs.

“Well something happened,” said Sarah, picking up the lamp.

“Yes,” said Peter. “But I was only rubbing and thinking, you know, just thinking, and I didn’t even know what I wanted to wish.”

“What were you thinking?” asked Melissa.

“Truthfully?” Peter glanced at me. “I was having trouble focusing.”

“You felt foolish, maybe?” I said. I was determined to be clinical and not take any personal offense.

“Not quite. But I didn’t want to look foolish, no. I suppose I never do.”

We all hmmed at each other. Melissa brought more wine and Keeleigh, who’d been the quietest, rose to use the restroom. “But wait for me!” she said. “I don’t want to miss anything.” Her lovely, if diminutive, form fled the table. The luck of Brandon was unavoidable tonight. My wife watched Keeleigh round the corner as well, and we both gave inaudible sighs. We didn’t want to care about unattainable beauty, yet here we were.

“What’s the most interesting conversation you’ve had since children?” Sarah asked. She was still holding the lamp.

“That assumes we used to have them,” I answered. Some chuckles. Not laughs.

“I read a lot, is what I mean,” said Sarah, “and Peter reads a lot, but we care about different things. I feel like we can talk about work and the kids and every now and then summarize what we’ve been reading or whatever, but we don’t actually get into the details of anything.”

“I’m in a book club,” Melissa offered. “It’s pretty much all novels, though. I think our favorite was probably about a podcaster who gets caught up in a local murder. One of the gals knew a lot about, like, old-timey radio and said podcasts were a funny way of going back to, you know, the 1930s and such. That was interesting to me.”

I beamed at my wife.

“I feel like I only ever get into it when I’m smoking,” said Brandon. I didn’t know he smoked. Tobacco or something more than tobacco? He never invited me. “I dunno why,” he continued, “but a friend and I were discussing Kierkegaard the other week, just bullshitting while we smoked out back. Neither of us had read anything since college. But I really think Kierkegaard was a prophet of mass media, like he was against it, I mean. And my friend insisted that was a really stupid thing to focus on for the guy who gave us Fear and Trembling. We didn’t really make sense, but I definitely felt alive, you know? We both went totally overboard, like real undergraduates again.”

Keeleigh returned to us and was told the prompt. “Oh,” she said. “We’re done with the lamp?”

Sarah was still in possession.

“Brandon and I have been discussing a book of letters from World War II,” said Keeleigh. “We both love art, as well, especially the pre-Raphaelite cult. I mean they weren’t a cult, but they were a bit of a blip, you know?”

Only Brandon nodded. There was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles joke somewhere in what Keeleigh was saying. But it escaped me. It slithered away from me. Post-Leonardo. I stayed silent. Of course I did. An ignoramus. A moron. There it was, myself, spread about an inch thick on the ground. Puddle-deep piece of shit. We all said nothing.

Sarah coughed. “Well,” she said, “I might give it a little rub myself.”

“Not-the-first-time-you’ve-heard-those-words-huh-Peter?” I said. My quick draw was vicious. More chuckles. Brandon nodded in admiration. He’d opened his mouth only a fraction after me.

Closing her eyes and gathering a thought in her mind, almost as if she were obeying birthday rules, Sarah began rubbing the lamp. Her brow scrunched. Her hands tightened.

“Oh crap,” said Peter.

“Uh oh,” said Keeleigh.

“For real?” said Brandon.

“What?” I said.

Sarah was gripping the lamp with one hand and the edge of the table with the other and her eyes were still closed. We didn’t exist to her anymore. Lucky Sarah. She was somewhere else and I couldn’t tell if she was in pain or in ecstasy, and I didn’t know why my wife was nudging me in the side with her elbow. It was strange! It was exactly the sort of escape from this moment—this dinner party which was not going how I thought, yet which was going to provide memory fodder for my guests and for myself for months and maybe years to come—it was exactly fit for this moment, or maybe any moment.

Oh, I realized. Sarah was having an orgasm.

She didn’t make any noise but her lap seemed to press deeper into her own seat and her hands gripped both the lamp and the table.

“Please stop looking at my wife,” said Peter.

“First-time-you’ve-seen-that-in-a-while,” I said, but I shouldn’t have. No one laughed.

Besides, Sarah had the right idea. We did look away, or at least we tried. Peter couldn’t, and we were all looking at Peter, which made us want to look at Sarah. This was only a matter of seconds, we’re talking. The depths of sex cannot be overstated in this neighborhood, which has nothing animal left inside its walls. Our grandfathers hunted and we never wanted to hunt, and neither did most of our fathers. Some of our uncles and aunts still shot geese in the fall, but we didn’t want that. We wanted dogs who could be caressed into plush toys.

Sarah was caught in a deep wanting that was under whatever conscious thought she held in her mind. She undulated a little bit, but nothing too indecorous. A firm and quiet and passionate woman. God, I hated myself.

Peter was talking to her.

“Baby, put the lamp down. You gotta put the lamp down, okay?”

He was reaching for the lamp. How could she acquiesce? Saint Sarah, lost in the one intersection of our lowest and highest instincts. We didn’t want to be beasts and we didn’t want to be angels.

“Here we go,” said Peter, and finally pried the lamp from her hand.

“Oh my god,” she said. “I was here the whole time?”

“Yes,” said Melissa.

“I tried wishing for the power of flight. That’s what I was thinking, I mean.”

“You are one lucky guy,” Brandon told Peter. Everyone guffawed as a way to break the tension, and Sarah blushed. But a happy blush. Her pale neck was still flushed.

“It’s like the only tether, sometimes, sex,” said Keeleigh. Her beautiful, petite form pulsed a bit with the word sex. I was staring very hard at her cheekbones. “It’s one of the continuities, you know?”

“I need some water,” said Sarah.

“We didn’t have sex until we got married,” said Peter. “We’ve only known each other, you know?”

Keeleigh nodded. “I remember Sarah saying that. It’s amazing to me. Beautiful, really.”

“Like meeting a woolly mammoth in person,” said Brandon. “Aren’t your kind extinct?”

“It’s something sacred to us, even now I mean,” said Peter. “I remember my college roommate, very much not a woolly mammoth, tried to explain to me how there was sex and there was making love. It was a very young idea, and he was pretty new to his own sexual adventures. But he was right, of course. Everyone knows the difference.”

“He’s going to say something about Saint Augustine,” I said. “He’s told me this.”

“I am going to say something about Saint Augustine.”

“I don’t even really know who Saint Augustine is, and he loves telling me this.”

“Maybe it was Saint Aquinas?” said Sarah, returning with her water.

“One of the big guys,” said Peter, “makes it clear that sex has to arise—”

Brandon and I opened our mouths.

“—from the love.”

We agreed to a silent truce.

“The spouse can become an object if you’re not careful.”

“Have you been careful?” asked Keeleigh. “Do you use each other as objects?”

Sarah shrugged. “Sometimes. But we try not to.”

Keeleigh nodded. “I sometimes feel like the bedroom, with the kids asleep and Brandon very obviously horny, is the only retreat from our current life. It’s this little tent, this time machine tent, we can enter or leave. It exists within our current life, but remains apart, too.”

“An oasis,” said Peter.

“Yes. An oasis. I had to read the Song of Solomon for a poetry class, and I remember that, Peter. An oasis.” She didn’t blink. The two of them watched each other.

“What the fuck are we talking about?” asked Melissa.

No one was sure.

“Let’s try rubbing the lamp together,” said Keeleigh to her small husband, Brandon. The short wit. Brevity is the soul of—. Well, he was beautiful, too. Compact.

Their left hands overlapped on the handle of the lamp, and their right hands, his fingers in between her own, began rubbing.

Not much happened. Nothing was happening. Our children were playing in the room next door. Sarah was undressing in front of Peter.

“Don’t look at my wife,” said Peter.

Melissa was getting drunk. Or getting me drunk. I was drunk. People kept drunking me.

Keeleigh and Brandon were in their nice dinner clothes and not wine-bibbled and not undressing, although she was on his lap now.

“Do you want me to undress?” Keeleigh asked my wife.

Melissa made a face. She could take it or leave it.

I realized it wasn’t only our children, it was everyone’s children in the next room. All the children. Peter and Sarah’s three kids and Brandon and Keeleigh’s one child were playing with our two girls. The odd one out was Sarah and Peter’s youngest, a toddler. But they were playing so nicely.

“We’re all playing so nicely,” said Brandon. They kept think-ripping me. Ripping my thinks. My thought cords, pulled.

“Yank,” said Brandon, and winked at me.

But we were also having a lively, robust conversation.

As if mid-dialogue, Keeleigh was saying, “Peter and Sarah, now, they think abortion is wrong.”

“Sure,” said Peter, his wife still undressing.

“Yes,” said Sarah.

“And Brandon and I, we’ve paid for an abortion.”

“Of course,” I said.

“But we’re all together and happy and friends. Which calls into question the moral case for abortion, doesn’t it?”

Brandon was watching his child, a son, play in the next room. Our two daughters were matched by Peter and Sarah’s older two. There was a little plastic slide and many cars and some dolls getting their hair braided and a coloring pad being abused by the toddler, who was told, “Oh, I like that picture so much!” by one of the girls every few minutes.

But we were also talking.

“I think, actually,” said Peter, his wife’s areolas entering the air, “that our instinct not to bring up abortion calls into question how much we underestimate the need for socializing. We take the moral heft of getting along too lightly, maybe.”

“You’re not getting an abortion right now,” said Sarah.

“I love when they play like that,” said Brandon, watching our children.

“I don’t take socializing lightly,” said Keeleigh.

“I feel awful,” said Melissa. “I don’t want to talk about abortion. You’re making me feel horrible.” But she kept drinking.

“I think maintaining the social fabric is a vital cause,” said Keeleigh. “It’s not a slight or superficial idea at all. But still, if you think I’m a murderer, shouldn’t that come up now and then?”

“Good sharing!” Brandon shouted at the other room.

“But we’re friends,” said Sarah.

“Exactly!” said Peter and Keeleigh at the same time, not agreeing, both of them watching Sarah begin to pull at the waistline of her husband’s jeans.

“Give me that!” said Melissa, and she took the lamp.

The children were gone. The clothes were replaced. I was un-drunked again, and so was Melissa. She held the lamp high, brandishing it at the room.

“Oh, man,” I said. “I wish the girls actually were here. I didn’t expect that.”

“I wish,” said Melissa, out loud, and she began rubbing the lamp. But she didn’t have a chance to voice the thought.

Had she been wishing? She kept the lamp in her lap, and we continued the dinner chatter we’d all been enjoying.

“So you’d go to Crete?” Keeleigh asked Sarah.

The question was: what vacation would you repeat if you could only travel somewhere you’d already been? We’d been discussing the question for, oh, the whole night I should say.

