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In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews an early example of ‘gritty’ epic fantasy It was the late, great Terry Pratchett who observed that most modern fantasy is just rearranging the furniture in Tolkien’s attic. And many innovations within the genre have tended to use […]
The Little Mermaid sacrifices her tail for a human soul. The Navajo Changing Woman grows old and is reborn with the seasons. The nymph Daphne becomes a tree to escape lovesick Apollo. Women transform because we are hungry. We transform because we’re restless, and because we’re dangerous. Women transform seeking liberation from domesticity, obscurity, prescribed roles, our own bodies. We transform for fun.
My book Animal Wife is a collection of stories about women’s transformations, from girls into wives, mothers, and monsters. In “The Vanishing Point,” a woman constructs a mechanical deer suit to live in the woods behind her childhood home. In “Animal Wife,” a girl embarks on a quest to find her mother, who she believes is a swan. In “Desiree the Destroyer,” a timid proofreader creates a cage fighting alter ego.
I, and the ten women whose stories I’ve assembled here, use transformation to illuminate the raw places inside our female protagonists and their worlds. Our women escape, they devour, they create life—and they discover their true selves by stripping away their known skin.
In this story by the queen of modern mythology, a girl’s father loses her in a game of cards to a carnival-masked beast who carts her away to his palazzo, “a world in itself but a dead one, a burned-out planet.” She finds strength in her imprisonment (“He snuffed the air, as if to smell my fear; he could not.”), and when the beast offers to send her back to her father, she realizes that her existence has been as vacant as the clockwork maid who now serves her. “I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves in all their unreason.” Rather than return to the father who had sold her, she transforms into a tigress whose vitality rivals the beast’s.
A restless wife wants more than she has; wants to be more than she is. One night, she wishes for “a placeholder, someone to keep her life intact while she goes on a little reconnaissance trip,” and she gets her wish, in the form of fungus. A mysterious Mushroom Queen transforms into the woman’s doppelganger and steals her life, while the original woman dissolves into a fungal colony, “the discontent of one calling to the desire of the other.” As the Mushroom Queen molds her new human life to her will, the original woman “runs her mycelium under fields of cabbages and cantaloupe,” trying to find her way back home.
When a change in government bankrupts their families, women are recruited to work in a silk-reeling mill with the promise of an “imperial vocation” that would free their fathers and husbands from debt. They’re spirited away to a factory room with a single window where they’re forced to spin silk from their own bodies. As they feed their thread into a giant reeling machine, the girls transform into silk worms until “every droplet of our energy, every moment of our time flows into the silk.” The narrator, Kitsune, chafes in her new role and organizes a rebellion. “Who knows what the world will look like to us if our strike succeeds?” she says. “I believe we will emerge from it entirely new creatures. In truth there is no model for what will happen to us next.”
Fatima, one of two Black girls at her private school, “had existed like a sort of colorless gas” before she met Violet, a Black girl with albinism who is as confident as Fatima is insecure. Under Violet’s tutelage, Fatima “absorbed the sociocultural knowledge she’d missed…through committed, structured ethnographical study,” like watching Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Although Fatima enjoys a newfound sense of self—“there was something prettier about her now”—her “transformation” is tested when she begins dating Rolf, a white boy from her school:
“The conventions of such a transformation dictate that a snaggletooth or a broken heel threatens to return the heroine to her former life. That snaggletooth, for Fatima, was either Rolf or Violet, depending on how you looked at things…”
In this fierce, funny flash story, a woman awakens having given birth although she wasn’t pregnant. “But there he was, a little baby boy, swaddled among cotton sheets, sticky with amniotic fluid and other various baby-goops.” Although the woman’s boyfriend is “not amenable to babies,” she embraces her newfound motherhood and insists they keep the baby—and the one she births the next night, and the next…
This narrator owns her desires and knows what she wants. She savors the way her body transforms through desire—“the silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been”—and through motherhood, and in the aftermath of birth, when the doctor obliges her husband’s request for “that extra stitch.” She gives her husband all of herself, and all she asks in return is that he refrain from touching the ribbon she wears around her neck. But, “brides never fare well in stories, and one should avoid either being a bride, or being in a story,” the narrator says. “After all, stories can sense happiness and snuff it out like a candle.”
A woman whose daughter drowned decades ago feels her uterus falling. She visits the doctor, she goes to the mall where she buys lime-green thongs—“they look fertile to her and she finds themselves wanting them, needing them”—she rides the bus. Throughout this deceptively simple day, the woman revisits the loss of her child and anticipates another loss as she considers a hysterectomy: “The problem is that her body was once a house where her daughter lived…. All these years she has carried the tiny inland sea her daughter swam in.”
Men recall their wives’ “soft smooth faces” as the women acquire bestial features and strange appetites. The husbands are concerned about violating social boundaries (“that the neighbors will complain about the carcasses littering their lawns”) and grapple with deeper worries that gnaw at the roots of their marriages, “that their wives will finally fly or crawl or swim away, untethered from the promises that only humans make or keep.”
Amphitrite and her twin sister Thetis are accustomed to the strange things their mother does, like eating shellfish for breakfast, keening like a whale, and showing off her glistening tail. She’s a mermaid, after all. But when the girls are twelve, their mother begins to change, starting with a fateful day at the aquarium when she dives into the beluga whale tank.
“She was still wearing her floral-print blouse, and her hair and shirt billowed with weightless beauty. I had never seen her like this: both fish and woman, something ancient and forgotten, no longer an invalid in an aqua chair, but mythic and powerful.”
When her restlessness becomes unbearable, the mermaid leads her family on a voyage to the Arctic where her daughters must confront their ancestry.
In this story, which begins with the account of a 17th-century eel massacre, Katy stops eating. Her sister Suze tries to feed her, “surprising her with peeled carrots chopped into mouthfuls, chunks of melon, halved avocados,” but Katy resists and Suze can only watch helplessly as her sister withers and begins to transform into an eel. “[T]he skin on Katy’s arms was bleached of color; her mouth was a stretched line.” Even still, Suze enjoys a novel closeness with her sister. “In a way she’d never done when I trailed her to netball practice or balanced on the edge of the sofa while she and her friends watched films, she included me in this: her starving.”
