flash nonfiction

Animal Years, an excerpt

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Lion by Jean Bernard (1775-1883). Original from The Rijksmuseum

BY LORI GREEN

—

Before Hal was the beginning. And the lions, still fresh. There were seven of them, each as big as a bedroom and the color of the sun. I was six-years-old and too happy to try being a novelist. Our family had a backyard with shade and acreage and its own stone bench. The maple by the door was devoted to me, and once a year the lilacs bloomed.

Then for Christmas, my parents decided to teach me about responsibility and placed the job of feeding the Pride squarely on my shoulders. I don’t know how they thought it would work long-term when I wasn’t allowed to handle raw meat. Once my maned and tawny darlings had weakened from hunger, they were checked into one of those chimpanzee retirement communities where fur becomes glossy and grabbable again. They thrived and plumped up and made new friends. I sent them postcards and they wrote back but, as my handwriting improved, theirs plateaued.

I mourned. My parents bought me five Goldfish and an indestructible tank. Thinking they deserved better food than brown clumps from a bottle, I fed them the best our pantry had to offer until they died of salted pretzels and sour candy. I mourned again, but less. The fish had been pretty boring. I missed spending summer afternoons with my lions, falling asleep inside the fuzz of their choral purr.

For my seventh birthday, I asked for a notebook instead of another animal. My parents warned This is your last chance! and bought me a spiral-bound soft-cover. That year I completed my first short-story, The Missing Bird, a highly effective series of cliff-hangers resolved sentence by sentence. I knew I’d never top it so I moved on to novels and churned them out, a prolific kid. It was 1998 and by 2000 I’d begun twelve and finished none.

Now it’s 2020 and I spent over a year filling my last Moleskine. Clearly, it’s time for humility don’t forget, a child can write a novel as well as any adult and is probably better at diagramming sentences so I get down on my knees and beg my kid self for direction. She’s lounging under her maple tree flipping through old correspondences, four feet tall and intimidating as hell. I was never that intimidating girl. She tells me, We’ve been starting novels as hiding places. We think we can store faces behind paragraphs, sneak fictions into immortality. We call it stone-soup, believing stone-soup is about the stone.

This seven-year-old is too clever for me by half. I get humble. Patting my shoulder, she says, Just find a store and buy a copy of The Address Book. Better yet, call Hal. She leaves me with a copy of our original story for guidance.

January 27, 1999 / The Missing Bird

Once upon a time, I had a bird; it could talk. The bird was a big help to the family. He was the only pet we had. One day when everybody was out of the house a thief came. The thief stole my talking bird. When I got home I said, “I’m back from school Mad.” Then my mom and dad told me he was gone.

When Mad was about to be choked because the thief was holding his neck, he kept getting closer and closer to a strange mansion. When he got inside he thought to himself, “I got to get out and find a phone to call Lori.” Mad got out by smashing the door down. He had trouble finding a phone. He finally found a phone he called 536-[xxxx]. I answered the phone. “Mad where are you?” “I don’t know, let’s meet at the park.” The next morning I went to the train station. When I got there I saw Mad. We went home and had a great feast!

—

LORI GREEN studied across genre at the New School’s Riggio Program for Writing and Democracy. Her work has appeared in Silver Needle Press, 12th Street Journal, and Whitevines Review. She lives, writes, and paints with her husband in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

[NEW NONFICTION] Crying and Paintings

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BY ALICIA BYRNE KEANE

—

I.

I remember once going to an Edvard Munch exhibition and seeing an entire room filled with studies of the Weeping Woman. I don’t really know art things so the painting didn’t really seem all that remarkable to me compared to his weirder ones. It’s a nude, standing up in a bedroom, her head bowed. But the longer I looked at it the more I started finding it sinister. The way the same picture has been obsessively repeated. I started to notice how in certain versions the room is claustrophobically distorted to make it look as if her head is almost pushing against the ceiling like she’s standing up in a tent. How in some the palette is unpleasantly oversaturated, her cheeks too red, the shadows in the corners of the room too dark. Something invasive about the angle like the artist is sitting too close to the subject. I never found out the context of the painting, whether it was meant to seem that way. (Weird if not, and weird if so.) There’s something panic-inducing about it.