For some reason, though, I missed our daughters. I won’t tell you their names. We don’t post their likenesses anywhere online. Just the backs of their heads. We don’t want the wrong kind of exposure for them. From our feeds you’d think we wanted to be somewhere in the mountains or near the ocean or out beneath the stars, just me and Melissa like old times, with two castoff shadows and silhouettes, at best, dragged along. But that was only digital security. We wanted to watch the girls experience the mountains, the beach, the stars, more than we wanted to experience the mountains and the beach and the stars ourselves. We wanted for them and through them, but not in the way our parents did. Not vicarious vampirism. We wanted them around, and wanted them to want to be around. And they did! For now.

“Where would you go?” Brandon asked me.

“I’d like a chance at the lamp,” I said.

“I thought we weren’t doing that tonight,” said Sarah.

“We all passed,” said Peter.

“Babe,” said Melissa. “Let’s try it another night.” It was sitting in her hands atop her blue skirt, the one with pleats which was somehow very attractive and very old-fashioned at the same time.

But I wanted to hold the lamp.

“Let’s just see,” I said, smiling as widely as possible. “One of us should try it.”

I took the lamp from her hands, and she let me.

We all remembered at the same moment.

“Your wife has exquisite breasts,” said Keeleigh.

“Stop,” Melissa said. “Stop ruining this!”

The lamp was lighter than I’d hoped. Almost cheap.

“What’s in your heart, do you think?” Brandon asked me. The competition.

“I’m sorry, Melissa,” Keeleigh was saying. “I was just joking.”

“Honestly, I don’t feel as much shame as I would’ve expected,” said Sarah.

Peter guffawed. “I do.”

“It happened to me, I mean, the same as it happened to all of you.”

I was centralizing a thought in my head. Or trying.

Gripping the lamp’s handle, I began to rub at its middle, clockwise as any sane person would do.

A gun appeared in my hand.

The lamp in one, the pistol in the other.

“Honey,” said Melissa.

“Whoa. What the hell?” said anyone. Take your pick.

“I’ve never held a gun before,” I said.

“Next!” said Brandon. “Do not cross start, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

“You know,” I said. “Our life here is very full. Everyone told me it would be empty, the suburban deadness and all that, but it’s not. It’s very full. I thought I’d hate it, but I don’t. I don’t even love the wrong parts of it. I think.”

“Let’s be done with the lamp,” said Peter. “I want to hear more. But without the lamp.”

“Or the gun,” said Keeleigh.

“But he wants to die,” said Melissa. “I’m not surprised. He wants to die.”

I smiled. “I think a loft in exactly the right city and without the wrong job would solve everything.”

Peter reached for the gun. “Here. You can give it to me. I’ll take it.”

“What I wished,” I said, “or what I wanted to ask for, I mean, was the ability to stop time.”

Brandon nodded. “For yourself? Or for everyone?”

“I dunno. For myself, I guess. Or maybe everyone would stop around me, and I could exist in a little bubble of time. Or maybe the effects of living would stall for a bit. No aging for a day or a week or a year, or something. Maybe that’s all time is, a kind of decay. I dunno. But I wanted to be able to stop time.”

“Here,” said Peter. “I love what you’re saying, but just hand that here, yeah?”

“That’s like dying,” said Melissa. “Stopping time, I mean. I’m not surprised. It’s not an escape hatch. It’s negation. Erasure.”

I shrugged. “It’s the only real choice. A realist deals with reality. You choose to accept life as it’s piped into you or you choose to die. Once you realize those are the options, well, it becomes an option.”

“But do you want to die?” said Brandon.

Keeleigh touched his wrist. “I think Peter’s right. This is a genuinely interesting conversation. It just needs one less gun for us to have it.”

“Wanting is downstream of reality, I think.” I was enjoying the weight of the pistol. I didn’t know it’d be so solid, so exquisite as a creation. “What can be wanted, you know, it dictates the desires. You can want to receive, or you can want to die.”

Melissa was staring at the table. “We should have had a family party. We should be in the backyard with the kids, all the kids. We should be getting interrupted.”

“But if life is a disappointment,” said Sarah, whom I’d seen topless, “like if you find the bad parts of life overwhelming your desire to keep living, that can only flow, you know, from life being good. Right? Life is good, otherwise it wouldn’t matter when it’s not.”

“I didn’t say I was being logical.”

“We all think we’re logical,” said Peter. “We all think we’re realists.”

“You can’t be so disgusted by life—”

“I’m not disgusted!”

“—that you want to kill yourself, without first believing life is good at the most basic level. That’s the seed of all our desire. We want more of the good.”

“Just give Peter the gun,” said Keeleigh. “We’ll all feel better. Just give him the gun.”

“No gun for you!” tried Brandon.

“Keep talking,” said Peter. “Keep talking. Just let me see that.”

“You don’t want this,” said Sarah. “You don’t actually want this.”

Melissa shook her head, but kept staring at the table.

I put the gun to my temple. Everyone made a lot of noise, but no one was quick enough to stop me. I pulled the trigger.

It hurt. It sparked and boomed.

But it was a blank.

“Ha!” I laughed. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

What a wonderful joke.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

JOEL CUTHBERTSON: I’ve always lived in my head too much. I believe my most entertaining stories were written between third and fifth grade, when I spent every afternoon jumping on a rusted trampoline a neighbor gave us, entering whatever worlds appeared that day. I tried to be a screenwriter and a playwright in college, but I guess I’m drawn to ideas that need both a larger and a more intimate canvas. There’s no world too big for a novel, and yet no medium is as well-suited to explore interiority.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

JC: I am firmly in the “stealing time” phase of life. I write during breaks at work, in the mornings if a larger project has possessed me, and sometimes at night. Most pieces begin with an opening line; usually some kind of perspective is already half-sensed. But any strong impression will do: a character that leaps out of life, a paradox I continue to injure my brain on, or a place I love and can’t explain why.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

JC: Fatherhood seems dominant at the moment. But I think the strain of connection generally appears in my work. Also, if I straighten my invisible bow tie and adjust my glasses with the right sort of intellection, I might say that the problem of evil, which is sometimes a very funny problem, seems to insert itself into everything.

If not a writer, who would you be?

JC: Many things are possible. I might be a marketing drudge or a dedicated high school English teacher or even an emergency room doctor. I suppose the most likely outcome is that I’d be marvelously rich, probably a rock star, and that I’d have really defined abs. Damn you, fiction!

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

JC: Two pieces of advice stand out.

The first, which I cribbed from George Saunders, is to justify your excesses. Can you parse what this advice means? Can you feel its weight in your mouth when reading your work aloud for revision? It appears like a revelation, at some point, if you internalize the phrase. “Justify your excesses.”

The second is to touch the work every day. I stole this one as well, from Dana Spiotta this time. It can be ten minutes, five minutes, or less. Sometimes you’re editing a lot because that’s an easier lift in between feeding the children and feeding the loan officers. That counts. It all counts. Stay in contact, if you can.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

JC: A nonfiction work of book length—of novella length at least—has entered my life. I’m still trying to scribble out stories as much as possible, but I never thought I’d be this distracted by something that puts on reportorial airs. I won’t say more than that it’s called Animal Life, is memoir-ish in a diet Annie Dillard kind of way, and should be finished in the next several months.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

JC: Some authors and storytellers that give me permission—another stolen line, this time from Jenny Offill—are Mikhail Bulgakov, Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Gene Wolfe, Dave Malloy, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Wynne Jones, Jane Greer, Zadie Smith, and Joy Williams.

Gene Wolfe in particular is an author who’s reminded me to add, to enlarge, to find annexes as part of the editing process. Bedazzling is sometimes more necessary than the Lishian cutting I practiced and was pointed to in earlier years. Maybe your narrative is too small rather than your language not being sharp enough. Once the voice and technique find their balance, you’ve still gotta let it rip sometimes.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

JC: I’ve been listening to Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook on and off for weeks now. Go forth and do likewise!

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Commonplace Bert

diatribes and distractions, usually bookish

By Joel Cuthbertson

Notes on Art

We paired this story with Nicole Eisenman’s Winter Solstice 2012 Dinner Party (2009)1 — six figures around a candlelit table, wine half-drunk, plates barely touched, everyone slumping or staring or somewhere else entirely. Eisenman paints social gatherings the way they actually feel after enough hours and enough wine: the bodies are still at the table but the minds have wandered into private, ungovernable places. Her figures are together and alone at the same time, and the paint itself can’t decide how real anyone is. Cuthbertson’s dinner party works the same way — a place of reckoning and magic and chaos where truth and fiction tango together until the very end.

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What an upside-down world.

The gentleman: town confessor, listening ear, advisor on marital discord, financial predicaments, and cosmic questions, has been shuttled outside to stand alone in a vicious storm.

The people of the mountain are conflicted. Some have closed their curtains and sit silently by their fires with the weight of what they’d done. Others watch out their windows, silently mouthing their gratitude and asking for forgiveness.

The gentleman stands against the large fir across from Marvin and Bros Mercantile & Post, drenched, his ragged shirt melting from his body, his lips pulled back as though he is asking, What have you done to me?

That summer, there’d been a terrible drought. Crops dried up, animals died, babies cried, and dust coated everything: food, clean laundry, the insides of noses and mouths.

It was near midnight, and the moon was behind clouds, so nothing could be seen on Main Street but a candle’s flame in the window of Marvin & Bros Mercantile & Post.

Birdie was talking to the gentleman again, sitting near him in the corner, where dust collects.

This heat! she complained.

It was unbearable, and her apartment above the shop was stuffy, and on top of that, she’d outgrown her affection for her wife, who was prone to rambling on and on—in stuffy apartments, of all things. Also, Birdie’s wife was lazy, frivolous, and a slovenly eater. There was a time, Birdie told the gentleman, that she found Minna enchanting. What happened?

It would help, Birdie said, if she would speak with you as I do. But truthfully, she lacks the ambition.

The gentleman looked sympathetic, baring his teeth in a frown, his painted blue eyes focused on some distant thought—likely a thought about Birdie’s wife and her fallen status, and especially a thought about Birdie’s unfortunate entrapment.

Anyhow, you’re a good egg, old fellow, and a much better listener than Minna, said Birdie, looking energized after such a lovely chat.

She took her pocket knife and snipped off a sliver of the gentleman’s fingernail, then placed it on her tongue where it sat sharp and unpleasant, though not all that different from chewing one’s own fingernail, all things considered.

Upstairs, in her stuffy little apartment, Birdie found Minna sleeping on the sofa, flushed in the heat. She must have been plucking a button on her dress—it now hung loosely from its thread. Her dusty slippers were marking up the cushion Birdie’s mother made when she was small—a stiff little pillow, fern-green velvet on one side and embroidered dogs on the other. Birdie marched over to the sofa and pulled the cushion out from under Minna’s feet, and Minna opened her eyes.

Oh, Birdie, how lovely. I thought you’d be working all night—

This is my mother’s cushion. She made it.