The post 10 Short Stories About Women’s Transformations appeared first on Electric Literature.
I have been asked a lot about autofiction with my latest novel, which is about a Korean American adoptee named Matt who finds out that he has a doppelgänger, also named Matt, who has lived a much more successful life but has disappeared. Autofiction is not the genre for Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, yet there is no mistaking the theme of multiple selves.
The genre Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear belongs in is Parallel Realism. Parallel Realism is fiction that represents the (real) experience of living in multiple realities through the fictional use of parallel universes. Lived reality for many people means being treated as if they are not themselves, or feeling like a different person than the person they have to be to survive. Parallel realism is not in the realm of science fiction or alternate histories. It is fiction about the multiplicity of now. I am partial to what Julio Cortázar said about his work—that he did not write magical realism; he wrote fiction more real than realism. Fiction’s real advantage is that it can explore experiences that can’t be explored via the dry facts of observable life.
Here are nine parallel realist books I highly recommend, a list to which I would gladly, humbly, add my own.
In Ruth Ozeki’s masterpiece, an author named Ruth discovers, washed up on the Canadian shore, a diary written by a girl in Japan. Ruth becomes more and more immersed in the troubles of the suicidal girl, until the diary entries, of course, eventually come to an end. It takes a connection across these two separate realities and times for these two very different characters to teach each other something about what it means to live.
This is not Murakami’s best book, but it contains the scene I remember best from all of his work. A woman at the top of a Ferris wheel sees into her own window below. In her apartment—is her. She watches herself do something she would never do, and she can do nothing to stop herself. The entire novel is worth it for this one scene, I think, which is what the book turns on.
In particular, from this story collection, one should read the story “The Island at Noon,” in which a man takes a particular flight over a particular island again and again and finally decides to give up his life and move to the island. From the beach, he sees the plane he used to ride—suddenly it crashes into the ocean. An islander jumps into the sea and pulls out a man—who is the protagonist—from the wreckage and onto the empty beach.
A novel about the multiple lives we live through stories—both the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. Multiple characters who are also the same characters live and die, as an author trades stories with his imaginary—or is she real?—muse. Most fun is when the author’s wife gets involved in the story/self-making. Love always complicates what is real.
The narrator of ME comes home one day to find himself already inside. In other words, there is another version of him there with his wife. Soon, versions of the narrator are everywhere. Are these multiple realities or the reality of a person’s identity being an iteration one can’t control?
Rather than an alternate past, this novel depicts a parallel universe present. In South Texas, drugs have been legalized and the new contraband is “filtered” animals brought back from extinction. Arbitrary borders of all kinds are represented here. Flores’s novel is a great example of how parallel realities makes our reality even more clear.
This might be fudging the rules a little, but this is my favorite of Kawakami’s books and it features a woman who feels someone—people? spirits?—following her, though no one else can see them. She is drawn again and again to Manazuru, which is where these two worlds seem to meet. On one trip, she is almost lost to this other world, these other beings, among whom may or may not be her missing husband.
One of the best books of 2019, The Need explores the multiple realities of work and parenthood, of love and grief, as a young archeologist discovers objects from a parallel universe in which, among other things, God is female. But along with the objects of another universe come the people and attachments of the other. Parallel realities here help depict the reality of how difficult it is to meet the expectations of being so many things to so many people at once.
Of course, this list could not be complete without The Garden of Forking Paths and especially its title story, in which the narrator meets a scholar of his eccentric ancestor-author, who apparently locked himself up in a garden labyrinth and wrote a final, sprawling book. The labyrinth was never found, and the book was a mess of contradictions. The scholar, however, explains that the book is the garden and is not contradictory but a representation of many realities at once. Borges’s story itself is an exploration of many possibilities and ends with the narrator’s choice to close off all other possible paths by following the one he least wishes to take.
The post 9 Books About Living in Parallel Realities appeared first on Electric Literature.
Vivek chipped my tooth when I was eleven years old. Now, when I look in a mirror and open my mouth, I think of him and I feel the sadness crawling through me again. But when he was alive, when it first happened, seeing it just used to pump anger through me. I felt the same after he died, that hot anger, like pepper going down the wrong way.
When we were small, he and I were always getting into fights. It was mostly nothing, scuffles here and there. But one day, we were pushing each other in his backyard, our feet sliding in the sand under the plumeria tree, both of us angry over something. Vivek pushed me and I fell down against a concrete soakaway outside, splitting my lip, and that was when my tooth chipped. I cried, then was ashamed of crying, and refused to speak to him for a few days. He was about to leave for boarding school up North—some military academy that De Chika had insisted on, even though Aunty Kavita begged him for months not to send Vivek. But my uncle wanted him to toughen up, to stop being so soft and sensitive. I wanted him to stay, but I was too angry to tell him. He left and I stayed behind, nursing an injured pride that prompted me to fight anyone who brought up the missing corner of my tooth. I fought a lot in school that term.
By the end of the year, I missed him terribly and I started to look forward to when he would return home to Ngwa during the rainy season on holiday. It was during one of those long breaks that Vivek’s mother convinced mine to enroll us both in SAT prep classes.
“It’ll get the children ready for American universities,” Aunty Kavita said. “Then they can get scholarships and an F1 visa. Think of it as straightforward.”
She and De Chika expected Vivek to go overseas for university, with a certainty they passed down to him—a knowledge that his time here at home was temporary and that a door was waiting as soon as he was done with his WAEC exams. Later I realized that it was the spilling gold of the dowry that funded this belief, but back then I thought they were just being optimistic, and it surprised me, because even my own mother who believed in thick prayers had never mentioned me going overseas. The gold was a secret door, a savings account that could buy America for Vivek.
