Essay Daily: Talk About the Essay

Thursday, June 10, 2021

Monica Prince, Tell It Backwards: an Erasure

This is an essay in a series of b-sides to The Texas Review All-Essay Issue. (More info at the end of this post.)

Tell It Backwards: an Erasure

Monica Prince

Monica Prince teaches activist and performance writing at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem ([PANK], 2020), Instructions for Temporary Survival (Red Mountain Press, 2019), and Letters from the Other Woman (Grey Book Press, 2018). She is the managing editor of the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, and the co-author of the suffrage play, Pageant of Agitating Women, with Anna Andes. Her work appears in The Texas Review, trampset, Artemis, The Rumpus, MadCap Review, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.

I have always loved the B-side of records or cassettes, being let in on the secret/unreleased or more unexpected strangeness that awaited from artists. The B-side, in its essence, offers a singular delight in a promise that you, the audience, will not (or may not) be able to recreate the experience the B-side offers anywhere else. It says welcome, stay here a while, and put it on repeat.

In the spirit of the B-side, The Texas Review asked contributors of the All-Essay Issue (Vol. 40, #3/#4, 2020) to contribute essays to a B-side compilation. We want to offer, here, a moment of singular delight as accompanied unexpected strangeness or echo location or dancing and braided conversation in conjunction to the contributors’ essays featured in the All-Essay Issue.

Please enjoy the following B-sides by: Mary-Kim Arnold; Piper J. Daniels and Nicole McCarthy; Lily Hoang; Vincent James; Michael Martone; Ander Monson; Katrina Otuonye; Danielle Pafunda; Monica Prince; Addie Tsai; Julie Marie Wade; and Nicole Walker.

Thank you (and genuflection) to all of the contributors featured in our pages: Danielle Pafunda; Sejal Shah; Addie Tsai; Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint; Temim Fruchter; Raquel Gutiérrez, Muriel Leung; Monica Prince; Ander Monson; Janice Lee; Piper J. Daniels; Camellia-Berry Grass; Wendy C. Ortiz; SJ Sindu; Dinty W. Moore; Michael Martone; Lily Hoang; Nicole Walker; Mary-Kim Arnold; Katrina Otuonye; Vincent James; Julie Marie Wade; Caroline Crew; Diana Khoi Nguyen.

Thank you to Ander Monson for giving us the space of Essay Daily, and as ever thank you to Nick Lantz, Editor of The Texas Review.

Welcome, stay here a while, and put it on repeat.

Katie Jean Shinkle, Guest Editor, The Texas Review

If you would like to order a copy of the All-Essay Issue: http://www.thetexasreview.org/issues/

Wednesday, June 9, 2021

Danielle Pafunda, Dear Friend

This is an essay in a series of b-sides to The Texas Review All-Essay Issue. (More info at the end of this post.)

Dear Friend

Danielle Pafunda

Dear friend,

I’m thinking this morning of our dear editor friend who is set up in bed, quarantined from her spouse, and texted I’m like Emily Dickinson / but with internet / and without the white dress! When I check on her, I ask if she’s yet forsaken love of a lover for the ecstasy of pure thought, if she’s yet baked a black cake, which cake froths with molasses, which cake gratifying in the teeth as garden soil in the hand, which cake warm in winter and wicked in summer, which cake the result of scaling the world a sugarcane factory, which cake sourced from slave labor, which cake produced by the uncompensated labor of reproduction, which cake in this joke relies on us going along with the forgery of Dickinson-the-Recluse, and not Dickinson-the-Resister. Well. We need our jokes, right now.

