Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

We were in love, and I dreamt of our future. The home in the middle of the Indiana woods. An old chapel that once housed a cloister of nuns, nuns who prayed with their shoulders pressed against each other, and who took vows and called each other Sister. A stone exterior, dried mortar pinched and oozing. Narrow paths winding through old gardens, a n

My body was so cold it felt like it was disappearing at the edges, like my shoreline was evaporating. It was the opposite of pleasure, which had pumped blood through me and warmed my body like the mammal I was. But here, I was just skin, then just muscle, and then merely bone. I felt like my spine was pulling up into my skull, each vertebra click-c

(If you are reading this story out loud, force a listener to reveal a devastating secret, then open the nearest window to the street and scream it as loudly as you are able.)

One man. A boyfriend. Didn’t like condoms, asked me if I was on birth control, pulled out anyway. A terrible mess.

As a grown woman, I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world observed only by a single set of eyes.

You never live with a woman, you live inside of her, I overheard my father say to my brother once, and it was, indeed, as if, when peering into the mirror, you were blinking out through her thickly fringed eyes.

You wanted, he says. You wanted and wanted. You were like this endless thing. A well that never emptied.

Only then did I understand. Only then did I see the crystal outline of my past and future, conceive of what was above me (innumerable stars, incalculable space) and what was below me (miles of mindless dirt and stone). I understood that knowledge was a dwarfing, obliterating, all-consuming thing, and to have it was to both be grateful and suffer gr

He thinks of Benson, the way she stood there, the way her clothes looked put on funny, the way she drank from him as if she were dying of thirst, the dreamy way her hand ran over the metal fence, over the iron-tipped gate as if she was asleep, as if she was high, as if she was a woman in love, in love, in love.

“It is my right to reside in my own mind. It is my right,” I said. “It is my right to be unsociable and it is my right to be unpleasant to be around. Do you ever listen to yourself? This is crazy, that is crazy, everything is crazy to you. By whose measure? Well, it is my right to be crazy, as you love to say so much. I have no shame. I have felt m