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

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

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.

Around me was not the absence of sound, but the sound of absence: a voluptuous silence that pressed against my eardrums. Then, a pulse of wind goaded the tree branches, and there was a groan, a whispery shimmer of leaves. I trembled. I wanted to look up—for a moon, or stars, or something to tell me where I was—but I was rigid with terror.

(If you are reading this story out loud, make the sound of the bed under the tension of train travel and lovemaking by straining a metal folding chair against its hinges. When you are exhausted with that, sing the half-remembered lyrics of old songs to the person closest to you, thinking of lullabies for children.)

I thought of my wife, the dark stain of her nipples, her mouth open and ribbons of sound coiling out.

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

“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

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