I didn’t want to take the test prep classes, but Aunty Kavita begged me. “Vivek won’t do it unless you do,” she said. “He really looks up to you. You’re like a senior brother to him. I need him to take the classes seriously.” She patted my cheek and nodded as if I’d already agreed, giving me a smile before she walked away. I couldn’t say no to her and she knew it. So every Friday and Saturday during the holidays, Vivek and I took a bus down Chief Michael Road to the test center. I got used to spending the weekends at Vivek’s house, to the Saturday breakfasts when De Chika would detach the cartoon section of his newspaper for Vivek and me, when Aunty Kavita made yam and eggs as if she’d been doing it her whole life.
She had learned to cook Nigerian food from her friends—a group of women, foreign like her, who were married to Nigerian men and were aunties to each other’s children. They belonged to an organization called the Nigerwives, which helped them assimilate into these new lives so far away from the countries they’d come from. They weren’t wealthy expats, at least not the ones we knew. They didn’t come to work for the oil companies; they simply came for their husbands, for their families. Some knew Nigeria because they’d lived here for decades, through the war even; others spoke Igbo fluently; between them, they taught Kavita how to cook oha soup and jollof rice and ugba. They held parties for Easter and birthdays, and when we were little, I used to follow Vivek to attend them. We would line up for the photograph behind the birthday cake; we dressed up as ninjas for the costume party and spent weekends in the pool with the other Nigerwives’ kids at the local sports club.
One year, when we were all around thirteen or fourteen, there was a potluck at Aunty Rhatha’s house. She was from Thailand and had two daughters, Somto and Olunne, roundfaced girls who laughed like identical wind chimes and swam like quick fish. Her husband worked abroad, but Aunty Rhatha seemed to get along just fine without him. She made pink and yellow cupcakes, fluffed with air and sugar, decorated with carefully piped designs and sugar decorations, birds and butterflies in startling colors. Though he had a bit of a sweet tooth, Vivek hated the cupcakes, but he took his share anyway so he could give it to me. We walked around the house as wings melted in my mouth, our bare feet against the cool marble tile. Aunty Eloise was pacing in the back parlor, on the phone with someone, probably one of her sons, who had already left for university in the UK. Eloise was short and plump, with thick sandy hair and a perpetual smile. She and her husband, a doctor from Abiriba, both worked at the teaching hospital, and Aunty Eloise liked to host dinners and parties at her place, just to get some sound back into the walls now that her children were gone.
“Why doesn’t she just go and join her kids?” Vivek wondered aloud.
I shrugged, peeling a cupcake wrapper off. “Maybe she likes living here? Or maybe she just likes her husband.”
“Please. The man is so dry.” Vivek looked around, at the other Nigerwives clustered in the dining room, arranging pans of curry and chicken and rice along the table. “Besides, most of them are only here because of their children. If not, they would have left from since.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis.
“Your own mother, nko?”
“Mba now, her own is different. She was already living here before she got married.” We heard the front door open and Aunty Rhatha’s high voice, shimmering as she greeted the new arrival. Vivek cocked his head, trying to hear the guest’s voice, then smiled wickedly at me. “I think that’s Aunty Ruby,” he said, wagging his eyebrows. “You know what that means—your girlfriend is here.” I was grateful he couldn’t see me blush through my skin, but his eyes were laughing at me anyway. Aunty Ruby was a tall woman from Texas who owned a daycare center; her husband owned a carpet shop, and her daughter, Elizabeth, was one of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen in my short life. She was a runner, lean and longboned, with a swaying neck. I once tried to beat her at a footrace but it was useless, she moved like the ground was falling away beneath her feet, the future rushing toward her. So I stood back and watched her race all the other boys in the area who thought they could take her on. Elizabeth always won, her chest high and forward, sand flying behind her. Most of the boys were afraid to even talk to her; they didn’t know what to do with a girl who was faster than them, but I always tried to chat with her a little. I think it surprised her, but she didn’t seem to like me the way I liked her. She was always nice to me, though, if a little quiet.
“Leave me alone, jo,” I said to Vivek. “Is it because Juju is not here?”
Vivek colored immediately, and I laughed in his face as Somto and Olunne came around the corner with a bowl full of sweets.
“Do you want?” Somto asked, her voice bored as she held out the bowl. She hated when her mother hosted things, because they always had to help set up and serve and clean afterward. Vivek shook his head, but I rifled through the bowl, picking out the Cadbury chocolate eclairs that were my favorite.
Olunne stood next to her sister, twirling the white stick of a lollipop around in her mouth. “What were you talking about?” she asked.
“His wife,” I said, grinning. “Juju.”
Somto kissed her teeth. “Tchw. Please. I don’t have energy to waste on that one.”
“Ah‑ahn,” Vivek replied, “what’s your own?”
“She never comes to these things,” Somto complained. “The rest of us have to attend, but that one just lets her mother come alone. Who does she think she is, abeg.” Somto was right: Jukwase, who we all called Juju, didn’t like to come to the Nigerwives’ events. Her mother was Aunty Maja, a nurse from the Philippines who was married to a much older businessman. I’d watched Vivek pine after Juju for years, but the girl was too somehow, a little strange.
“Maybe she thinks she’s too janded to be here,” Olunne said, shrugging. Juju had been born overseas, even attended school there for a few years before her parents moved back to Nigeria. She’d been very young at the time, but her voice still kept an accent that was different from ours. It was too easy to gossip about her, especially when she avoided the rest of us.
“Don’t mind her, she’s there forming fine girl because of her hair,” Somto said, her lip curling. I bit my tongue; this hair thing was a sore point for Somto, who’d had to cut hers the year before when she started secondary school. Juju’s mother had enrolled her in a private school that didn’t require mixed girls to cut their hair, so Juju got to keep hers long, curling down her back. Vivek frowned, but he knew not to push Somto or defend Juju too hard. It wasn’t until we were on the way home that he lowered his voice to complain to me.
“The girls don’t give Juju a chance because they’re so jealous. It’s not fair.”
I nodded, knowing how it had cut at him to hear them talking about her. “It’s not,” I agreed, mostly for his sake. He just liked that girl too much. She lived down the road from De Chika’s bungalow, at the end of a quiet street near Anyangwe Hospital. We used to ride our bicycles up the street all the time, slowing down when we passed Juju’s house. Aunty Maja loved flowers, so their fence was covered with piles of pink and white bougainvillea.