 

II.

Crying four years ago, surrounded by large abstract paintings. I’m in a top-floor office in a leafy suburb, the very kind of ornate redbrick neighborhood that causes people to employ the cliché leafy suburb, in the office of an academic I have just met. She conducts studies on things like hats in literature.

There is lots of art on the walls, floor to ceiling. It’s not very good art, but it’s large and copious. Particularly vivid, in this memory, is a view of the painting opposite me. It’s sort of pinky beige. It looks the way baby wipes look when I’ve used them to take off my makeup.

‘Beckett was a real guy,’ she is saying. ‘He had sex, he played tennis.’

He played sex, he had tennis.

I manage to say ‘I hate it here’, in a voice that sounds like it’s being squeezed out through a straw.

 

III.

I don’t know my housemates very well, but around the Repeal referendum, one of them bought a little framed painting that sits on our mantelpiece. I can’t see who the artist is because their signature is done down the bottom in pencil and I can’t read it hardly, but it looks like the first name is Anna or Ann. It is titled #togetherforyes and it shows a crowd of people from afar, stick figures with outstretched arms, holding different banners that all give the names of different collectives and organizations. It’s incredibly detailed when you look at it closely and reminds me almost of Quentin Blake drawings, it seems gentle. I need to ask them who made it.

I Google #togetherforyes painting, #togetherforyes ann painting.

Everyone’s away and the house has an uncanny quality. I have been cleaning for hours. It reminds me of grey Sunday dread when I was a kid.

I have put a chair out in our garden and I can see it from the window. The garden is a blaze of sun and if you saw just this scene in isolation you would think you were somewhere nice. I duck into the corner of the kitchen closest to the door, for some reason, because this feels like the least windowy area of the house, and somehow safer than anywhere else for displays of emotion. I don’t know who I think would be watching me. I begin to cry.

I am not sure why I am crying, here in the part of the kitchen that no one can see, where the dustpan and brush hang, trailing bits of grey fluff.

This time last year I walked to a part of the city I didn’t usually go to and read Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin and found the way she was in bed with a broken ankle for most of the story sadder maybe then I was meant to. It made the whole book seem transitory and unfinished like just a really odd part of someone’s life. I read it in a park during a drought, when most of Dublin looked grey and yellow.

—

ALICIA BYRNE KEANE is a Ph.D. student from Dublin, Ireland. She has a first class honors degree in English Literature and French from Trinity College Dublin and a MSt. in English Literature 1900-Present from Oxford University. She is currently working on an Irish Research Council-funded Ph.D. study of ‘vagueness’ and translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami. She has performed poetry at events such as Electric Picnic, Lingo Festival, and Body & Soul, and has assisted on the editing team for the New Welsh Review. She has more recently turned to writing prose pieces.

[NEW NONFICTION] Intro to all my Unwritten Novels

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Image by Catherine Green

BY LORI GREEN

—

Recently I’ve been hearing this sentence: A baby, loose among the banquet, crawls towards the raspberries. I know it’s grammatically off, but replacing ‘among’ with the antiseptic ‘at’ leaves the picture juiceless. So does keeping ‘among’ but turning ‘banquet’ into a word for its people, such as the archaic ‘banqueters,’ of which the baby is one.

I don’t go to banquets, certainly not ones with guests self-possessed enough to bring a baby and set it free to find its own memories. I can’t think of anything more glamorous, except for a story I read in a fashion magazine when I was a teenager: It’s the late 1950s and a couture-clad woman strolls through Venice with a man she just met. They’ve spent hours along the canals tilting their chins toward the moonlight when she realizes she has to pee.

If she asks to interrupt their wandering, she’ll betray herself as a human being with a body rather than the universal antidote. Even if she does admit this fatal flaw and make it to a restroom, her dress is such that she’d need the help of a good friend and a pair of scissors to get the job done. She cannot will the situation away and her wits are failing by the minute. It’s pressing. In the end, she is saved by her nose, which remembers that Venice already smells like sewage. With a fit of sparkling laughter, she hides the sound of urine sliding down her legs under a gown she will never wear again. For me, its cloth has always been a satin in ominous mauve.