Yes. I know. Funny little dogs…

The dogs were terrible, vicious-looking creatures, with tiny open mouths and gargoyle eyes. They used to give Birdie nightmares. She’d always kept the embroidered side flipped over, but now look. They had dirt on their poor little faces!

That night, in Birdie’s dream, the gentleman walked toward her as smoothly as a living person walks. His eyes were the same bright blue, only real and shining and so full of kindness, Birdie felt she would break open like an egg, spill out all her innermost thoughts and deepest feelings.

She rose from the bed and slipped downstairs with her candle, nearly expecting the gentleman would be sitting comfortably near the stove, cheerfully lit, and drinking a cup of tea. But he was standing, as he’d always been, propped in the corner, and the stove was dark.

Birdie told him about her dream. Then she told him about other dreams, specifically the one she frequently had as a child where she floated off like a balloon on a great wave of wind into the sky, watching her home grow smaller and smaller, then barely there, then gone.

The gentleman is a sublime listener.

When people speak with him, they feel he expresses concern when they are overburdened, or quiet laughter when they are being humorous, or sympathy when they are downcast.

No one knows how old the gentleman is, because he has always been there, in the memories of the people and their parents, and so on. His clothes are simple, handspun, and in a great state of decay. His eyes, long since dissolved by the elements, have been replaced by smooth stones painted with bright blue irises, and his lips are drawn back to reveal small brown teeth.

There are rumours: he was once a great philosopher in London, whose brain was meant to be studied upon his death, but when a terrible storm hit the city, he was stolen by a friend, or a cousin, or a lover, and brought across the ocean, packed in a steam trunk. Or, he’d been a world-famous clairvoyant, and after his death, was carried over the mountain trail by a travelling circus, then sold to a hermit, who was in need of a friend after discovering that his solitary existence was far more lonesome than it was spiritually enlightening. Or, he was a mountain mystic, a wanderer and a teacher, found in the caves over which Mr. Haas’ grand old house now resides, where he’d starved himself in a final act of protest against the War of the Succession in Austria, his homeland.

In any case, the people of the mountain know the gentleman to be wise, brave, sympathetic, and sharp-minded, with an appreciation for the delicate beauty found in human frailty, like a goodly doctor or patient teacher.

Minna was doing many things at once, and she didn’t care one whit that she was sweating like a boiled kettle while doing it. She was painting the banister fern-green, she was eating a hearty sandwich (roast pork and cabbage), she was listening to the gramaphone at its loudest volume (some orchestra playing some wild thing), and she was thinking about Birdie, who put up with so much, and was the most intelligent girl Minna had ever known, and was a real go-getter in every sense of the word, and a prime example of modern womanhood (working, thinking, planting her heel, et al), and an all around exemplary human being whose only real flaw was working too damn hard!

Minna was grateful for her wife, who put up with it all. Meaning Minna’s Problem.

Minna was prone to the worst stomach pains, and there was nothing really to soothe them. Though she’d tried. Rosehip tea, prickly tobacco, Pink’s Treatment for Female Pains and Inconveniences, hot compresses, cold baths, standing on her head while breathing the steam of stewed nettles. When these pains came, and they did with some regularity, she found that eating dry crackers was about the only thing to bring the slightest relief. That, and lying with her feet propped on a pillow and her head flat.

When Minna didn’t have The Problem, she was filled with reckless excitement, a frantic and bumbling energy, as if her body alone couldn’t quite believe she was free, if only for a moment. Free to do things and go places and see people. And so, when Minna was well, she painted banisters, scrubbed floors, read from her worn copy of Greek Myths and Legends, washed the dust off fern-green velvet pillows with embroidered dogs, baked cakes and brought them to neighbours, listened to Birdie’s gramophone at the loudest volume, went on vigorous hikes, and talked at length with anyone she ran into. She had ideas, and wrote them down (or, in her excitement, forgot them), she planned plans (which she rarely fulfilled, due to the inevitable next bout of Problems), and she ate ravenously, to make up for the diet of dry crackers that sustained her when she wasn’t well.

Throughout it all, her love for Birdie changed, but it did not diminish. When she was laid up, her love was grateful, a soft and quiet longing just to be near her. When she was well, her love was free. A vivid display of admiration, a real joyous and overflowing affection. But in either case, it remained strong, and big, and everlasting.

She wondered, as she painted the final brushstroke on the last spindle, what Birdie would think of the new colour. She imagined her smile growing with each step up to their little apartment.

Few had come to the shop that day—the heat was oppressive, and concerns over dying crops were too great. Birdie took down the open sign in the window and sat next to the gentleman, her brow damp and her dress sticking to her in the evening heat. In the candlelight, his skin looked yellow, like polished wax. His mustaches were mostly gone, but what remained were long, in the fashion of some bygone time. Fitting of a true gentleman.

Perhaps, said Birdie, you were once a professor. In tweeds. Spending your days in research at some ancient library.

The gentleman looked pleased to hear this. Perhaps she was right, or perhaps he was simply acknowledging that, given the opportunity, he would have made a top-notch professor.

Birdie placed her chin in her palm. Or you were a great adventurer. Exploring ancient ruins, feasting on monkeys’ brains. Discovering rare reptiles.

The candle sputtered, and outside, a dog howled from some distant farm.

I’ve always been here, raised there. She rolled her eyes upward to indicate the apartment. As you know. Such a small town. And I feel large! Like I should be sailing the seas or walking city streets or…

Birdie spoke with the gentleman until the candle was only a hissing nub. Then she went upstairs in the dark, where paint fumes assaulted her like poisonous air. When she touched the handrail, her fingers came away sticky with thick paint. Oh, Minna!

In their room, Minna was sleeping, splayed in the middle of their small mattress. After scrubbing the paint off her hand, Birdie brought a blanket to the sofa where the green velvet pillow was placed neatly against the arm, freshly cleaned and pressed. She turned it over so she didn’t have to look at those hideous dogs.

Throughout the next day, several came to visit the gentleman. Mrs. Bakshi confessed that she was becoming forgetful, and her hand shook so noticeably that she was forced to hide it beneath her other arm. She wondered if she should prepare her children for her inevitable departure? (The gentleman clearly agreed that this was the most responsible choice.) Mrs. Beddoe said she was more often than not left in a gentle stupor from her prickly tobacco, and she preferred it that way. She asked the gentleman if perhaps she was not made for this world, considering she needed to remove herself from it as often as she did? (The gentleman assured her that she was not removing herself from the world, but rather immersing herself more fully in it, and so she was free to enjoy the prickly tobacco as often as she wished). Mr. Cates confessed that he felt a stirring when he looked upon sweet Mrs. Kovalyov, and had taken to visiting her when her husband was away. (Of course, this was normal—healthy even—and nothing worth burdening oneself over.) And so on.

And each confession was followed by a sort of prayer to the gentleman—to please, if it was at all possible, put a stop to this wretched drought! After which, the visitor took up the little knife hanging by a piece of yarn, and sliced the teeniest bit of the gentleman to place on their tongues: a bit of hair, a bit of earlobe, an eyelash or a callous. A long strand from his moustaches, a short hair from near his navel. Wanting to preserve his dignity and, some would say, his handsome appearance, most avoided marring his face. And so, if a person were to lift his tattered and rotten shirt, they would find countless nicks all over his torso, little slivers of skin tidily excised and consumed for prosperity, love, luck, vigor, good weather, health, wealth, and (occasionally) vengeance.

Minna had another good day, following three bad ones. Good in body, that is, though she felt a small disturbance in spirit. Birdie hadn’t seemed herself in some time. And Minna couldn’t quite place her finger on why.

But she put that aside, and let herself enjoy the buzzing energy of a person who had been ill and now wasn’t. She cleaned the apartment, picked wildflowers for the dining table, the corner table, the bedside table, and the windowsill. She sat in the sweltering park and read her Greek Myths and Legends (poor Icarus!!), made cold chicken salad, played the piano, brought several jars of soup to Mrs. Bakshi, who was laid up. But beneath it all, lay a constant current of her concern: Birdie was not happy. Finally, after she could stand it no longer, she spoke with the gentleman while Birdie delivered a package.

It felt strange. She’d never gone near him before, always catching glimpses from behind the counter or the bottom of the stairs, from where, to Minna, he looked like a gruesome sort of doll. His eyes, though skillfully painted, of course, were a little too bright, a little too direct, his mouth curled back in a way that seemed, from certain angles, unfriendly. Minna began to speak to him, stiff and halting, but it wasn’t long before she felt the unburdening of her soul, the softening in her spine.

I love Birdie so much, she whispered, fanning herself with an old book of songs. I love her so much my heart feels enormous, filled to the brim, but I fear— she leaned in, close to his ear and lowered her voice further. I fear I’m a burden to her. I fear she doesn’t love me in return. She told him there was a time when they laughed and talked and dreamed of their futures all throughout the day, without tiring of each other. And at nights, they dipped their heads beneath the blankets, and didn’t resurface for hours.

But now we feel like strangers!

A little hair twitched, and a tiny beetle crawled out of the gentleman’s ear. Minna flicked it away and sat back to regard him. The gentleman stood in a ray of sun from the window, and his eyes, once so startling to her, had taken on warmth and light. Further, she was certain he smiled, as if to reassure Minna. As if to remind her that real love is rarely demonstrative and never simple. Eros waxes and wanes. Like a candle’s flame, philia is sometimes steady, and other times it flickers, yet it remains to guide their path…

He seemed to go on in this way, and when Minna left, she felt healthy and refreshed, as one does after spending the day near water, in a lovely breeze, while feasting on fresh fruit.

But now it was late. The shop below closed hours ago, Minna was alone, and the chicken salad had congealed into something ugly and inedible.

At picnics, and parks, and during school recess, the children sing:

Gentleman, gentleman, where have you been?

I’ve been to London, to see the queen.

Gentleman, gentleman, what happened next?

I was a war hero and came back a wreck.

Gentleman, gentleman, what was in store?

I followed the railroad, feeding the poor.

Gentleman, gentleman, what then, if you please?

I went on to cure illness, sad plights, and disease.

Gentleman, gentleman, what’s on your mind?

You, my dear friend, for we are entwined.

Birdie had poured the gentleman a cup of cold tea, wondering how she hadn’t thought to do it before. How rude! She apologized, and he looked humble, but not at all put out.

Do you suppose, she said tentatively. Do you think it’s possible that this place is too small for me? Her spine straightened with a current of excitement. I mean, this place, this store, this town. Minna. Do you think that, out there, in the wide world, there’s a better shop, something more interesting than dried beans and bolts of brown calico? Do you think there’s a better girl for me? Someone more interesting. More willing to do things and go places… and be, I don’t know. How to say it. Affectionate? Clever? Less laid up.

She felt many things as she spoke. Guilt. Strength. Fear. Excitement. The gentleman was looking directly at her. In the candle’s flicker, his eyes were lively and certain, as though he were saying Birdie was meant only for greatness. A notion reflected in her very name. Do birds survive long in cages? No. They live short lives, dull lives, friendless and unchallenged. What Birdie was feeling, the gentleman seemed to say, was the very natural impulse of all winged creatures, and she would only be truly free when she obeyed this impulse to fly away.