“Go and knock on the door,” I told Vivek. “See if she’s home.” “And say what?” he replied, pedaling in slow loops in the middle of the road.
I shrugged, confounded by the intricacies of wooing a girl in her father’s house. We pedaled home, leaving our bikes next to the swing set in the backyard. There was a cluster of bitterleaf bushes in front of the boys’ quarters, fighting with an ixora hedge for space. Aunty Kavita and De Chika used to have a househelp who lived there, but she returned to the village after a year or two—a death in the family, I think—and they never replaced her. Vivek and I took over the housework; we would sweep her old room in the boys’ quarters as if someone still lived there, dragging the broom under the metal frame of the bed. We stayed there when we wanted to be away from the grown‑ups, our bodies sprawled over dusty‑pink bedsheets, eating boiled groundnuts and throwing the shells at each other. Aunty Kavita left us alone there, only shouting from the back door of the main house if she needed anything. De Chika never even set foot inside. All of this made it a little easier for me to hide Vivek’s thing from them when it started.
I don’t know how long it had been happening before I noticed. Maybe someone else noticed first and just didn’t say anything, or maybe no one did. The first time I saw it with my own two eyes was the year after he chipped my tooth, on a Sunday after I had gone to Mass with them. It was afternoon, and Vivek and I hadn’t even changed out of our church clothes. We’d eaten lunch, cleared the table, then escaped to the boys’ quarters with a small stack of Archie comics that Aunty Eloise had brought back from her nephews on her last trip to London. I had one splayed out on the cement floor, my head and one arm dangling off the edge of the bed, my feet propped against the flaking wall. Vivek was sitting cross‑legged on the mattress beside me, his comic in his lap, spine curving forward as he bent his head over the pages. The day was hot and quiet, the only sound the rustling of thin paper and an occasional cluck from the chickens outside.
Vivek’s voice broke into the silence, low and rusty. “The wall is falling down.”
I lifted my head. “What?”
“The wall is falling down,” he repeated. “I knew we should have fixed the roof after it rained last time. And we just brought the yams inside.”
I closed my comic and sat up. His head was still bent but his hand was unmoving, resting on a half‑turned page. His fingernails were oval, cut short down to the beds. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Are you all right?”
He raised his head and looked right through me. “You don’t hear the rain?” he said. “It’s so loud.”
There was nothing but sun pouring through the glass louvers and old cotton curtains. I stared at Vivek and reached my hand out to his shoulder. “There’s no rain,” I started to say, but when I touched the cotton of his shirt and the bone of his joint underneath, his eyes rolled up into white and his body flopped sideways, falling against the mattress. When his cheek hit the foam, he jerked as if he was waking and scrabbled his arms and legs, pushing himself back up and gasping loudly. “What? What happened?”
“Shh! You’re shouting,” I said. I didn’t touch him because I was afraid of setting him off again.
His eyes were wide and jittery. He looked around the room, his gaze brushing past me as his breath settled. “Oh,” he said, and dropped his shoulders. Then, almost to himself, “This thing again.”
I frowned. “Again? Which thing?”
Vivek rubbed the back of his neck, looking uncomfortable. “It’s nothing. Just small‑small blackouts. Forget it.”
I kept looking at him but he wouldn’t look back at me. “You were talking about rain,” I said. “And yams.”
“Ehn?” he replied, cramming an is‑that‑so into one sound. “I don’t remember. Biko, fashi the whole thing.” He picked up his comic and lay on his side, turning away from me. I didn’t say anything, because that’s how he was: when he wanted to stop talking about something, he stopped talking about it, shutting down like metal protectors had fallen around him. But I watched him, after that—I watched him to see if it would happen again.
There were moments when he would become very, very still, just stop moving while the world continued around him. I saw it happen when we were leaving class one evening: Vivek stopped walking and our classmates jostled and pushed him as they filed past. I was a few people behind him but he still hadn’t moved by the time I caught up. The others were glaring at him, sucking their teeth as they shoved past. He was walking as if he was drunk, staggering and stumbling, his lips moving slowly and soundlessly. I grabbed his elbow and propelled him forward, pulling him against me so he wouldn’t fall. As the stream of people continued out of the compound—JAMB exams were coming up, and the test center was full of students—I got Vivek through the gate and pushed him out of the way, up against a fence by the roadside gutters. Finally, he shuddered and came back. “Are you all right?” I asked, letting go of his elbow.
He looked at me and the protectors fell over his face. “I’m fine. Let’s go.” I followed as he strode toward the bus stop, wary but silent.
Somehow it became like that whenever he was back from school, even when we went to the village house over the holidays, me watching him close and intervening when I could and Vivek never really telling me what was going on. If I stepped in like I had at the prep center, he just thanked me and we’d continue as if nothing had happened. I got used to it.
None of our parents noticed, maybe because he was always so controlled around them, never as relaxed as he’d been in the boys’ quarters. To them, it just looked like he had quiet spells. Aunty Kavita would assume he was tired and tell him to go and sleep. My mother told her to check if he was anemic, and Aunty Kavita fed him large portions of ugu for a while, just to be on the safe side. He and I still read our comics and ate boiled groundnuts in the boys’ quarters of his house when I was in town; we still rode our bikes down the street; we still knocked down guavas and mangoes with a hollow bamboo stick, then lay on the bonnet of De Chika’s car to eat them.
We were young, we were boys, the years rolled by in the heat. Later, much later, I wondered if I should have told his parents what was going on, if that would have helped him, or saved him a little.
Two years before I finished secondary school, I finally gathered enough courage to approach Elizabeth. She was taking the SAT classes with us and I toasted her the same way we all toasted the girls we liked—I bought her FanYogo after class and escorted her to the gate when her driver came to pick her up.
Vivek watched me and laughed. “You’re finally chyking this girl?” he said. “Thank God. At least you didn’t wait until graduation.”