Dear friend, the flour for that cake likely would’ve come from the city in which I now reside. Dear friend, our dear editor friend and I say can I be petty and say it is good to be aware of one’s pettiness. Like spiteful, like bitter, like nervous, like sour feelings, I admire the work that petty feelings do to keep us whole. But petty sounds always to me the neighbor of pretty. As a rose garden. Do you remember that game? It went like this: first you tug up your sleeve. Children do not roll up their sleeves. Tug. Then your friend clamps down your wrist with their non-dominant hand. With their dominant hand, fingers spread equidistant, scratches four rows into the tenderer flesh of your forearm. Five if they’re agile enough to include the thumbnail, ragged, the row most likely to burst. First you dig the garden, says your friend. It is very likely lunchtime in the cafeteria, your friend’s breath smelling of nacho cheese and snack cakes and other things you aren’t allowed to eat, but sometimes for which you trade a rice cake and find yourself shocked by another kid’s willingness to make what’s clearly a bad deal. Your arm now has four pinkening raised lines. Then you plant the seeds, says your friend, making the pincers gesture and methodically spacing pinches along each hot welt. Then you water your garden, says this friend whose face up close begins to remind you of your cat’s. Your friend’s hand like a claw pounces repeatedly on your arm. A slightly more perverse and committed friend will add spit. Here comes the sun! shouts your friend, slapping your forearm, and now the roses grow! The friend twists each rosebush for good measure, and then turns away from you, their cold blank back saying nothing more. Look down at your arm, and indeed it’s a garden. A few other children look on in disbelief, jealousy, put-offedness, whatever. You’ve grown much larger in your body and your forearm glows, here I am with mean and pretty feelings, with petty and ecstatic feelings, etc, dear friend. If only we could meet up and do so.

Dear friend, I want to say to you the word radio. Radio waves, radio promise, radio synchronicity, the way the radio saved our lives over and over again whoever we were; you remember. You stumble over it on cold mornings, the ghost of the person you thought you’d become. Your cold hand holding the cigarette funny, your big coat over your big sweater, your worn-soft thermal with the neckline slashed, your army surplus pants ripped at the knee, more thermal beneath, black Docs laced black, grandfather’s scarf wrapped twice around your neck. Or was it a scarf your mom made for your dad when they were first dating, too long, camel or dove gray wool, tucked in the cedar chest with the Mamas and the Papas record—the one with “Dream a Little Dream”—and the beat-up rucksack in which you carry your books. Your thermos full of cheap vodka Jeff buys for you when you’ve got the late shift at Village Video. Sound familiar? Am I close?

I, too, can remember how I took a cold front to the face and tipped my chin up, anyway. I can remember how we breathed in the twentieth century, cracking through the ice as quickly as it formed. I’ve been holding your place this entire time. Dear friend, I want to pat your cheek and say good egg, then pat your cheek harder and say even louder, again, good egg. I want to hustle you out in the night air and say there! No, there! There, there.

Everything’s a comet when you’re spinning hard. I name a star for you, but never say so. I put the certificate in a fireproof box of important papers. I wonder about the relationship of the box to my own longevity. When I dub the star, I don’t use the name your parents gave you, but the one you whispered into that first littoral ear, back of the bar, tucked out of the bartender’s line of sight, seventeen. The one you gave the protagonist’s dead brother in the first novel about which an agent wrote you back. In the novel, you bury a tinderbox, a witch’s comb, a broken chalk circle, and I do find them all.

Dear friend, I cannot reconcile my continuum of aging with that unchanged original longing I only rarely brush up against. Well. It is not my job to reconcile that. I say. It is just my job to live with the aching self I am and its spool through two-headed time. Hydra-headed time, I say to my students, and they say yes. Or did. We cannot tell if the present moment has changed the past, yet, so we still use its tensile strength to organize ourselves. Oh, friend. In one timeline, here I am, always knit to you by such an even, steady stitch that in every other timeline you know I’m missing.

With my enduring affection and admiration,

Danielle

Danielle Pafunda is the author of nine books of prose and poetry, including Spite (The Operating System), The Book of Scab (Ricochet Editions), Beshrew (Dusie Press), and The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books). Her work has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry, BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and a number of anthologies and journals. She teaches at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Thank you to Ander Monson for giving us the space of Essay Daily, and as ever thank you to Nick Lantz, Editor of The Texas Review.

Welcome, stay here a while, and put it on repeat.

Katie Jean Shinkle, Guest Editor, The Texas Review

If you would like to order a copy of the All-Essay Issue: http://www.thetexasreview.org/issues/

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Katrina Otuonye, You Just Had to Be There

This is an essay in a series of b-sides to The Texas Review All-Essay Issue. (More info at the end of this post.)