Birdie smiled, her cheeks flushed and her heart fluttering like the very bird’s wings the gentleman was almost certainly telling her about. She was so happy that when a new light filled the room, it took her a moment to realize it was Minna with a lamp, and not her happiness, that created the glow.

Hello, Birdie, said Minna, seeming a little uncertain. I made dinner, if you…

Birdie was not hungry, but she was also rarely rude. She looked at the gentleman, and he, of course, was still looking at her. She stood and took the little knife, then sliced off a bit of tough skin over his knuckle, placing it on her tongue, then turned to Minna, who she once loved so furiously. And she followed her up the fern-green stairs.

That night, while Minna slept, Birdie packed her bags.

Though nearly everyone on the mountain had implored the gentleman to put an end to this drought, nothing changed. Crops and rivers dried up, Misters Pike and Kovylov lost two cows, and Irving’s horse dropped dead under the scorching sun. Maybe they needed to do more than beg. Maybe they needed to help the gentleman help them.

Minna, not usually known for being subtle or sly, planted the idea so expertly that no one was quite sure who came up with the plan to place the gentleman outside, directly in the very weather they wanted him to influence. But, as Minna watched, alone from the little window above the shop, they did just that. She continued watching until they hammered the last nail through his tattered clothes into the great fir, then she let the curtain fall.

And, three days later, when the skies turned black and the rains rushed in to flood streets and pool in fields, she suggested that, given the calm of his expression, the softening of his posture, he prefered to remain outside. Look at him! The people agreed.

And though Minna never visited him again, she set a chair directly in front of her bedroom window, where, when she wasn’t ill, she watched the gentleman, her heart as empty as it had been full only days before.

The gentleman, back when he had a real name, now forgotten, back when he was five and out for a swim while his mother picnicked on the bank, found a pretty little leech on his belly. The leech squirmed, shimmery and black in the sunlight. The boy went to touch it with his finger, gently so as not to scare it, and as he did so, he thought maybe he could bring it home with him. Keep it safe in a little bowl of water. Name it!

Frederick, he whispered.

Someone gasped—his mother, who flew at him and ripped the leech off, throwing it into the pond. Blood ran down the boy’s stomach like water, and he cried because he thought it was the leech’s blood and that the leech had died. And further, though the leech couldn’t speak, and had no face for expression, he felt certain that it had been friendly and wise.

That’s your blood and that filthy worm was stealing it! said the boy’s mother. Oh, stop crying. That leech would kill you without a second thought, if he was big enough for it.

What an upside down world.

Though he was too young to reason it out or form it into a clear thought, the boy absorbed this notion of upside-downness. He absorbed it like moss absorbs rain, and on through his young years: Good people become sick. A horse can’t heal from a broken leg. Old men are the most talkative and the most lonely. Salmon berries are the most beautiful, and the most sour. School makes you dumb, not smart! Teachers are mean.

Some mothers are angry. Some fathers are gone. Some children are as lonely as old men.

The gentleman’s soul became swollen with the rot of unfairness, and by the time he was old enough to mull things over and create opinions, ideas, and life philosophies, he didn’t much care which way the world was turned, and certainly didn’t want to think about it. Sure, the world might be upside down (or maybe it wasn’t), but he was upside down, too (or maybe not, who’s to say). Maybe everyone else was upside down, and he was right side up. He didn’t care.

The gentleman burned down his first house at twelve. The gentleman went to jail eight times. The gentleman laughed when his mother became sick. Why? Because she looked all funny and yellow, because she turned as skinny as a broomstick. (Of course, in a hundred years or so, this laughter would be viewed through the lens of psychological understanding, and people would recognize it as a thick coat of armour over top a sad and rotten soul, but by then the gentleman will have been forgotten and so this benevolence is lost to him)

The gentleman died face down in a farmer’s field, all drunk and piss-pants, his little brown teeth showing through grinning lips. The gentleman was embalmed by the new young doctor with new modern methods. The gentleman was stolen in the wee hours from the embalming table, and put on display in the corner of the new general store, where Birdie’s great-grandfather, Marvin P. Coates, instructed them to place him in the corner, where, to make up for his incredible debts, folks paid a penny to view him. And, after his debts were paid, the gentleman continued to stand, silent and still, as the people gave him a piece of their minds once and for all.

The gentleman isn’t meant to be out in the rain. He swells. His skin peels off in soggy sheets. His little brown teeth fall out from rotting gums, and his painted stone eyes slip from drooping sockets.

The people of the mountain continue to visit during the rains and after the rains subside. They share their problems and joys, their fears, dreams, and petty complaints. And though he no longer has the brilliant blue eyes with which they can feel truly understood and regarded, they’re convinced, in the end, that eyes aren’t all that essential. They are still relieved when they walk away, and they are still comforted by a sort of clarity of mind, having purged their dark thoughts and fretful distractions. And the gentleman, drooping now, with one arm slipping out of his sleeve, and with his neck bent sideways, and his toothless mouth gaping open for creatures to nest in, seems to say he believes every good thing will come to every person, and nothing bad should befall them, and all will be well at all times, and further, none of them have done anything wrong, nor will they ever…

And the people take the rusted knife, now tied to the great fir the gentleman is attached to, and snip off a little piece, place it on their tongues, and walk away quite pleased.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

ANGIE ELLIS: I started late! In a serious way, that is—I’ve always dabbled. We had our family quite young and that, coupled with shift work and all the rest, didn't leave me with much time to pursue other activities. I think this worked out for me. Sometimes I wonder what I would have been writing in my 20s, and though it would have been nice to begin developing my skills back then, I needed to figure myself out a bit first.

I find that when I write, it's like tilling a garden, turning up all the questions, concerns, baggage, and curiosities lurking in my mind. It’s so satisfying to put words to those things that would otherwise remain unformed and unvoiced. And I love reading stories that provide that same experience. A story that asks questions, digs around in your subconscious a bit. In both instances, the writer and reader are on a journey together, thinking things through, a little uncertain, puzzling things out days later.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

AE: I’m a chaotic and completely inefficient writer. It’s a messy process of writing my way into tone, character, story, themes—letting those things emerge as I flail about. If I sit down with what I think is a clear idea or plan, I end up with trash. Every time. So, I flounder until something feels right and I get this little thrill, like, Oh! There it is! It's a matter of letting my subconscious do the heavy lifting, I suppose.

Because this is what works best for me, my starting point is always very, very small. A flicker of a feeling, a certain hairstyle on a faceless character, a type of house, or the blurry shadow of a relationship. I can’t start big. Especially with themes. Those have to sneak their way in pretty late in the process. It took me a long time to figure out how I work best—and it's interesting how different that can be from writer to writer.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

AE: I grew up with some pretty hard core religion, and that does tend to creep into my work—usually with a twist. I can recognize it quite heavily in The Gentleman, with elements of confession, communion, prayer, disillusionment. Death is often a big part of my stories. Repression. Some light nihilism. Hedonism is fun. Animals and nature often play an important role in my stories. Also familial histories, or generational trauma. And now, perimenopausal women with an axe to grind ;-)

I have learned that some of these can crop up out of habit and I do try to avoid that. For a while, I was writing a lot of middle aged women who were directionless, slightly dark, a bit off-beat, and I got pretty tired of that. So now I ask myself: Am I writing this because it’s easy? Because I've written it before? I want to watch out for that.

If not a writer, who would you be?

AE: So many things! An archaeologist. A set designer. A chef. Master gardener. I’d love to spend my life restoring some old abandoned house in France, honestly, but let’s face it...I’ll have to save that for another lifetime.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

AE: I’ve heard so many helpful things over the years! I like, “argue both sides” from author Colin McAdam. And from Tom Jenks, “If it's hot, write cool. If it's heavy, write with a light touch.”

I think both of these are important for new and old writers alike. The first helps you avoid caricatures, basic good guys and basic bad guys. The second helps you avoid melodrama.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

AE: A collection of linked stories. “The Gentleman” will be included, so that gives you a taste of what I’m going for. It’s been a lot of fun, and aside from being a slower process than I'd like, it hasn't yet ruined my life at all! Maybe that'll happen when we start shopping it around ;-)

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

AE: Oh boy, I feel like this list could go on forever. I recently rewatched The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which I find really inspirational in the "Why CAN'T you write that??" sort of way. You want a wholesome, singing, dancing killer cowboy that becomes a singing, floating angel? Sure! It's truly thrilling to see movies and tv shows that free themselves from the tired and expected. I'm inspired by surprise, and like to be surprised while I write as well.

Right now I'm reading The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock, where you'll frequently meet a new side character with a long, detailed backstory, and then never see them again. I love it. Somehow it works, but I feel like we're often told to rein in that sort of thing. I love seeing people fly through these imagined barriers in successful ways. I mean, why would we want to rein ourselves in? Weird.

I LOVED The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley. She wrote it in a style that reflects old Norse sagas: distant and plain and almost monastic. You might think that couldn't possibly work for a long novel, but it's a beautiful book—one of my favourites. Because she chose to write in this ancient sounding way, the experience of reading it is completely transportive. And again, I think giving ourselves permission to choose differently can result in beautiful things. I want to be brave enough to take those chances.

Bo Burnham’s standup might not seem like a good fit for this list, but his work is so completely outside of what we've always seen, and still always see. He's created his own genre that's vulnerable, hilarious, dark, challenging, goofy, uncomfortable. I love that creative freedom, to go where your talents lead you, but also your anger, your questions, your insecurities, your weirdness. And it challenges me to ask: what can that look like in story?

Basically, I've been moved lately by broken rules, unusual arcs, wobbly structure, sparse language and flowery language, and the unique print that only that particular artist can leave on their work.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

AE: Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It's a beautiful movie in every single way.

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ANGIE ELLIS lives on Vancouver Island, where she is working on a linked short story collection, which will include “The Gentleman”. Some of the other stories in this collection have been featured in Story Magazine and the Masters Review. Her first novel was published in 2025 and she is very grateful to have received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council.

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Remedios Varo’s Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (1961)1. Women sit in a tower, stitching the world into existence — houses, rivers, boats — from threads that spill out the windows and become real. They’re enclosed, dutiful, working from a pattern someone else set. But the fabric has a life of its own. Angie’s story has that same quiet tilt: a small mountain town stitches meaning onto a body that can’t speak back, and the meaning spills out and becomes real to them. Birdie stitches a whole escape plan from a dead man’s silence. Minna stitches love onto everything she touches. The gentleman just stands there while the town embroiders him into a saint.