Not being fifteen any longer, I understand the scenario’s corrupt. But still, whenever I remember her ingenuity I’m reminded to get off my ass and actually make something of myself. I’ve told this story to friends and family but I can never translate its effect. No one sees the charm, the danger and innocence. I try to emphasize the lines of her dress and the intensity of her gaze, the city’s postcard perfection and its stench, the Woman Victorious.

When they tell me it’s simply disgusting, I know I have failed again. I wonder if it would play out better on film. The baby, loose among the banquet, crawls towards the raspberries. I will not kill this darling.

 

—

LORI GREEN studied across genre at the New School’s Riggio Program for Writing and Democracy. Her work has appeared in Silver Needle Press, 12th Street Journal, and Whitevines Review. She lives, writes, and paints with her husband in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

[NEW NONFICTION] The Dead Psychologist

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BY AMANDA OLIVER

__

I’m using a dead psychologist’s pen in a dead psychologist’s house full of dead psychologist’s books and yes, it smells like an old man.

Or dead air, or cooked food aromas that have hung out in the rafters too long, or just a closed-up house at high elevation. It could be comforting, could be warm and familiar, if I knew him. But he is a stranger. But he is dead. But the house is free and his children are so generous to let me use it for two weeks. The floors are real wood and real rock and lush carpet. The bed has memory foam and the couch has a plaid pattern and there are glass roosters, of all sizes, everywhere (everywhere, everywhere). The bedroom has a bay window. The living room has a fireplace and massive television with surround sound. There are games in a closet, there are plush towels in a hope chest, there are family photos on the fridge, there are menorahs.

The ink of the dead man’s pen isn’t working. I’m carving lines into the pages of books I’m reading with it anyway. Hoping that leaves enough of an imprint that I can find it later when I need it.

His children have left this house like a shrine to him. In his den, among books like TREATMENT OF THE OBSESSIVE PERSONALITY and THE OBSESSIVE PERSONALITY and THE EGO AND ITS DEFENSES, is his checkbook. The last check he wrote was to the IRS for $1,079 on 3/20, year unmarked. The check before that was to AT&T for $43.65 on 3/17, year unmarked.

Can you invade a dead person’s privacy?

 

I am in the middle of writing a book. One that requires full sentences and a better version of myself that I do possess, but I possess it like a ghost, which is to say it feels like haunting, like lingering around too long in a place I maybe don’t belong, using words I’m not quite sure of.

Most houses are dead people’s houses, I guess.

This house does not feel haunted, but, somehow, my writing does.

My own psychologist’s name is Suzanne and she has worked with me for eight years. Says things like, “You deserve this” and “Do you think you could ever forgive your brother? Do you think you could ever forgive yourself?” and of course I do and of course I could, but will I?

I’m carving lines with the dead psychologist’s dead pen under words like “he craves a family, a neat nest of human bowls” and I wish that I could unwant anyone. I wish I knew how to satisfy a craving for a person who isn’t here anymore. Isn’t dead, but is still, incredibly, a ghost.

There are mugs full of pens, mugs that say things like ZABAR’S, a gourmet emporium in New York City with A Mezzanine that Has Everything For the Kitchen and Home and they remind me that the dead psychologist had a full and well-traveled life in addition to what seemed to be a successful therapy practice.

I don’t want to discover that none of the pens work, that all of the pens are dead, so I don’t try another one from the mugs.

On page 62 of the book I’m reading, the pen miraculously starts working again and I draw a blue arrow at the words: “The houseplants will appear to have chosen sides. Some will thrust stems at you like angry limbs. They will seem to caw like crows. Others will simply sag.” I have killed more houseplants than I can count on both of my hands. When I moved from D.C. to Southern California I tried to mail six plants in a package to myself. When they arrived, they were, inevitably, dead.

I am constantly doing this. Trying to make things live longer than they want to with me.

What would the dead psychologist say?

Which book would he read after meeting with me?

How much would he charge me for the favor of telling me what’s wrong?