You Just Had to Be There

Katrina Otuonye

In grad school, I tried to explain to a friend that growing up in a small town is like having a best friend all your life and you have very intricate inside jokes. Where one day, one of you says, “the salamander!” and you both crack up laughing. You can’t really explain the inside joke to anyone else, there are too many levels. “You just had to be there,” you say.
You have a history with your best friend, all the good and all the bad. You saw each other through playground slights in first grade, first periods and the unwieldly limbs and hormones of middle school, the horrors and cliques of high school. And sometimes friends grow apart. And that’s just how life is, people grow, things change.
A group of my essays center around “otherness;” my brothers and I were some of the few Black kids I know of that grew up in the UP, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Our hometown has 4,000 people. Writing my essays only reinforced what I know to be sure: I deserve to live my life out loud. That includes holding up a light to my brilliant, happy, lonely, beautiful, harrowing upbringing. I write plenty about the good stuff. I think people get tired of the fun stories I have with my brothers. It took years before I realized there are people who barely speak to their siblings, let alone send them memes and tweets every day.
When I was putting my thesis together in grad school, I looked over all the essays I’d been working on, the moments that weren’t hitting the page right, thinking about the moments I hadn’t bothered to write at all. The day after I sent in the whole kit and caboodle to my thesis committee, I sat down and wrote an entirely new essay I’d been avoiding completely.
When The Texas Review published it, I told everyone when it arrived, all bright and shiny in my mailbox. Many people told me they ordered a copy, and then a tiny sense of dread crept in. What would think of the story? My brother sent me a picture when his copy arrived and then I sat and waited. Would he read the essay now? Later? He was in it; I wasn’t sure if I had mentioned that to him. Everyone I meet is fair game for any essay; my brothers are in most of them. About an hour later, he texted me about it and we talked until he had to go to bed.
“We had a nice little life,” I said.
“Life was complicated, but simple, and you had to be there to get it.”
“Thanks for reading,” I told him.
“Reading is easy—sharing is hard,” he said.
I think these stories I’ve been sharing, those intricate moments, are the reasons I’m so fascinated by small towns. The things that happen to you, that you remember, that you embed in your bones, aren’t going to this show or checking out this place or going to that party. It’s scratching a finger along the sliver of ice that forms on the inside corners of the windows at the end of February, when the last snow of the “season” is probably still several weeks away. It’s sitting in someone’s backyard around a makeshift bonfire pit, whittling down a stick for your marshmallows. Where the fireflies have lost a bit of the wonder they held when you were a kid because they are everywhere. Where you stay out as late as you can, soaking up as much sunlight as possible because the summer days are so blissfully long.
The pieces I’m not entirely sure anyone will actually want to read are finding their ways out of me. In grad school, we talked about balance and happiness and love and how to get all the work done. I wish we talked more about fear and shame. After some of our workshops, I’d look around the room and think, “Do all writers just need a good therapist?” When I write nonfiction essays, sometimes I plop myself in the story like a character, or I write about a topic trying to completely remove myself from it. There was more of the authors’ real lives in some of my friends’ fictional works than in my own writing.
And I thought about that—about finding a way to remove myself from some stories by writing it as fiction. As if it’d be easier for people to read if they could reasonably believe that the story was about somewhere else, as if it weren’t their hometown on display. But it’s important for people to have access to the truth as I see it. In a world where we constantly have to contend with people debating facts and asking, “Did it really happen the way you said it did?” It would do me a favor to tell my stories and send them out into the world to find someone also searching through a tumultuous world that often seems to actively work to want you dead. I wouldn’t trade being Black for anything. I live with the dichotomy of my love of self. Because in this world, in this moment in particular, I feel like a conspiracy theorist. I’ve got a board with red lines connecting one thought to another and still people are saying, “Yes, but racism? Are you sure?”
When I hesitate, I think of Nikki Giovanni saying, “If now isn’t a good time for the truth, I don’t see when we’ll get to it.”
So, I’m working on another essay and another and another and another. Every once in a while, I get an email from someone who really connected to something I wrote, a turn of phrase made them feel less alone in the world. And…do you feel that? That’s me connecting to you, and you connecting to me. We just formed a bond right here, right over the written word, over what started as a completely blank page. I think you might even be my new best friend.

Katrina Otuonye (she/her/hers) is a writer, editor, and editor from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She received a BA from the University of Tennessee and an MFA from Chatham University. She often writes about personal experiences alongside her interests in pedagogy, art history, mental health, and superheroes. Katrina was a Made at Hugo House Fellow and her work has appeared in publications such as The Texas Review, The Seventh Wave, Crab Orchard Review, and The Toast, among others. She is working on a collection of nonfiction about grief and silence. You’ll find more of her work on her portfolio at katrinaotuonye.com.