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Mother of the Beast

The beast was her gift, an ugly thing given to pay for a pretty thing taken—to bed, to brood, to Italy. While her husband gave his mistress everything she was denied, Queen Catherine threw pitted plums through cage bars and watched the beast devour them, his beard slick with sweet juice. While her husband the king consulted his mistress on affairs of state, knowledge no doubt acquired at the cocks of previous consorts, Catherine the Queen commissioned portraits of the beast. She sent them to her relatives. See the fruits of your machinations. Though my husband has not given me a child, he has given me a beast.

I am Pavel of the Far Isles, the beast said. Please let me go.

Queen Catherine laughed, and flicked an apricot through the bars. Well Pavel of the Far Isles. I am Catherine of Italy, and see what that has gotten me.

For the first year following the beast’s arrival, noblemen and women pressed velvet pouches swollen with coin into Catherine’s plump palm just for a chance to see the beast, to speak to him, to paint him, to touch him. For more coin, Catherine left them alone with the beast. For a young man such as Pavel, pig-snouted and covered in hair, any attention was a gift, the only rational response, gratitude. To be a prized possession of the powerful is a privilege people would pay for. Though Pavel had not.

But the year passed, and with it, the beast’s novelty. Queen Catherine saved the plums for herself, plugged her ears with putty at night to drown out the snorts and sniffles that emanated from the cage. They said her husband had started a war, that his mistress walked amongst the soldiers, protected by the new bulge of her belly. Queen Catherine tossed in her goosedown bed, the beast on the flagstones at its foot. Queen Catherine dreamt of bellies and babies and beasts and beauty, and when she awoke, she knew what she would do next.

Wife of the Beast

The peasant girl Catherine trekked to the palace from the town. When she arrived, her muslin skirt was muddled with mud, hairline honeyed with sweat. In a long line of better-dressed hopefuls, the Queen pointed at Catherine and said, “That one.”

Catherine curtsied, and in hoisting her skirt, she revealed still muddier shoes.

“Clean her up,” said the Queen.

Catherine stood naked in a gleaming copper tub. The Queen’s hard-faced attendants scrubbed scrolls of skin loose with horsehair bristles. But Catherine didn’t mind the pain. She was transfixed by the room, by the sumptuous surfaces that beckoned in velvet, brocade, and silk. She felt she was inside a jewelry box, the kind she’d only seen in shop windows.

Once she was clean, the attendants rubbed her pink with thick, warm towels.

Legs crossed, clutching her nascent breasts, Catherine asked, “When will my family receive their money?”

But the attendant only shrugged. When she left the room, a key clunked in the lock.

Catherine stood in the center of the room until the attendant returned, water plunking in fat droplets from the tips of her hair. She worried a scabbed, red welt at the base of her neck.

The door opened again to a cloud of shimmering white. All that was visible of the attendant was her hand, hoisting the dress by its high collar.

As Catherine stepped into the dress, she asked, “When will I meet him?”

The attendant chuckled. “Sooner than you’d like.” She sucked her teeth and clicked her tongue. “Sooner than you’d like,” she repeated, cinching the dress tight as a vice.

Mother of the Beast

The common girl resembled her husband’s mistress in the same way all pretty girls resemble each other. The same pert noses and breasts. The same wide, surprised eyes. The same heart-shaped lips. The same placid skin, marked only by the occasional girlish flush of blood to their cheeks, a reminder of their physicality, of the pink that lay just beneath the surface of their skin. Queen Catherine snapped her fan open in front of her face.

The girl leaned forward as she walked down the aisle of the great hall, bobbing slightly with the effort required to drag her dress. She was weak. That much was clear.

When the girl curtsied, Queen Catherine snapped her fingers. “Bring out the beast.”

The cardinal bent his hatted head in acknowledgement, before disappearing behind the dais. Moments later, two shuffling sets of footsteps approached, but the Queen did not care to see the beast. Him, she had seen plenty. She fixed her eyes on the girl. She wanted to see the moment the pretty face cracked, the moment she saw what her beauty had bought her.

The girl inhaled sharply through her nose, lips pursing in towards her delicate cheekbones. Queen Catherine leaned forward.

The girl exhaled. Her lips blossomed back into a heart, face placid as a reflecting pool. The beast took his place across from her.

Long fronds of black hair swayed from every pore in his face, clipped artfully so his black eyes were visible in their deep sockets. His strange hands, gnarled in a claw-like rictus poked from the embroidered ruffs of his wedding costume. He extended them to the girl. She did not flinch as she took them, as the cardinal bound their hands together with a length of lace, symbolic of their eternal union. She did not shed a tear as the cardinal spoke the words to pronounce them husband and wife.

When the ceremony was concluded, the girl thanked Queen Catherine and said, “The money will be sent to my family today.”

Queen Catherine nodded and waved her away. Unabashed trollop. Concerned only with money. Beauty is no indication of character.

Wife of the Beast

Back in the jewel box of a room, the beast would not look at Catherine. She couldn’t look away from him. He removed his jacket, placed it on the back of a chair. Beneath the billowy white muslin of his tunic, hair was visible, thick as a second shirt. Still not looking at Catherine, he said, “I won’t touch you.”

Catherine said nothing, only sat and unlaced the ribbons of her shoes, pulled the heeled slippers from her feet, and began to massage the arches of her feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?” asked Catherine.

This, at last made him turn around. Beneath the fur, his eyes were glassy, his jaw clenched. “I know this isn’t what you want.”

Catherine turned her back to the beast. “Can you unlace this please? It’s quite painful.”

The beast fumbled his knotty fingers in the corset strings. As he worked the tight knot at the base of Catherine’s spine she spoke again, “I got what I needed. Just not how I expected.”

The knot sprung free, and Catherine peeled the boned cage loose from her chest. She turned to face the beast.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Pavel,” he said, averting his eyes from the pique of her nipples beneath her undershirt.

“I knew it. I told my sisters you must have a name other than beast.” She sunk onto the edge of the bed, sighing. “Though I warrant I’ll never return to the village to tell them I was right.”

The red welt on Catherine’s neck glimmered with pus.

Mother of the Beast

Despite the beast’s relocation, Queen Catherine had not removed his cage from her chambers. Seated at her writing desk, she stared at it now, the threadbare mattress, spitting feathers on to the flagstones, the bars beside the bed worn shiny with the beast’s nervous ministrations.

“Is she with child yet?” Queen Catherine asked her attendant, who was also the village girl’s attendant.

“No, your highness,” the attendant said, hands full with a full chamberpot. “She’s just bled again the day before last.”

“Take that out, will you,” Queen Catherine responded, snapping at the malodorous pot.

“Yes, your highness.”

Queen Catherine returned to writing her letter to her mother.

The girl will be with child soon. A beast cannot resist such a pretty, young thing for long. What are beasts but men, and men but beasts, after all? I pray my next letter will bring tidings of miniature beast children. They will occupy me as the beast once did, pass the time until my noble husband, the king, returns from war. Perhaps you will visit to see the strange creatures as you did the beast? I miss you—and our home. All my love, Catherine.

Wife of the Beast

The room became their cage. It was bigger than Pavel’s previous cage, and had a better view of the lush fields and distant mountains, but a cage with a window is still a cage. Catherine spent long hours at the window. Pavel knew the difficulty of adjusting to a life of confinement, and so he spent hours speaking stories to her back, telling tales of princesses, dragons, knights, talking frogs, wishing wells, and spinning wheels.

After one story about a maiden who shed the skin of a swan, Catherine turned to Pavel and said, “How is it you know such stories? Are you able to read?”

Pavel shook his huge head, sending the fronds of hair dangling from his face swishing back and forth. “My mother.”

“And did she look like you?”

“No,” said Pavel. “But my father did.”

Catherine nodded. “Does the Queen know this?”

“Unfortunately,” Pavel said. Then, he asked, “And what of your family?”

“What of them,” said Catherine to the bees beneath the window.

“They sent you here,” Pavel said, but his statement was a question.

Catherine turned to face him. “I am one of seven sisters. We raised sheep.”

“Do you miss them?”

“As much as you miss your family,” Catherine nodded. “But we had too many sisters, not enough sheep. Something had to be done.” She shrugged, “I was the oldest.”

“I’m sorry,” said Pavel.

She shook her head. “Nothing is promised.” Her hand jumped to the puckered white scar on her neck. “Who knows? A worse fate might have awaited me.”

“Do you—” Pavel began to ask.

But Catherine interrupted him, “We used to tell stories while we spun the wool to yarn,” she said. “My sisters and I.” She turned back to the window. “So, I’d like to hear another story, please. If you know one.”

And so Pavel resumed speaking, his rumbling, tumbling voice joining the hum of bees outside the window as they pollinated lavender just out of reach.

Mother of the Beast

Queen Catherine could not understand the girl’s barrenness. Surely, the pair had consummated their union. Men could not resist, after all.

She sealed a letter to the King and thought of their wedding night. It had hurt to make him happy. But she had taken pleasure in the pain, pride in the successful fulfillment of her duty. She may never know the ecstasy of men, but she knew a fraction of it when she watched the King’s brow knit in pleasure, lips part and pant in satisfaction—satisfaction with her. Her pleasure, anyways, was in what the pain promised. She would never be king, but she could create her own kingdom from what lay between her legs. A kingdom of love within these castle walls unlike any she had ever known, its only subjects her, her husband, and their children.

She pressed the wax seal to the parchment. Her attendant approached as she wafted the letter in the air, letting the seal set. When it had dried, she placed the envelope in her attendant’s hands.

“See that he gets this,” she said.

And as the attendant’s head bobbed in a curtsy, something flashed in her placid face, something the Queen did not like at all—a swift, sad smile.

The Queen would consider the appropriate punishment for this insubordination later. Now, she had visitors.

Wife of the Beast

Pavel was finishing a story when the attendant opened the door to their bedroom. She never knocked.

“Guests,” she said in that flat-as-a-pan voice so unlike Pavel’s.

As the two followed the attendant from the room, Catherine slipped her hand in Pavel’s. He flinched only slightly before letting his fingers relax around hers.

The attendant did not tell them which guests were visiting or why. It did not matter. These visits always proceeded in more or less the same fashion, varying only in degrees of horror.

Today, it was only a mother and her two daughters. Catherine watched Pavel’s shoulders relax, though he still flinched at the children’s shrieks. Catherine had never asked Pavel about his past. She had not needed to. She knew enough from her time in the village to recognize the prints left by pain.

“Oh my,” the noblewoman exclaimed, pressing her white palm against the crepey wrinkles of her bosom. She lifted a bottle of smelling salts from a gold chain between her breasts and waved them under her nose, repeating the admonishment. Oh my.

Her daughter burst into tears and buried her face in her mother’s skirts, begging her mother to put it away.

The boy ran in circles around them chanting gleefully. Beast. Beast. Beast. Beast.

These noble people were so wearily predictable, Catherine thought. Pavel, at least, was singular.

Back in their room, when the attendant closed the door, Catherine did not release Pavel’s hand.

She brought her other hand to the thick fur on his cheek. He flinched away.

“It’s what she wants,” Pavel said. “Little beasts.”