Do we think the dead psychologist had a favorite patient?

I am always trying to be someone’s favorite. The dentist, the barista, the classmate, the coworker. I want everyone to like me. Tucked away in this house at 5,678 feet above sea level there is no one to make like me.

Two trucks pulled over outside of the house windows earlier and I heard a man and a woman yelling from their windows.

“Why can’t we just get lunch some time?”

“I have a husband.”

“What about everything I did for you?”

“I have a husband.”

I do not have a husband. I do not have a boyfriend or a suitor or a crush or an affair or a desire to let anyone touch me. I do not have the feelings of a significant other to worry about. I have freedom that some people would kill for and I’m not sure how much I want it.

If these walls could talk would they tell me I should let someone in for once? Can therapy occur through osmosis, like, if I sit in the psychologist’s office chair? Can therapy occur through death? If I touch and eat and sleep and write in one of the last places it was life?

On my fourth and fifth nights here my electric toothbrush turns on in the middle of night and wakes me up. I press the button to turn it off and it stays off for the rest of the night. This is not the thing I wanted to haunt me, or, I am totally unclear on what this message means and who it comes from. Is it the dead psychologist? Is he worried about my teeth?

Nightmares about losing your teeth are supposedly about feelings of powerlessness and loss of control. I have them all the time, but I haven’t had them here.

Have I gained back some power?

Is the dead psychologist trying to tell me to keep going?

I would like some answers, dead psychologist.

Do you have them?

Can I keep them?

 

__

AMANDA OLIVER is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of California, Riverside. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Times, Vox, and more. She is currently at work on a book about being a librarian. She is @aelaineo across social media.

[REVIEW] VHS and Why it’s Hard to Live by Tatiana Ryckman

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11TR

 

Zoo Cake Press, 2016

 

REVIEWED BY MATHEW SERBACK

—

Tatiana Ryckman is the voice inside of my head.

Maybe I feel this way because we are both from Cleveland, Ohio. Or maybe it’s because we both migrated to big cities in Texas. Or maybe the answer is something more obvious – something simple; Tatiana Ryckman is just better at being honest.

In her new collection of flash nonfiction VHS and Why it’s Hard to Live, Ryckman expresses the sadness we all feel about never becoming the person we thought we wanted to be. She has an unmatched talent for finding the embarrassing truths we don’t want to tell ourselves and exposing them through tangential connections.

Each story in this collection is built with precision. The sentences bubble, and the self-reflections bubble, but they always burst by the end. It’s the small moments of self-revelation that absorb me into the prose. It is in these moments that Ryckman is the voice in my head.

In “Coming of Age,” a flash piece about love and hatred, she writes, “In high school, a boy who would sneak into my room at night but who would not date me said ignorance was the path to happiness, and that happiness was death to the self. It’s a little dramatic, but it explains a lot about the times.” I’m suddenly compelled to find my high school girlfriends on their social media of choice and tell them how sorry I am for the past – to tell them how wrong I was about the future.

That’s what Tatiana Ryckman’s writing does to the boy who was sneaking in and out of windows and telling half-truths they knew were lies. Just imagine what it’ll do to you.

In “My Death,” Tatiana considers the way she will die, “I can’t walk to the grocery store, which is not to say I don’t walk to the grocery store but every time I have walked to the grocery store, alone, at night, I know I am being followed. Or if not followed, then watched, to be followed on a future night.” That’s the same voice in my head that tells me I’m afraid of sharp objects – the pronounced corner of a table, the useful end of the screwdriver – and most importantly, knives. Ryckman reminds me that we all are sharing in a ubiquitous death. She has to walk to the grocery store, I have to use a knife, and you have to board that airplane. Her death is waiting in the bushes. My death is in my right hand.

Each story is a different thought that keeps you up at night.

And even now, as I try to tell you how beautiful and tangled Ryckman’s language is, she’s the voice in my head that is reminding me that VHS and Why it’s Hard to Live isn’t about her – it’s about me, and always will be, “Maybe you know what I mean; maybe all of our shit is just pet enough to keep us up at night, alive and in the world reaching our full potential, wondering what the world would be without us.”