Thank you to Ander Monson for giving us the space of Essay Daily, and as ever thank you to Nick Lantz, Editor of The Texas Review.

Welcome, stay here a while, and put it on repeat.

Katie Jean Shinkle, Guest Editor, The Texas Review

If you would like to order a copy of the All-Essay Issue: http://www.thetexasreview.org/issues/

Monday, June 7, 2021

Ander Monson, On Modality

This is an essay in a series of b-sides to The Texas Review All-Essay Issue. (More info at the end of this post.)

On Modality

Ander Monson

I write sometimes in different modes. Like a lot of my stuff begins in Word, like probably yours does too, and while might eventually transition into InDesign it has that Word stain to it. But sometimes they’re initially composed in something else, like Dreamweaver or Write Room, a bare-bones word processor that you can program to look like an IBM PC circa 1990 or a green-screen Apple IIe or whatever that really clicks something on in me when I use it. I mean, you sit down and it all comes from somewhere—I guess you can call it the muse or God or channeling something from beyond, but more often it’s like summoning some past self through a stimulus, and when I write in these other modalities the stakes change. Or maybe it’s not the stakes but the situation I’m composing from: it changes. It looks different. It has unfamiliar tools. The way the sentences sprawl on the page varies. All of a sudden I don’t feel obliged to compose Something Good and instead can get lost in just messing around. It’s obvious, isn’t it: the technology of composition changes so the nature of the composition changes.

Both of the essays of mine that have appeared in the Best American Essays anthologies were originally composed in Dreamweaver, which isn’t a software anyone would ever think to use to compose essays, in part because it pretty much sucks. But I wrote them for my website, so using Dreamweaver, and without thought to what my editor might think of it, and because I was navigating a new space with its new tools, that added an extra emphasis on the actual technologies of composition as I was composing, which I suppose must be a good mode in me, since those two essays qualify as among the bigger hits I’ve had, A-sides for sure, at least by comparison to my usual readership (hey there!), but I certainly didn’t start them as hits at all but began them as weird one-off side projects.

This one’s a weirdo side project too, written originally as part of my forthcoming book Predator: a Memoir, about the 1987 Schwarzenegger movie Predator, but it’s since been stripped out of that, and I don’t know where it belongs now: a b-side, surely. That’s because it’s a little hard to think of it as an essay at all, being that it’s composed in the voice of one of the birds that Olin Sewall Pettingill “observed” in “Observed Acts of Predation on Birds in Northern Lower Michigan,” from The Living Bird Fifteenth Annual, 1976, which I picked up in a Tucson Goodwill largely for the diagrams and got infatuated with.

A lot of the Predator book is thinking about what it means to see (ourselves) as another creature, which is the question that a lot of good sci-fi asks us: what can the predator or bird or whatever see in us that we cannot see in ourselves? We’re not so good at seeing ourselves, which is a disconnect I think about a lot. Well, the Predator, an alien hunter, only sees in infrared, as you know if you’ve watched the movie, and really quite a lot of the movie is spent in its POV as it is (we are) trying to make some sense of these hot hardcore big-gunned supermen wandering through the jungle blowing up stuff and preening. It’s an unusual feeling to be in a film trying to understand just what it is we’re actually seeing when we’re seeing what we’re seeing. I suppose all films are us seeing us (I mean, we literally are seeing us, or some version of us, as we watch the screen), but Predator takes it further. So I wanted to take it further too.

So I started using an infrared camera I bought to replicate this effect. It’s eerie, seeing in these spectra, and knowing that pretty much every creature (including alien predators, if they exist) sees only somewhat like we see, and that they see things we cannot. Jumping spiders see only green and ultraviolet, for instance. Most crustaceans see only blue and red, but a few see way more color than we can. Most insects (and cats) see ultraviolet (which we can’t see) and often blue and yellow. Snakes see some color and some infrared. Birds see substantially more colors than we can, and at a much higher frame rate. The very nature of seeing changes based on what we can and can’t see, and I’m not sure if you’d call what mosquitoes do (see carbon dioxide emissions and sensing body heat, in addition to using their eyes) seeing or if it’s so deformed it turns into something else.