“I know,” Catherine said, stroking his face. “But it’s what I want too.”

She moved in closer, but paused, her pillowy lips inches from his furred ones. “I don’t want to be like her,” she whispered.

“You’re not,” Pavel said.

“You want this?” she asked.

And Pavel kissed her.

Mother of the Beast

Queen Catherine watched the peasant girl writhe on the bed. She was shrieking for Pavel, but though it was a beast’s birth, there were still standards of decorum to uphold. Men were not permitted in the delivery room. The King had not been there, after all, when the Queen delivered her first child, or her second, or her third. He had been visiting foreign dignitaries. And hunting. She did not know where he had been for the fourth, and final, stillbirth, but it was soon after that he sent Queen Catherine the beast.

The attendants’ hands probed amidst the blood and excrement to extract, first a head, and then a body, and then tiny, flailing legs. The girl shrieked and heaved and gasped like a cow, like a beast herself. But then the attendant wiped the baby with a towel, and Queen Catherine had eyes only for it.

She took the beast as the girl reached for it. It was everything she hoped for—covered tip to tail in thick fur, but with the same bland beauty as its mother. A pink gem of a monster in miniature. A truly singular creature, one lords and ladies would travel far and wide to see. Even the King, she thought, might be compelled by such a temptation. Or, perhaps, her family?

Wife of the Beast

Bella, named for Catherine’s mother, was barely a month old when Queen Catherine opened the family’s room for public viewing. Noble friends from far and wide visited to see, as Queen Catherine called her, “The Incredible Miniature Monster.”

Catherine was forced to nurse the baby while onlookers peered at her child’s furry face. The Queen advised them to observe the flare of the nostrils, a tell-tale sign of a developing snout. She pointed out the size of Bella’s ears, turned out in the manner of an elephant from India. The knuckles! The curl of the lips! A bump on the backside! Could it be a tail?

And Catherine remained silent throughout it all, clutching Bella, as if her arms could shield her child from the onslaught.

Mother of the Beast

When the child was six months old, Queen Catherine received a visitation request from another Queen, the wife of a King of a neighboring kingdom. Queen Catherine accepted happily. The miniature monster’s fame was growing, to garner such a visitor. Soon, she thought, her husband the King would visit. Or her mother.

Queen Catherine ensured the creature was dressed in the embroidered blue velvet of her house, displayed in a hand-woven bassinet, frocked with lace. The mother of the beast lurked like a swollen shadow. Childbirth had not treated her well. Everything about her seemed to spread and sag—her features, her breasts, her hips. With her lips turned down in a sullen frown, she completed the picture of the bestial little family.

The visiting Queen tittered appreciatively when she saw the three of them arranged so in the room. It was a gruesomely satisfying tableau, one which Queen Catherine knew would supply months of anecdotes for her visitor.

But, the visiting Queen wanted more.

After a few rotations around the bassinet, stalked by the sulking shamble of the beast’s mother, the visiting Queen turned to Queen Catherine.

I would like to buy the little beast, she said. How much?

The neck of the beast’s mother snapped at this statement, eyes fixing fast on Queen Catherine’s. Queen Catherine was surprised, but not displeased. The peasant girl was already with child again. The attendant had informed her. Clearly, the couple could not control their animal instincts. A little market of beasts. It would make the castle a compelling attraction. Important people may come from far and wide if they know they could not only behold a beast, but have one for themselves.

That could be arranged, Queen Catherine said. Let us retire to the parlor to discuss specifics.

A low growl escaped Pavel’s lips. The visiting Queen hitched her skirts like a shield, stepping back from his bared teeth with a simpering disgust.

After all this time, I thought he was domesticated, she hissed at Queen Catherine.

Oh he is, the Queen assured her, shooting a chastising glance at Pavel. She did not want him to disrupt this potential deal.

Well, said the visiting Queen, releasing her skirts, and relaxing somewhat. If you’re sure. I’d have to know they could be domesticated, you see. She pointed at the baby. If I’m going to have that one around my children.

The baby’s furry paw protruded from the bassinet, reaching for its mother. It let out a tiny, strangled cry, like the mewling of a cat.

Wife of the Beast

It wasn’t Pavel that leapt at the Queen then. It was Catherine. There are beasts that are born and beasts that are made. Beasts beget beasts. Beasts birth beasts. But Catherine thought of none of this as she leapt towards the Queen, vaulting over her baby’s bassinet. Claws clamped on corset until they found purchase. Teeth sunk into skin. The white, fluttering flesh of the Queen’s neck, one of the last beautiful bits left of her, was shaken loose from the red wet of her esophagus.

Catherine’s head snapped back and forth, blood flying from her lips, spattering the squealing noblewoman who ran from the room, arms over her head, red speckling the pale pink of her gown. Queen Catherine fell, and Catherine fell on top of her, the two Catherines tangled upon the floor in a pool of blood that spread inexorably. Catherine stared at the growing puddle, head cocked, contemplating how this small wound might soon touch everything.

Mother of the Beast

And as Queen Catherine died, upon the floor where she’d once caged the beast, her lips spread in a small smile. Maybe this would be enough to bring her husband home. Or, at the very least, her mother. It had been so long since she had seen either of them. Since she was a girl, really. Not much older than Catherine. They would come soon. She smiled at the thought. Blood bubbled up her throat to line the spaces between her teeth before dripping like drool from her yawning jowls.

Wife of the Beast

Pavel brought Bella to her as she spit a scrap of skin to the stone. She took Bella in one arm, shielding her blooming belly with the other. In months, this second child would cleave her open. She wasn’t afraid. Life was demarcated by cleavings—from innocence, from family, from children. But not yet, not yet. Pavel hugged her, Bella, and her belly safe between their bodies. For now, for now.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

Caroline Beuley: I came to writing because I have always love reading more than almost anything else. As a child I especially loved reading fantasy. I loved the magical worlds, and I loved how the words on the page worked their own kind of magic to conjure them. I had a very sad period in my life where I got lost in the wild woods of the corporate world and stopped writing, but even then I was always reading. Eventually, reading brought me back to writing. I've been writing consistently for the last six years, and it's been absolutely amazing. I think writing is the closest thing to real magic—the way simple words, when said in the right order, make a whole world.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

CB: I am obsessed with structure, deadlines, and to-do lists. I map out my week every Sunday night to make sure I have time to get my work done for my job, write two pieces for my Substack, and make progress on my novel. Occasionally, there is time for a short story, and it's always amazing when that happens. When I’m writing a story, I find that the concept usually comes first. For “Two Catherines,” for example, I read a piece on Substack about how “Beauty and the Beast” was based on a real genetic condition that causes hair growth everywhere. I knew I wanted to tell the story of someone with that condition. As I wrote, it became “Two Catherines.”

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

CB: Shit is hard for women. I would say that is the theme/message that weaves itself into my writing even when I don't mean for it to. It feels more important to write about now than ever, and it seems I just can’t resist its pull!

If not a writer, who would you be?

CB: Something in fashion! After writing, fashion and styling is my favorite way to be creative.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

CB: The factor that will most determine whether you make it as a writer is not innate ability but rather your ability to keep writing after rejection. If you don’t let rejection stop you and you keep writing eventually you will be a published writer. My professor and mentor, Jason Mott, told me that. I think about it at least once a day. It’s so simple, but also so hard. You just have to keep writing.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

CB: I am working on Hunted, a young adult fantasy novel inspired by fairy tales (very on brand). I described the concept to my friend and she said it sounded like “a much more violent Shrek,” which is now my favorite way to describe it. Basically, all the magical fairy tale beasts and creatures have been rounded up by humans and banished beyond a wall. The protagonist is competing to become a Huntsman, the elite force that patrols the wall. But as the novel progresses, the boundaries between good and evil, magic and humanity become much more blurry. I hope the novel will, in it’s final form, say something about who is allowed to live where, how we treat difference, and how magic cannot be conveniently divorced from the people who possess it. I’m really excited about it, but I’m on my fourth draft, so I’m also very ready to be done with it.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

CB: George Saunders’ craft book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain forever impacted the way I wrote short stories. Kelly Link and Karen Russell’s wildly imaginative short stories have really pushed me to be more weird and creative in my writing. I have always really admired Carmen Maria Machado’s ability to write a brilliant, engaging, story that floors you at the end with a resonant message about our world, so I always aspire to do the same in my writing. And, of course, fairy tales are probably my greatest and most impactful source of inspiration. I love to draw on the fairy tale aesthetic and imbue my writing with the magic, wildness, darkness, and bravery that are so emblematic of the fairy tale tradition.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

CB: My favorite movie this year was Strange Darling because of its creative structure and unique approach to storytelling. It’s a thriller told in six chapters, but the chapters aren’t presented in order, and its’ amazing to see how the chosen order and structure changes everything.

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CAROLINE BEULEY is an alumni of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and is pursuing a Fiction Writing MFA at UNCW. Her writing has been nominated for Wigleaf's Top 50 and Best of the Net. She is at work on a story collection and YA fantasy novel. She is co-editing an anthology, Between Our Legs, forthcoming from University of Iowa Press Fall 2026.

Fairy Tales by Caroline

Fiction, fairy tales, and essays, delivered every Wednesday and Sunday

By Caroline Beuley

Notes on Art

Lavinia Fontana’s portrait of Antonietta Gonsalvus (c. 1595) is a painting1 of the daughter of Petrus Gonsalvus, a man with hypertrichosis who was kept at the French court of Henry II and Catherine de' Medici. Antonietta is maybe six years old in the portrait, dressed in the brocade and lace of nobility, holding a letter that explains what she is.

Fontana was one of the first professional women painters in Europe, and there’s something in the care of her gaze that resists the voyeurism the portrait was commissioned to satisfy. She painted the child…as a child. The letter in Antonietta’s hand, though, tells you someone else decided what the painting was for. “Two Catherines” lives in the gap between those two impulses — the human gaze and the transactional one — and asks what happens when a woman caged by one system turns the key on someone else.

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ABOUT THE VOICE ARTIST: Abdulsalam Joki-Lasisi is a Nigerian engineer and professional Voice Over Artist. From lending authority to multinational brands to breathing life into diverse animation projects, his vocal range is matched only by his passions for gaming, reading, and sports.

Raise a plastic fan and hold it next to your head. Turn it slowly, your head facing forward, until you start to hear sounds. The sounds change every night; running water, TV static, a stampede, whispers, a festival, but never turn your head to look. With your other hand, reach across your face and feel the air around the fan, closest to where you think the sound is coming from. Feel, until something licks you.

That is when you know you have found Them.

There are many stories about how She came to be. Some say She was born when lightning struck a boulder at the base of Shere hills. Aunties tell their nephew that She was a babalawo’s illegitimate child, created by the gods to punish him for his infidelity. All versions are useful, have power.

There is one story that isn’t shared as much. I wonder why. But, you’ll need this version to be able to get her to do what you want.