After a week of sending her letters and carefully writing down the lyrics to the hottest love songs for her, Elizabeth finally agreed to be my girlfriend. She saved the letters, all written on sheets of foolscap paper torn out of my exercise books, and wrote me notes telling me how romantic I was. I visited her house in Ngwa a few times—I already knew I could never bring her to Owerri.
One weekend, she suggested traveling down with me when I was going home.
“I have an aunty who lives there,” she said. “And my parents know your aunty, so they’ll allow me to go with you. You know how the Nigerwives are.” She was starting to get excited about the idea. “We can take the bus together!”
I refused. I didn’t want to chance anyone seeing us together at the bus stop in Owerri and reporting me to my mother. She had already warned me about having girlfriends during a rant about the sins of the flesh, when she told me that if she ever caught me masturbating, she would throw me out of the house. I couldn’t believe she was the one talking to me about that instead of my father, but my mother didn’t care. By then, she was a hardened pillar of religious fervor and prayerful discipline. When De Chika told me stories about the cheerful young woman my father had married, the one he used to sit and gist with in the kitchen, I couldn’t recognize her as my mother. The mother I knew was a straight‑mouthed person who held nightly prayer sessions, always kept her hair wrapped in a scarf, and quoted her pastor in every second breath.
Meanwhile, my father was staying longer each day at the office and I was spending more weekends at Vivek’s house, even when we didn’t have SAT classes. My mother noticed this immediately, of course. How could she miss it when we were all she had? She complained to my father about his absence, and when he continued to stay late at work, she decided he had a mistress. It was a fear fed to her by the women in her church. Why else, they reasoned, would he stay away from his family? No, he had to be keeping some girl in a guesthouse somewhere. On the nights I was home, I sometimes heard the shouting from their room as she threw accusations at him in tight, balled‑up words.
“You think you can just go and take another woman, ehn?! And me, I will fold my hands and allow it? Tufiakwa! You will tell me who she is, Ekene—today today! You will not sleep until you tell the truth and shame the devil!”
“Mary, lower your voice,” my father said, his voice tired and level. “The boy is asleep.”
“Let him hear!” she said, her voice punctuated with claps. “I said, let him hear! Is this how you want to shame me in front of everybody? Oya now, let us start with our son!”
I covered my head with my pillow to block the sounds. “Your mother wants you to spend more time here,” my father told me the next morning over breakfast. “This is your home. Not your uncle’s house.”
I kept my mouth shut and ate my cornflakes, even though I wanted to tell him that he was just as guilty as me. He was never there. He was the one leaving me alone with my mother, who felt like a hammer instead of a person. So I stayed away from home when I could, making up an impressive roster of excuses: De Chika was sick and they needed me around the house. The road from Ngwa to Owerri was plagued with armed robberies and it wasn’t safe to travel. If my mother had simply told De Chika that she wanted me home more, he would’ve sent me along immediately, but she never brought it up and he didn’t notice how often I was around. I think my mother kept quiet because she didn’t want it to look as if she and my father couldn’t handle me.
Aunty Kavita had told me once that my mother had wanted more children, but that she’d stopped trying after several miscarriages. I couldn’t imagine what she’d gone through—how much of my mother’s life I missed because I was a child—but I wondered if that was what changed her. She must have prayed so much in those years. Maybe that’s where the bright, high‑spirited woman De Chika talked about went; maybe she’d been sanded down into dullness by grief and prayers that went unanswered.
Instead, she held on to her faith with a stubborn kind of bitterness, as if it were all she had left—a trapped and resentful love. Who could stay bright and bubbly after losing baby after baby? What do you do when you’re not allowed to be angry at God? I could see why she made everything so heavy, but I still ran from her, all the way to the boys’ quarters at De Chika’s house and to Elizabeth, who made me never want to go back to Owerri.
“I don’t like to be in my house either,” she told me. Her family didn’t have a lot of furniture, and although Elizabeth said it was just the style, I had heard my aunt and uncle talk softly about her father. He was a quiet man, gracious, always with a handkerchief in his suit pocket, but from what I’d overheard, he was also a drunkard. His carpet store was always in danger of closing—he spent their money as if it was water—and Aunty Ruby had to hide what she made at the daycare center from him. Elizabeth never talked about it and I never asked her. She let me come over when he wasn’t home, but she preferred to visit me at De Chika’s house, in the boys’ quarters.
“I like it here,” she said, twirling around the room. “It’s like our own little world.” My heart pounded as I gazed at her arms and legs, so long and brown, sticking out from her clothes, ending in narrow hands and sandaled feet. There had been one or two girls at school that I’d knacked before, but Elizabeth was the first girl I’d brought there, to that small room and the dusty‑pink bedsheets. She never stayed more than an hour or two; Vivek came looking for me there after his piano or French lessons, and she would always straighten her clothes and leave before he returned. I spent what time we had in disbelief that this person—the same one I used to watch as she cut through the air running—was here, choosing to be with me. I remembered in exquisite detail how, each time she won a race, her face would light up, her lips parted as she panted for breath, her eyes bright with victory. I wanted to re‑create that look. I wedged the door to the boys’ quarters shut and pushed up against her, and she giggled under my hands and mouth. “Don’t stop,” she sighed, as I kissed her neck. Her skirt was starched and green and pleated. I slid my hands up her thighs, but she pushed them away, so I just held her waist instead.
One afternoon we were making out on the bed, our hips grinding through layers of clothing, when Elizabeth pulled her head back and searched my eyes with hers. “Touch me,” she whispered, and I froze, wondering if I’d heard her correctly. She let her legs fall open and arched her hips up toward me. “Touch me,” she said again, and I obeyed, reaching under her skirt. We fucked right there on the mattress—the sweat of her body against mine, her legs around my waist—and it was like a better life. My hair was short then, but I kept it in little twists like I was trying to start dreadlocks. She slid her hand into my hair and tugged on it, and the pain in my scalp was electric and perfect. I had to strip the sheets afterward to hide where I’d pulled out and spilled all over them.