Like the movie itself, my book about the movie has turned into something else the more I watch and think and write about it. There are still a number of first-person experiences as something other than the I you’re reading here (he too is a fiction, I want to note), but none from the bird’s POV, which I decided was a little too disruptive. Plus I started stressing out about the possibility of having to get permission for all the stills I wanted to use from the movie and as a workaround started making my own with the infrared camera I bought so I could see how the creature sees myself. I also happened to have a bird mask, so the image itself is a self-portrait as a sort of bird, rendered in the style of Predator’s best and most enduring effect:

I don’t think any of this is obvious in the essay, and it’s probably not all that important, but I hope it gives you another reason to read the essay and the issue, which is great. On account of the essay itself being a b-side, I guess this makes this, the thing you’re reading, the b-side to the b-side, and it’s longer too and dancier to boot.

Ander Monson's next book is Predator: a Memoir (Graywolf, 2022). He's the founder and editor of Essay Daily.

Thank you to Ander Monson for giving us the space of Essay Daily, and as ever thank you to Nick Lantz, Editor of The Texas Review.

Welcome, stay here a while, and put it on repeat.

Katie Jean Shinkle, Guest Editor, The Texas Review

If you would like to order a copy of the All-Essay Issue: http://www.thetexasreview.org/issues/

Sunday, June 6, 2021

Michael Martone, The Year of Lasts (2)

This is an essay in a series of b-sides to The Texas Review All-Essay Issue. (More info at the end of this post.)

The Year of Lasts / The Death of the Author or an Existential Inventory

Michael Martone

On Friday after the retirement reception for my colleague Dilin Liu, I lugged my university issued laptop over to the E-Tech offices for my annual inventory.

This one, of course, will be the last inventory--I have a laptop and an iPad--as once I retire all the equipment returns to the university. I talked with Ruth Pionke, E-Tech director, who told me that if I am granted emeritus status (and that is an if) I get to keep my email address, and I then can petition to use a lab computer if I need one. The tough loss is that I will no longer be part of the license agreement for the shared university software. Sigh.

Pictured, the ritual checking in and checking off of the equipage. I had to hand (very old-timey) initial the big book and there years of "mm"s cascaded down the analog page:
mm
mm
mm
mm
mm
mm
mm
looking a bit like the ordered headstones in a veterans cemetery.

Areej Sindatok did the heavy lifting, reading off the impossible ID tag number to Annmarie Samuelson who also took the documenting photograph. Something new happened during this last session. Areej said that they now had to attach a nadditional sticker with one of those square scanning codes--I assume to make it easier the next time even though there will be no next time. So I wanted a picture of a computer, Arjeej's iPad, taking a picture of a computer, my laptop, so I could download the picture from my email--which I may get to keep--and upload it here for you to see on your computers or laptops or hand held devices.

Yes, all of this term has been steeped in senses of ending.

I started "teaching" creative writing 40 years ago, in 1980, when the idea of creative writing at the university was newly novel. Little did I know then but that in a garage someplace the first Apple was being engineered as well. I remember back then that when I applied for graduate school there were maybe a dozen places with programs. I graduated into a world where we couldn't have enough of them. Over 100 by 1985. The writer in a college went from the Writer-in-Residence model to an academic. The author became a Romantic Modernist genius now with tenure very fast. And just as fast we traded in our typewriters for computer word processing.

Side note: The bulletin boards of Johns Hopkins were scalloped with flyers advertising typing, a buck or two a page, with a fringe of rip-off phone numbers. I had to turn in my thesis to my typist a month ahead of its distribution to my defense committee as the type had to be perfect even if the content and style and art of it was deeply flawed.

Anyway, somewhere in there, those forty years, the "author" died, but writing continued.

The deconstructive essays from the continent set many of us on edge, but I am pretty sure now that post-structural theory didn't really lay a hand on the author (or writers) in the university. We typed on, on our computers, our computers hobbled to produce a typescript pretty much like one from the late 19th Century anyway. But now, now that I am in midst of my last lasts, I understand that being an author working at a university (and remember I was there at the beginning of this experiment) now seems to be in its final phases as well. That is to say it feels like the author is dead, long live the writer (as is the "professor" replaced by the "instructor" it is not that I am irreplaceable but that my category, my genre, might in fact be disappearing with me). And it wasn't Derrida or Barthes that deconstructed me. It was that heavy beast that went with me through all those years, that slab of plastic that redefined, redefines, is redefining who and what a writer is and how, with the reader, meaning is made.