The story goes thus:

They were born dead, spirit hovering over their lifeless pudgy forms. They were born in a tub, in a bathroom with high clay walls and a flimsy zinc door. They slid out of their mother, a soul with a tightly curled body. She didn’t scream, this mother. She rinsed the body, that silent breathless baby, then washed herself. They watched, curious.

Her lips tight, their mother dug out a spool of thread and a needle attached. Their curiosity morphed into horror and they tried to scream. But spirits cannot scream to the living, so, they could do nothing but watch, dread curling, as the mother pricked her finger, then stabbed the dead baby’s stomach. and blood began to flow along the thread, white to red as it flowed into the body.

Then the body’s eyes opened, and it began to cry. The mother cried too, and hugged the body. The body looked at where They floated, close to the yellow bulb, hatred clear in their eyes. And it smiled. Through its tears, it smiled, and curled further into the mother.

“Thank you God,” the woman cried out, voice hoarse from hours of unaided labour.

Like a summoning, the zinc door flew open with a grating squeal and a man barged in. He nearly tripped over his hastily tied wrapper, almost bashing his head against the enamel tub. And They winced, annoyed at Their failure. He re-tied the wrapper hastily and loomed over the wife, smiling a smile that chilled Their bones.

“It’s a girl,” the mother whispered. And handed the body to her husband. The body that now lay so still, it was like watching a statue passing hands.

“Yes,” he said, his lips curling. “Yes it is.”

When you find Them, when they have licked your hand, draw it back. If you don’t, their teeth will follow. It is not time for the teeth yet.

You will feel afraid. Your heart will pound and nervous laughter will tickle your throat. Laugh and be nervous, sweat even, as you make dinner and think about what you want to do. What you want them to do for you.

But when you hear the gates swing open, when you hear Musa’s welcome sa! good evening sa!, compose yourself. Smooth your hand over your headtie as you walk to open the door. Hug your husband and inhale his Dior Sauvage like you have missed his scent all day, and cannot wait to have him all to yourself.

“Ah ah, is that how much you missed me?” he will ask.

Smile and say yes.

As you close the door, your eyes will find it. A red thong, leftover from your afternoon dalliance with Fatima.

Look quickly, to see if he saw, then swipe it with your toe, nimble as a gymnast. You might make a noise.

“Did you say something?” he will turn and ask.

Shake your head no. He will frown, like he doesn’t believe you, and your heart will start to pound. But don’t panic.

Pout your lips and graze his arm with your newly manicured nails. It doesn’t matter that you feel nothing, like touching a tap. Do it till his pupils dilate, and his breathing changes. Then leave him and go back to making dinner.

It always used to work on Rhoda, and it will work on him too.

That night, after he has fucked you (never the other way around), tell him you want to shave his beard. His smile will be confused, but rub his chest. Feed his vanity; make him think your fingers’ only purpose is to be glued to his body.

As you lather his chin, leave a small patch without shaving foam.

Shave the rest, carefully, stroking his face so his eyes flutter and he has a constant placid smile.

“Let me use my tweezers.”

Pluck the hairs, dark and short with their whitish root/follicle, and place them inside a square of tissue. Your heart will race, and your fingers will tremble, but force yourself to relax.

Later, when his snores make the windows rattle, and makes you want to slap him, grab your fan again. Reach for them, to the place where They are. This time, when you reach across your face around the fan, give them the tissue-wrapped hairs. Their teeth will graze your fingers, and latch onto the hairs, and a wet, cosre tongue will tickle your fingertips. Then they will disappear.

Seven days later, they will give you several pouches of powder, and you will poison your husband for the first time that night, watching with satisfaction as he swallows each morsel of pounded yam and laced afang soup.

Every time the mother had gotten pregnant, she’d had a miscarriage. That is what They are made up of, the spirit of each baby she miscarried. Each tragedy was an omen from the Old spirits, a warning that she should not have her husband’s baby.

You see, the mother and her husband had gotten married despite her parents’ pleas. They’d even locked her up in her room, threatening to sell her to the highest bidder should she accept the man’s proposal.

Everyone in the village knew who he was. They kept their daughters behind them as they danced forward every Sunday to drop their offering, or to receive anointing from his Goya olive oil bottle. No wife ever went to see him without her son or husband, and spiritual deliverances were always a family affair.

But the mother…the mother was different. She would go to see him alone, and each time returned to her parents’ house with a pious fire in her eyes, singing hymns and dancing tilll 3am when the neighbours would band their windows and say, “will you shut up!”

Her parents tried to talk to her. But they did so in discreet terms, words that made little sense to her, to anyone who would need protecting.

“Plangnan…haven’t you heard…he’s not…”

But the girl didn’t understand. He was kind to her, spoke in a soft voice and stroked the back of her knee every time she went to see him. He was handsome, skin like clay, and brown eyes that sparkled when he lit his kerosene lantern at night. And he was the first man whose touched moved her, made her skin prickle and her nipples pebble. A person that wasn’t a girl, that wasn’t her “best friends” over the years.

So, she believed then, that he must have some ungodly power, since no man had every drawn moans from her the way Shitna’an and Miriam and Blessing did.

She had gone to him for deliverance, for counselling, when she heard his first sermon condemning homosexuals, and she felt something ugly choke her chest. It was the same feeling that suffocated her when at 19, whispers began to follow her. At the river side, in the marketplace, in the village hall.

“Did you hear?” “Hear ke? I saw them with my own eyes! Her and that Deborah.” “Tufiakwa. And you did not kill them??” “What’s my business?” “Let me catch her first. If I don’t chop her up, change my name.”

She hated the words, hated the fear that took root in her, that fed on her apparently ungodly desires. So, of course, she’d gone to the pastor for help.

“You see,” he whispered as he stuck a finger inside her and she writhed, clutching her breasts. “How can you be gay?”

She married him, and the whispers stopped. No one ever whispered against a pastor and his wife.

Until she miscarried four times in a row, and the whispers arose again, triumphant, vindicated.

“When she has been doing rubbish with that other girl for years, what do you expect? I’m sure that’s why God closed her womb. Useless girl.”

She would lock herself in her wardrobe, and cry till her husband came home to berate her over semo and kuka about her childlessness five years into marriage.

They did not know that it was the spirits handiwork. Spirits pay attention, they see the future, written in the actions of the past and present. They knew what would happen should the man have a child.

Then one day, she took matters into her own hands, and fucked another man where eyes could not see, where whispers could not be birthed, and even spirits were oblivious.

And gave birth to her daughter, the girl who would be her downfall.

Your problem, your husband, will be like an overnight pimple. Irritating, disfiguring, and you will want to pop him as fast as possible.

Bide your time. Every day, you will want to increase the dose. Don’t. Be like Beatrice Achike, like Giulia Tofania. They were careful, and no one found out till it was too late, till their problems were dealt with.

He will invite his friends over for his 40^th birthday celebration, and they will drink all the booze in the house, till you have to send Musa to buy palm wine from around the corner.

“Please be fast,” you will say. Because you do not want them, him, to be sober.

You do not want him to be able to understand the looks that pass between you and Miriam, Bello’s wife.

The first time you met him, at your introduction, he’d seen the look.

You saw a look too, one that made you roll your eyes. As you walked past him from the front door to change out of your clubbing clothes, you took in his big-bellied figure. Greed, potent and oily, shone in his eyes and in the way he stroked his beard. He was nothing new. The newest in a long line of men who’d visited the house over the past two months, you thought you could dispose of him too, prove to be so hard-headed they would leave.

No matter how much money they stood to inherit from your oil tycoon of a father, no man wanted a headstrong wife that they couldn’t control.

So, when your mother called you from your room, you mad sure to emerge in only a towel, tattoos on full display.

“Sochi,” your mother said. “Come and meet Isaac.”

“No,” you said loudly, and the room fell into silence. Your mother’s mouth fell open and she rose, the beads on her arms and neck rattling. She raised her hand to slap you, and you flinched, closing your eyes. Nothing came.

You opened your eyes to find her wrist stayed by the man. The way he looked at you then was different from the other men. Pitying, triumphant, possessive. Your knees trembled and you bit your tongue. Real fear crippled your nerves and you fiddled with the edge of your towel.

“Let me talk to her alone please,” he said. Everyone agreed. Your mother, father, uncles, all filed into the kitchen, and silence descended between the two of you.

He said nothing, simply pulled out his phone and scrolled and tapped a few times, then handed it to you.

You threw the phone across the room. It burned your hand, and the picture collage on it was scorched into your retina, and angry tears welled up.

“How the hell did you get that?” you whispered.

It’s fine babe, Rhonda had said. No one will know. Yet, there the two of you were imprisoned on his phone, lips locked and hair tangled in one another’s hair, chest smooshed together. In another picture was one thathad you both staring at each other’s eyes, two girls clearly in love and damning the world.

Isaac smiled, and his oily wretched face turned triumphant in your sight.

“Marry me,” he’d said. “Marry me or I’ll tell everyone what a dirty lesbian you are.”

The skin on your arms pimpled and you hated him instantly.

“Tell them,” you said. The smugness slid off his face and for the first time, he looked unsure. You smiled, your confidence returning in bits, masking the fear that thrummed in your veins. Then he marched past you into the kitchen.

He told them, and the next week, you were married.

Two years now, and you still hate him, want him to suffer for the life he has trapped you in, a life created out of fear for your own life.

But he doesn’t know that your boldness has gone nowhere, despite the gold handcuff on your ring finger. You are still that girl in the towel, her tattoos now covered by bulbous bubus. It is that same boldness that led you to find a witch, one who didn’t fear your husband, who had his own army of babalawos, thanks to your father’s money.

“I can’t help you,” she’d said. “I will die. But I know who can help you, someone your husband cannot touch, because she is already dead.”

Thanks to her instructions, now you have the poison, and soon, you will be free. Maybe not to go back to Rhonda, who is married with two children now. But to live a life where you do not have to think of someone else when being fucked.

When Musa returns, Isaac’s eyes will be a little less glazed.

“What took you so long?” you will snap at Musa.

“Sorry ma,” he will reply. “E don finish before, but dem make new batch special for oga.”

As you transfer the palm wine to a jug, Miriam will join you in the kitchen.

“Let me help you,” she will say. Her voice is soft, and has always done something to your belly. This time, for the first time, her fingers will graze yours as she lines up glasses on a tray. They will linger, as will your eyes on her fair face, breasts hugged by sugar lace, and a mouth ringed in kohl. Then she will drift past you to the stairs, up to where she knows your bedroom is, where you have gossiped about your husbands. And their many girls. And whispered, coded desires. As she walks up, one shoulder of her dress will fall. There will be no bra strap. You breath will stutter and your eyes will remain on her till she disappears past the landing.

All that’s left is to deliver the palm wine, then join her.

You pause, then pour an entire pouch of powder into the jug. Because they are the same, the men drinking and laughing in the sitting room.

No one she told believed Her. Her grandmother had slapped her and said to stop dreaming up stories.