Two hours later, I lay on the bare yellow foam of the mattress and told Vivek about it, about the noises she made and how she felt inside. He was standing by the window in a green T‑shirt, leaning on the wall, eating chocolate Speedy biscuits from a purple packet he held tight in his hand.
“You didn’t use a condom?” he asked, making a face.
I shrugged. “Abeg, I wasn’t prepared. How I fit know today was the day the babe go gree?”
“That’s stupid,” he said, his voice flat.
“Small boy,” I sneered, a little stung by his comment. My cousin was a virgin and I knew it. He scuffed his foot and looked out of the window. There was a dark bruise around his right eye. I sighed and changed the subject, gesturing at his face. “Oya, who was it this time?”
“That Tobechukwu idiot from next door. Feels he can just open his mouth anyhow and talk rubbish.” He flexed his skinned knuckles and ate another tiny biscuit. It had been years since he’d chipped my tooth, but Vivek still fought a lot, just with other people now. He had a temper like gunpowder packed into a pipe, a coiled‑up strength that had developed with time, and because he was thin and quiet, no one expected the violence to explode out of his frame the way it did. I had seen a couple of his fights, and they were worse than when he used to fight me. At first, I’d tried to break them up, but I stopped after I arrived late once and saw Vivek beat the living hell out of the other boy. He didn’t need my help.
“Where did the two of you fight?” I asked, surprised he hadn’t gotten into trouble.
“Down the road.”
“You’re lucky his mother didn’t see you. What did your mumsy say when she saw your face?” I knew Aunty Kavita would have been upset.
“She hasn’t seen anything,” he snapped. “Fashi that one. Gist me about Elizabeth. How many times?”
I grinned. “Back to back,” I boasted. I didn’t tell him how it had felt when she gasped my name into my ear, her fingers digging into my back—like in that moment I was a whole entire world.
Vivek rolled his eyes. “It’s here you’ve been bringing her?”
“Yes, but it’s just today we did that,” I said.
He glanced down at the speckled foam of the mattress. “Is she going to come here again?”
“Maybe. What’s your own?”
Vivek ran a hand over his shaved head, the skin like burnt gold. “I want to watch next time,” he said, lifting his chin at me.
I sat up on my elbows, my chest bare, still smelling of her and sex. “Wait, wait,” I laughed. “Repeat yourself.”
He raised an eyebrow and kept quiet. I flopped back down on the mattress.
“You dey craze,” I said, looking up at the popcorn ceiling. “Watch for where?” I sucked my teeth.
“I’m serious,” Vivek said. “Unless you want me to tell my father what you’ve started doing back here.” I sat up fully and stared at him, but he was holding back a smile and laughed when he saw the alarm on my face. “I’m not going to report you, abeg. I’m just saying you should include me small.”
“Why do you want to watch?” I asked. “Is it that you like her or what?”
He scoffed. “I just want to see what all the noise is about. You people that keep talking about this knacking, knacking, every time knacking.”
“Ehn? So you want to just collect a chair and sit in a corner folding your hands while you watch us?”
He gave me a sneering look. “Nna mehn, don’t be stupid. I can just see through the window.”
“And if someone catches you standing outside, nko?”
“Who’s going to see me with all those bushes outside the window? I can just stay behind them.”
Vivek ate another handful of biscuits casually, as if he was suggesting something normal. I lay back and stared at the discolored walls, trying to imagine Elizabeth being there again, her short hair rubbing against the mattress in rhythm with my thrusts, except this time with a pair of eyes pressed against the torn mosquito net of the window.
“It’s not as if you’ll see me,” Vivek said impatiently, as if he’d read my mind. “Just pretend I’m not there.”
I gave in. I actually knew some friends who did things like this. They’d rent a hotel room and some of them would sit and drink on the room’s balcony in the dark, watching as the girl got fucked inside, laughing quietly behind the glass of the sliding door, hidden by sheer curtains and the lack of light. We were men together and we liked to show off, so I agreed.
The next week, Elizabeth came back. We sat together on the mattress, my back sweating. Her collar was unbuttoned, showing the stretch of her neck.
“How are you?” I asked, stroking the palm of her hand with a finger.
She smiled at me. “I’m fine. Happy to see you.”
“I wasn’t sure if you would come back after last time.”
Elizabeth laughed. “Why not?”
“Maybe I didn’t do a good job.”
She gave me a look, and in that second, I saw that she was nowhere as innocent as I’d imagined. I had assumed she was a little inexperienced because she was quiet and played hard to get, so it had felt satisfying to be the one with her on that mattress when we fucked. Like I was accomplishing something. But the way she looked at me made me think maybe I knew less about what was going on than she did.
“If you didn’t do a good job, you think I’d be here?” she said, and gave me such a cocky smile that my voice left me for a few minutes.
“So you’re just using me for my skills, abi?” I managed to joke, and Elizabeth laughed, throwing her head back.
“Don’t worry yourself,” she said. “Just enjoy. What’s your own?” She leaned in and kissed me and I stopped thinking. I unbuttoned the white cotton of her shirt with my pulse pounding, not looking at the window in case I’d see Vivek’s face behind the thin curtains. He’d insisted I replace the sheets on the bed (“Are you mad? You want to fuck her on just foam?”), and that I use a condom (“I don’t care if it makes her think you’re expecting sex. You are expecting it. And what if she gets pregnant?”). So we washed the pink sheets and dried them out on the clothesline, and now my palm was pressed against them as I tugged at Elizabeth’s underwear with my other hand.
She sighed and threw an arm over her face, turning it away from me. I kissed her neck and a breeze from the window made the curtains flutter. I focused on the curve of Elizabeth’s ear and her hand came up to grasp the back of my neck, her palm cool and dry. The sounds she was making must have carried through the spaces between the glass louvers. I briefly wondered what Vivek was doing out there. Was he touching himself or what? Isn’t that what someone would do? And what if De Chika or Aunty Kavita caught him behind the bushes exposed like that?
Elizabeth wriggled a little under me, dragging my attention back to her open shirt and small breasts cupped in a lace‑trimmed cotton singlet. I pulled the neckline down and put my mouth on her nipple, fumbled between our legs, ignoring the condom in my pocket as I pushed and sighed my way into her.