Strangely, the day before, the creative writing faculty had a routine meeting. But before we began the department's undergraduate director wanted to say a few words. A heads up for our information. The department was moving to introduce a track of digital and textual studies. There was a report in the Chronicle that Florida State has over 600 majors in this new conception of what the teaching of "English" should be, is becoming. I had long thought that Creative Writing and writing of all kinds could "take over" the literature departments that hosted them, and now they are. We didn't do it because we didn't want the headaches of the administering. But now, it might be, we have to.

I have no stake in all this. I certainly don't mourn what is fading away nor do I cheer the replacement. I just am noting that my time on earth (and in English Departments) has presented itself within these neat parentheses. I was one of the first into this particular construction of a writer, a teacher, an editor, a reader. And, even though we checked each year, I end up here not the "I" I thought I was or would be.

Funny, too, that in class this week, we discussed The Ship of Theseus paradox. It seems it should be used here but you can look it up easily enough, it's there at your fingertips.

Vincent James, A Cloud of Witnesses

This is an essay in a series of b-sides to The Texas Review All-Essay Issue. (More info at the end of this post.)

Vincent James

A Cloud of Witnesses

Vincent James lives and writes in Colorado, where he serves as the Managing Editor of Denver Quarterly and lectures in composition and ethics at Colorado School of Mines. James earned a PhD in English & Creative Writing from the University of Denver and is the author of Swerve (Astrophil Press, 2021) and Acacia, a Book of Wonders (Texas Review Press, 2023). Other work has appeared or is forthcoming at Ravenna Press, Annulet, Tarpaulin Sky, Juked, Prick of the Spindle, Denver Quarterly, and Texas Review. With Madame Crocodile, his record, Temple of a Thousand Blows, will be released later this year. Alongside his daughters, Lola and Daisy, he makes collages under the name, Rara Avis. Find him online at www.FatherFever.com.

Thank you to Ander Monson for giving us the space of Essay Daily, and as ever thank you to Nick Lantz, Editor of The Texas Review.

Welcome, stay here a while, and put it on repeat.

Katie Jean Shinkle, Guest Editor, The Texas Review

If you would like to order a copy of the All-Essay Issue: http://www.thetexasreview.org/issues/

Friday, June 4, 2021

Lily Hoang, 2 Essays

This is an essay in a series of b-sides to The Texas Review All-Essay Issue. (More info at the end of this post.)

Into Innocence

Lily Hoang

Let me tell you a story. It happened long, long ago, in places without names, but they are stories worth hearing, so listen with care. It is said that history repeats itself, again and again, and now that I am older, I do as I please and leave caution to the future. But before—well, let’s just say I was not always so old.

I once had a brother who became a bird. A swallow, perhaps, or maybe a crow. He was a strong bird, could lift heavy things, like rocks and smallish boulders. His talons had a fierce grip.
He was not always a bird. He used to be a boy, just like I used to be a girl, but then one day my mother cut off my head and then she put it back on my body and tied a pretty red velvet ribbon around my neck. She sat me on a chair and went on about her day. My brother was in school then and when he came home, he jolted my dead body with a hug and my head fell right off. My mother scolded him and he knew he deserved it because he had killed me—if only he had known the truth!
I forget the details, the order of things.
He became a bird and gave me a pair of lovely red shoes and he dropped a millstone on our mother’s head. That’s when she died and I became myself again but my brother stayed a bird forever. I painted his feathers red to match my shoes. We never had a father, so I built a house in the tree for my brother and me to live in.
The trouble with birds is that they don’t live as long as humans and after he died I became quite alone and terribly sad. My tears shone like blood on the curves of my patent shoes.