“You want the devil to use you abi?” she said.

Her mother hadn’t said anything, simply stared at Her till she began to doubt what had happened. Maybe I am exaggerating, she thought. No father would touch his daughter that way, the same daughter he fed strawberries at breakfast and made faces till she collapsed into breathless giggles.

You see, one day, Plangnan had come home early from church choir practice. That particular day, she was not interested in being fetted, fawned over and asked to deliver prayer points to her husband. She packed her bag and faked a headache, and left. Somehow she still ended up with two written prayer requests.

On getting home, she fished out her key from her purse, when a soft, whimpering sound made her pause. She stepped to her left and squinted to look into the window, wondering if there were thieves raiding their home so early in the evening.

What she saw stopped her heart forever.

On the couch lay her daughter, clad in her nightdress. Kneeling in front of her was the pastor, his hands beneath the nightdress, a smile on his oily lips.

Plangnan retched. Outside the door, she emptied her stomach of everything ever ingested. The lies, the faith, the sermons, the belief. Then she sat in the putrid mess and prayed, prayed she had mis-seen, because no father would do that to his own daughter.

She replayed her counselling sessions with him, how he’d fingered her. This time, she paid attention to the look in his eyes, not how her body felt, a body that now felt like a betrayal, a supreme lie. And for the first time, she saw it. The look. Punishing, triumphant, wicked.

She kicked the door, feet stinging, and swept on them. Her bag became a gavel, metting out justice onto her husband’s back. He cursed and tried to overpower her, lifting his hands. As soon as he did, she whacked his face with her shoe and scooped up her daughter and ran, locking them both in her room. Her daughter shook in her arms, tears glinting in the wam yellow light of the overhead bulbs.

“Plangnan!” he roared and pounded on the door. All night he threathened and shouted, voice going hoarse. Till he finally left, and her daughter slept, and Plangnan’s heart still did not resume its natural ryhthm

Naturally, she’d gone to her family for help, for solace and protection, the same people whose warnings had falling on her deaf ears, the same people now ho dismissed her.

How could a father do something like that?

Soon, stories of her accusation began to spread. People stared as she and her daughter picked out pawpaw and cashews in the market. Their eyes tracked her daughter’s movements, looking for the pastor’s fingerprints on her skin. And when they didn’t see any, when she looked normal, eyes burned with anger, lips curled, hissing. Plangnan hurled a few cashews, toppled a few pepper heaps.

Normal to them was not normal to her. She knew from how her daughter didn’t complain about buying overipe mangos, how she didn’t beg for boiled groundnut, how she pulled Plangnan away from every male trader, that her daughter’s scars lay in her bones, swam in her blood.

And she knew those scars demanded retribution.

She went home and performed for her husband. She pouted her lips, grazed his arm, caressed his shoulders as she served him dinner. She laughed as he joked, made he saw the heat in her eyes, made sure he mistook it for smoldering. Her daughter’s sadness and betrayed expression at the dining table clawed at her chest and almost broke her resolve.

That night, after he fucked her (never the other way around), and he dozed off, his stomach full of pounded yam and egusi, Plangnan steeled herself, took a knife, and plunged it into his fat kneck, where his rosary rested. And blood coated the cross, gargling till his struggles fell silent.

They saw, the spirits of the children that died in her womb. They saw what this woman had done in the face of what they had foreseen, the injustice that would have been committed against them too. And They smiled.

She went to wash her hands of his blood, and They descended, possessing the man’s body. He rose from the bed, a quiet zombie, blood leaking from his throat onto his night shirt. He walked out into the night, guided by Them under the watchful moonlight.

When Plangnan returned to the room, she screamed. Then she turned the whole house upside down, movenents frantic and deperate. She ran outside, searched the nearby bushes for him tilll the sun rose and her eyes were blood-red.

For days, she could not sleep. She waited for his resurgence, his resurrection and her subsequent damnation. For what dead man stood up and walked away ?

But weeks passed, and he didn’t return, and her confidence grew, even as people whispered about his disappearance.

The next time they were in the marketplace, the people stared, once more looking for the truth. And they thought they saw it, in the lightness of her daughter’s footsteps, the way she walked with her shoulder’s high like a layer of slime had sloughed off her. They thought her, the re-happy 5-year-old, responsible for her father’s disappearance.

Plangnan felt the fiery hate in their eyes, the pitchforks and torches that would come for her daughter if they believed her guilty. The fear tore at her throat, and her heart became irregular.

That evening, she called Deborah, who now lived in the city, a successful banker.

“Hello?” the voice pulled at something deep and long-forgotten in Plangnan and she had to stifle a sob.

“Deborah? It’s Plangnan.”

“Plangnan! Long time! How-”

“I’m going to die soon,” she interrupted. “And I want you to come and take my daughter away.”

Deborah was silent, shocked. “Why?”

Tears ran down Plangnan’s face. “You know what this village is like.”

She didn’t need to say more. Deborah agreed, and they scheduled the pickup for two days later.

That night, she went to Mama Iyabo’s beer parlour. She sat for hours, ordering cup after cup of burkutu. She poured them all over her dress when no one watched, so by the tme the moon graced the sky, she smelled like Katlong, the town drunkard. Then, heart thumping, she climbed onto the table. She took a deep breath. Then began to scream.

“I did it! I killed him! I killed the useless man.”

Jumping from table to table, kicking cups and plates, sending meat and booze flying. For the first time since she was a girl, joy filled her heart. She was no longer a dirty hell-bound homosexual, a stubborn girl, a barren wife, a lying wife and mother. She was a mother, fighting for her daughter, taking her protection into her hands.

It didn’t take long before people captured her, tied her up at the tree at the base of the mountain. And they stoned, hurled and threw until her body bled in all places. Her wrapper and clouse tore to shreds. But she laughed. Laughed because she knew her daughter would be safe.

As the life flowed out of her, and her connection to this side of life ebbed, she saw Them, and They reached out hands to her.

“Who are you?” she asked, voice cracked. Another stone hit her temple and destroyed her left vision.

“We were to be your children by that man,” They replied. “Join us, mother.”

Plangnan smiled, and the last stone hit, and she joined her children.

It will look like you will fail.

One day, he will come home to find you dozed off on the couch, phone hanging from your hand. He will take it and his body will go rigid. Fury will twist his dark face, till he looks like a pudgy potato.

The first blow will clear your sleep, and feel like nails driving into your cheek. The next will fold your stomach in on itself. He will grab your hair and pull you from the couch. Pain will explode at the base of your skull and tears will run down your cheek.

You will swipe helplessly at him, but pain has weakened your body, and the only thing you can do is scream and sob.

“I thought I told you to stop this nonsense!”

They will come to mind, Fatima’s red thong, Miriam’s lace-covered breasts, the countless women that have kept you sane, stopped you from taking your own life just to escape this prison.

He will do all these things, and your patience will break. This is where They will come in. They will come from the shadows and enter his body, replace his soul. He will jerk and try to fight. Then his fingers will unclench from your head, step back and watch.

He will tear himself apart, from hair follicle, to fingernail to skin flaps, till he is nothing but a mess of bone, suit scraps and blood.

Sometimes, there is no such thing as a clean ending.

Fear will try to overtake your body, will freeze you to the spot. Take your bags and run. Run towards your new beginning, one that starts with a plastic surgeon who will replace your face with an unrecognisable one, bland and mundane.

When they find his body, see what has happened, the insects living in his skin, they will call you witch. But not to your face, because it doesn’t exist anymore.

Witch, they will call you. Witch, they called women miracle workers. Divine, they called Jesus. Does it really matter? Witch, devil, they called Plangnan. She is the She they tell stories about, the witch they use for horror stories. Maybe they’ll use you for a story too.

And sometimes, for the sake of those who come after, our stories are more important than what they call us.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

Plangdi Neple: Until 2020, I didn't consider writing as a thing I could do professionally. By then, Covid-19 had made me bored enough to try anything. Plus, I was unhappy with my chosen field of study: Chemical Engineering.

My real draw to writing came about 2 years later, when I was considering stopping for good. Until I found what I really wanted to do with words. I don't talk much, so, writing (and the accompanying research) is my preferred way of asking questions I can't say out loud, and for talking about important things.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

PN: 90% of the time, structure. Wildness can occasionally help and surprise (that's actually how “To Whom It May Concern” started out), but has more often led to incomplete drafts that taunt me every year. Structure helps because I need to have a clear road map. If not, I'll retread old/familiar themes and stories.

The thing that comes first is usually a question: what if...? Followed by a twist on something I've been preoccupied with. For example, I have a story that started as "what if I wanted to steal money on its way to an ATM?".

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

PN: Oh my friends would have a field day answering this! The most consistent thing in my work (right now) is queerness. It wasn't always there when I was growing up, especially in Nigeria, and writing has given me the power to surround myself with it. Another thing is that a lot of my characters go to others for help/power. A part of it is that I think it's important to know when to ask for help (something I'm not very good at), and to understand the need for community.

If not a writer, who would you be?

PN: Probably an engineer, if my parents had their way!

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

PN: The best advice I've received is from a friend: do it afraid. And it's the same thing I'd say to emerging writers. You already have so many things working against you in the world right now. Don't let fear be one of them.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

PN: I'm afraid I'll invoke them if I speak. Oh well, what's a little curse. I'm working on a novel and a short story collection. One is about beauty, fashion, and the body, and one is about gender essentialism, surveillance states, and addiction. I'll give you 3 guesses.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

PN: There are so many people I can think of, but I'll stick to a few. Tee Noir, Cat Sebastian, Mina Le, Octavia Butler, Wole Talabi. I didn't really grow up questioning the world around me; I grew up Christian. These writers and creators gave me the language to express things I already felt, and exposed me to history and concepts I was otherwise oblivious to. They're also just really fun! Wole has a story (An Arc of Electric Skin) about a man using his skin to destroy the Nigerian political system. Delicious doesn't begin to describe that narrative.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

PN: Two very recent things come to mind: Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Maison Margiela Artisanal 2024 show.

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PLANGDI NEPLE is a Nigerian writer. His work has appeared in several publications, including FIYAH, Cast of Wonders, Flame Tree Press, Afterlives 2024: The Year’s Best Death Fiction, and others. He is a Voodoonauts 2024 Fellow, a Tin House Alum, a member of the Clarion West class of 2025, a Nommo Award Nominee, and a Brave New Weird Award winner.

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Wangechi Mutu’s The Bride Who Married a Camel’s Head (2009)1 Mutu builds hybrid women from magazine cutouts, medical illustrations, and ink—figures torn apart and reassembled into something fiercer. This bride kneels in tall grass, flowers erupting from her head like a crown or a wound, one hand raised as if casting or catching something. She’s ornamented and monstrous, trapped in a title that sounds like a folktale warning and a curse. And then we look at her face and realize, viscerally, that she’s not afraid. Neple’s story takes off from that look.