“Nwere nwayọ,” she warned.
“Oh!” I braced my hands against the bed and pulled back a bit. “Ndo.”
She smiled and kissed me, then wrapped her legs around my waist, her skirt falling up to her hips. We moved gently, and when the pleasure started to get too sharp, I pulled out to catch a breath. Elizabeth laughed and touched my cheek—but then she glanced past my shoulder and suddenly screamed, scrambling to cover herself and pushing me away. I turned around and there was Vivek, standing in the doorway, looking over the room, his eyes hooded and unfocused.
“Jesus Christ!” I leaped off the bed and pulled up my trousers. “What the fuck are you doing?”
He held on to the door frame and didn’t reply, his fingers digging into the wood. Elizabeth was crying, pulling her clothes back together, her hands shaking. I shoved Vivek and asked again, louder, but he just rocked backward like rippling water, then flowed forward, staggering a little.
“What is he doing here?” Elizabeth shouted, between sobs of rage. “Get him out!”
I pushed him harder, then again, out of the room, and he just kept taking it, his mouth slightly open, looking like a fucking mumu.
“Chineke, what’s wrong with you?” I knew he was having an episode, I knew he was sick, but I didn’t care. I was tired of covering up for him, tired of him being sick or strange or whatever was wrong with him. I really liked Elizabeth, you know, and now she was there, angry and crying in a corner of the bed, after he’d been standing in the door watching us for God knows how long. So I pushed him with all the anger I had and Vivek fell off the concrete landing, two steps down onto the ground. He broke his fall as if by reflex, twisting so that his hips and shoulders hit the sand, but his head still rocked from the impact, his eyes were gone, he still wasn’t here. Elizabeth screamed and I ran back into the room, terrified that Aunty Kavita would hear her from the main house, terrified that I’d hurt Vivek by pushing him so hard.
“Shh—it’s okay,” I said, climbing back on the bed and wrapping my arms around her. “It’s okay.”
“I want to go home,” she sobbed.
“No wahala. Come.” I took her hand, then led her off the bed and through the door. Vivek was curled up on the sand below, with his hands pressed to his face, hyperventilating. “Don’t mind him,” I said as we passed. “His head is not correct.” I escorted her out to the main road and she entered a taxi without looking back at me, slamming the door so hard that the frame of the car rattled. I watched it drive away, spluttering black fumes from the exhaust. She was never coming back, I thought in that moment; our relationship was over. I dug my hands into my pockets and walked back to the house, dragging my feet.
When I got back, Vivek was sitting on the landing, his back propped against the door frame.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as soon as he saw me, trying to stand up quickly. “I don’t know what happened—”
“You know what happened,” I said. “I don’t even care again. I’m tired. Every time with this your thing.”
“Osita, please—”
“I said I’m tired.”
He ran a hand over his head, distressed. “What do you want me to do? Should I go and say sorry to her?”
“Don’t fucking talk to her,” I snarled, and Vivek flinched. I shook my head and raised my palms, backing away from him. “It’s enough,” I said. “It’s enough.” I didn’t look back as I walked away. I threw my clothes into a bag, then caught a bus back to Owerri, knowing I’d miss the SAT class the next morning. I didn’t care.
My mother stared at me when I walked into our house. “You’re home,” she said, frowning. I hadn’t been back in a while. Usually she would shout at me for being away so long, but this time she just looked up at me, her shoulders rounded and tired. She was sitting in the parlor with a tray of beans in her lap, picking out the stones, and she looked like maybe she had been crying.
I put down my bag. “Yes,” I said. “I’m home.”
The post Little Cousins Make Bad Third Wheels appeared first on Electric Literature.
In this post, middle-grade author Fleur Bradley shares why she enjoys mysteries, how illustrations impacted her most recent novel, her top tip for writers, and more!
Fleur Bradley is passionate about two things: mysteries and getting kids to read. When she’s not active in her local SCBWI chapter, she’s doing school visits and is speaking at librarian and educator conferences on reaching reluctant readers. Originally from the Netherlands, Fleur now lives in Colorado Springs with her husband and two daughters, and entirely too many cats.
(21 authors share one piece of advice for writers.)
For more information on Fleur and her books, visit www.ftbradley.com, and on Twitter @FTBradleyAuthor.
In this post, middle-grade author Fleur Bradley shares why she enjoys mysteries, how illustrations impacted her most recent novel, her top tip for writers, and more!
*****
Any middle-grade book author will tell you that writing an effective book is more challenging than reading one! Take this online workshop, Writing the Middle Grade Book, and learn the essential elements of writing for kids and how to break into children’s publishing.
*****
Name: Fleur Bradley
Literary agent: Laurel Symonds with The Bent Agency
Book title: Midnight at the Barclay Hotel
Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers/Penguin Random House
Release date: August 25, 2020
Genre: Middle Grade Mystery
Previous titles: Double Vision trilogy (middle-grade Harper Children’s)
Elevator pitch for the book: The Westing Game meets Clue when five murder suspects are invited to the haunted Barclay Hotel, and it’s up to the tag-along kids JJ, Penny, and Emma (along with a ghost or two) to figure out who committed the crime.
I absolutely love mysteries, and I wanted to write a traditional, Agatha Christie style mystery for kids: with the colorful, mysterious characters, a murder, and an isolated (and haunted) location. After a visit to the Stanley Hotel (from the movie The Shining), I knew I had the right ingredients for a compelling story.
It probably took about three years from idea to publication—I took a while longer on this manuscript, because I really wanted to make sure I made the manuscript the very best it could be.
I then edited with my agent, and after that with my editor at Viking. This book took longer than I expected, but I’m so proud of how the finished story turned out.
(6 golden rules of writing middle grade.)
The idea itself didn’t really change during the process—I had a really strong sense of what I wanted the book to be: that traditional mystery with a spooky location. The manuscript did go through some pretty big changes. It was originally 50k words, and I had to edit to get it closer to 35k.