Alone without my brother I wanders the forests and meadows. I tried to talk to other birds, having learned their language, but they had no interest in me. Then I met a wolf and he seemed nice enough. He asked me where I was going and I told him nowhere.
“But you must be going somewhere,” he said. “You are, after all, going.”
“My body is moving,” I agreed.
“Where to?” he asked.
“I’ll follow your lead,” I said with a shrug.
He took me to an old lady’s house and knocked on the door.
“Pull the latch,” she said from inside, “and the door will open.”
We went inside. It was hardly a shack, nothing but sticks: walls made of sticks and chairs made of sticks and sticks broke into a fire, which made us all very warm.
Although we were strangers—and he was a wolf no less!—the old woman was kind. She offered us soup made of boiled sticks, but she added enough salt that it still tasted terrible. The old woman, however, put the bowl to her lips to let the last of the drops slide into her old wrinkled mouth.
“I suppose you will eat me now,” the old woman said to the wolf.
I looked at the wolf and he looked back at me. “That would be rather rude,” we agreed.
“You’re very pretty,” the old woman said to me. She got up and went to her closet, which was also made of sticks, but when she returned, she handed me a lovely red cape. “I made this for you.”
“But you don’t even know me,” I said.
With the bone of her finger, she touched the red line across my neck where my mother had once cut off my head. “I have known you forever,” she said. And then she looked at the wolf. “But you, you’re trouble.” She grabbed hold of a stick that did not seem sharp whatsoever and thrust it into the wolf’s heart. “Never trust a wolf,” she said. “Never again. Promise me.”
I listened very carefully and nodded my head.
“I should kill you too,” she said, “but you’ve already been dead once. What good would it do to kill you again?”
I listened very carefully and nodded my head. I thanked her for her kindness, although she did just murder my friend the wolf, but she allowed me to continue living and so I did the only thing I could and left.
I still had nowhere to go, but my shoes kept on walking.

In Rome I bought a new pair of red shoes from a children’s shoe store. They weren’t too expensive and much more comfortable above those cobble streets.
Soon thereafter I met a philosopher who told me I was stunning after licking my wrist.

Tucked deep in a corner I saw a small beggar girl. She looked pathetic and hungry. I had no food with which to feed her so I gave her my old red shoes. She went to a fountain to wash her feet before putting them on. They were a perfect fit and she began dancing. Together we danced and we danced and soon I felt tired and she danced left and I walked right.
“Thank you,” she hollered. She was quite some distance away. I felt no need to respond.

Soon I became a woman and many claimed I was a beauty. Some said they had never seen such grace, and a King persuaded me to marry him.
“I have nothing to offer you,” I explained to him kindly. “All I own in the world are these shoes and this cape. The cape was a gift, but I bought these shoes myself.”
He told me I was perfect and we married quickly and even more quickly I gave him a son. I had wanted to name him after my brother, but I couldn’t remember it. I just couldn’t.
My husband said, “What about Charming?”
My boy looked enchanting, so I was convinced.
He was a good boy, and my body wanted no more children, just this one, but he brought us both such satisfaction that neither my husband nor I could ever complain. Ours was a good marriage, a peaceful one. We never argued and we fucked every night. We were very happy.
Our son grew as they do and he made friends with a girl who was not beautiful but she had a robust spirit. They were too young to know love, and I gave her my old Italian red shoes. Since I was a queen, my shoes were now made of sea water encased in glass. Each step was an ocean beneath me.
My life was perfect. Who would have guessed?
One day our son was at school and the girl came to visit. I hardly know what happened but suddenly I had cut off her head. I had become my mother! I was possessed! My mother told me what to do, “Tie a ribbon around her neck. Let your son take the blame.” I did as my mother had instructed, but the only ribbon I could find was white. By the time my son returned home, it was red. Oh, if only I could explain his sadness, his woe.
I had to confess and did not ask for mercy.
Together we wept. We wept for days and days. Perhaps longer.
I decided my own head should be cut off, but then I remembered the old lady and how she said dying once is enough.
Not long thereafter, a visitor arrived at the castle. Well, not a visitor exactly, but a pair of dancing feet and on those feet were my old red shoes! Where was its body? Who knows and who cares? The feet danced up to the dead girl. The laces unlaced and slipped from one foot to the other and soon the dead girl opened her eyes.
We danced all night and even the night after.
My son didn’t marry the girl. It hardly seemed right.
But now let me think: what happens next?
Oh, yes, we just kept on dancing, our bodies could just jive forever.

Not all stories have morals, but here’s some advice: red shoes are made for dancing; lace does not belong around a slender neck; and never, ever trust a wolf.

Thursday, June 10, 2021

Monica Prince, Tell It Backwards: an Erasure

Wednesday, June 9, 2021

Danielle Pafunda, Dear Friend

Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Katrina Otuonye, You Just Had to Be There

Monday, June 7, 2021

Ander Monson, On Modality

Sunday, June 6, 2021

Michael Martone, The Year of Lasts (2)

Saturday, June 5, 2021

Vincent James, A Cloud of Witnesses

Friday, June 4, 2021

Lily Hoang, 2 Essays