I had several published MG novels under my belt before Midnight at the Barclay Hotel, but this is the first book that has illustrations. It’s such an amazing thing to see those ideas and images you have in your head come to life in pictures.
Xavier Bonet, the illustrator, really did an amazing job capturing the characters and place. Thanks to the art department at Viking, the book looks incredible. The way illustrations can elevate a book really surprised me.
I don’t want to spoil the story, but there was a plot twist that developed while writing that I didn’t plan on (or realize) until I was already halfway into the book. So I kind of surprised myself.
(Plot twist ideas and prompts for writers.)
That’s what I love most about writing: the magic that happens as you’re writing the first draft.
I hope Midnight at the Barclay Hotel has middle-grade readers fall in love with mysteries just like I did as a kid. There’s nothing like solving that puzzle, then reading on to find out if you got it right…
Keep learning, and keep an open mind. The publishing industry changes by the day right now—you have to change with it. That’s the best way to roll with the punches, and for you to keep finding joy in the writing process.
When my grandma left me her teeth I had no choice but to take them. They were a bad fit, riddled with cavities, and I was sorry to see my own teeth, white, healthy, plucked loose from my mouth and stored in a glass display case until such time as I might bestow them on someone else. Not that I would. It’s some real fucked up nonsense, inheriting someone else’s teeth, carrying their bones in your mouth, sharp little marbles of memory.
Ever since the transplant I’ve gone mute. My grandma Helen was a dancer. The language inside her body was movement, and now the language inside mine is unrecognizable even to me. I was never an athlete. I was never an artist. There is no way for me to externalize these internal currents, so I don’t.
At night, my dreams are filled with Helen’s memories. It’s a second life for her—her memories reincarnate in my body—but it’s me who’s living it. She’s as dead as she was before the surgeon buried the roots of her teeth into the fresh craters in my mouth.
My mom calls to ask how I’m doing even though she knows I can’t answer. She was sad when her mom skipped her and went straight to me, but she was also relieved, and I can tell she feels guilty that I’m the one carrying this ancestral burden instead of her. Nana was never that nice in the first place.
“Is your mouth sore?” she asks me. “Are you eating?”
Inside my body I feel what it felt like to carry her as a fetus. I feel the deadweight of her girlbody asleep on my chest. I feel insurmountable anger when she calls after months of not calling to say she’s pregnant, not because she’s pregnant, but because I’m the one who’ll have to take care of the baby while she finishes school, builds a life, when all I want to do, all I’ve ever wanted to do, is dance, and this is the second time this girlchild has stolen that from me.
“You sound good,” my mom says, even though I haven’t said anything, and my body is all flex and angles, all hard-lined accusation. “Let me know if you need anything,” she says, because she knows I can’t.
I cook Campbell’s tomato soup on the stove, and while it cooks, I choreograph a dance that perfectly expresses all of my fury and sadness. When I try to enact it in the living room, I am a pre-lingual baby, imitating sounds without understanding their meaning, and it makes me feel like tearing the limbs from my body and replacing them with another, more fluent set. I leave the soup on too long and it burns a thick layer of sludge on the bottom of the pan, which I leave in the sink for someone else to clean.
My mom comes by with Tylenol and coffee. Her eyes roam my untidy apartment and land briefly on the display of teeth that have been extracted from my mouth. I have made an altar for them on the coffee table—votive candles, Hershey’s kisses, peppermints. When I eat, I set aside a little food for them. When I drink coffee, I pour them a small cup and sit with them and tell them what I am feeling without using words or movement and it is no small miracle that they understand me. They offer suggestions. They ask for a refill. These enamel rocks that want what they want and aren’t ashamed to ask for it.
“Are you having second thoughts?” my mom asks me, nodding towards the teeth which are no longer mine.
All of my thoughts are second thoughts, having been thought once, already, by Helen, but how can I say this? There is a body enacting breath, billowing up and down, up and down, repeated ad nauseum, and for once I try my hand at performing this speech-act in front of another human, in front of my mom, but it comes off spasmodic and weird and I want to grind my fists into my eyes until I see stars. I have a feeling that my teeth are laughing at me from their coffee table shrine, and I want to knock their socks off, metaphorically speaking.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” my mom says, as if I had some choice in the matter. “No one would blame you for reversing the procedure.”
The teeth go sharp in my mouth, the roots clinging to my jaw like tentacles. How do I say I’m not alone? How does a body dance haunted? I remember the adrenaline rush of being backstage before a performance, the pulsing dark, the incipient light. I roll my head in a large, slow circle. I hunch my shoulders. My mom backs out of the apartment still holding both coffees, hers and mine.
I dream I’m dancing for an audience of Gaba girls. I dream about sex. The teeth want to keep dreaming, so I stay in bed all day, dozing through the morning, the afternoon, only rising at nightfall to pour some water on my extracted teeth, the poor thirsty darlings, before falling back into my bednest where I’m shaking cocktails for someone named Alfonse. When my mom calls, I send her straight to voicemail. When she calls again, I turn off my phone.
I am lying on a dance floor, watching other women leap over me. I am in a nude leotard on a rooftop slow-stepping in geometric patterns with women whose shoulders I never touch. I am good at this. I am the best.
In the bathroom mirror I meet a stranger with my teeth and someone else’s nose. First there’s fear, then panic, then the numbing sensation of a word repeated too many times, and a face is a face is a face and that’s not what’s important anyway.
In the living room, I move the furniture to the walls to make room for the words my body wants to say, but a full set of teeth, not mine, are shrieking for crusty bread and milk. They are desperate, these teeth, and I don’t truck with desperate. I unwrap a Hershey’s kiss and eat it, watching the teeth vibrate with envy, and then I eat another. When I’m finished with the chocolate, I eat the peppermints, and when I’m finished with the peppermints, I lick my finger and thumb and extinguish the candle’s flame.
I carry the teeth to the window—the night is balmy with spent rain—and I pluck them, one by one, from their setting until all that’s left is thirty-some empty cavities, a glass palate, a speechless tongue.
The post Grandma’s Bones Live In My Mouth Now appeared first on Electric Literature.
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