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Two Questions for Lucy McBee

We recently published Lucy McBee’s delightful “Some Kiss We Want.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) The Junebug kiss is so powerful — you combine elements of childhood intimidation (we see how the narrator is both excited and terrified by the prospect of kissing girls and, by correlation, adulthood) and tragedy (poor Junebug!). There’s so much happening with this particular kiss! Do you think the narrator will remember Junebug fondly? Or will there always be this mixed-up feeling of terror and thrill when he thinks of her?

I do think the boy (and later, the man) will always have conflicting feelings when he thinks of Junebug. The early excitement evoked by her promise of future romantic instruction will likely be forever juxtaposed with the shock of her murder. I’ve heard we can reroute negative neural loops by consciously rewriting old narratives, but it’s incredibly hard to do, especially when the traumatic event occurred early in life. (And of course the first challenge—and a formidable one at that—is becoming aware of what’s hidden in the unconscious.) So I think the boy will find it difficult-to-impossible to recall Junebug with only fondness; sadly, her murder will probably always eclipse the softer, hopeful, life-affirming memories.

2) But of course the most powerful kiss is the one the narrator doesn’t receive. The one they won’t admit they want. Do you think the child will ever be able to admit to the father that they want things like that? Or will there always be a distance between them?

Although typically I am more optimistic than not, here I am, answering another question with a negative prediction. I think the father is so defended, so walled off, and probably so wounded and rageful over his wife’s abandonment of the family, that he won’t ever be able to become vulnerable enough to admit that he has emotional needs, and most importantly, to become curious about and open to his son’s emotional needs. It feels safer to the father to exist in a world where longing (seen as “weakness”) is cut out of you as matter-of-factly as gutting a fish. Perhaps he believes he’s benefitting his boy through this lesson, but regardless of his intent, I think the child will never be able to express his need for his father’s love and approval. And the boy will be shaped around that: at the very least, maintaining the gulf between the two of them; at worst, carrying that emotional remove (and the belief that having needs is a problem) into his adult relationships.

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Some Kiss We Want ~ by Lucy McBee

      Not your aunt Frannie’s, hot and moist on each eyelid to help you see the brightest way forward. Twice on each eye because Frannie does everything twice, for luck, including two back-to-back marriages to men named Xavier and appearing at the funerals—ten years apart—wearing the same black-and-white checked dress, plus wedding veil. Afraid that someday she’ll snag an eyeball with an eyetooth, you run and hide when her car wheezes up the driveway. But she always finds you.

      Not Meemaw’s, her lips whiskered earthworms on your neck, collards-and-garlic breath making you hold your own as she mutters: Don’t grow up to be more man than good, hear?

      Not your babysitter Junebug’s, a dollop on the tip of your nose at bedtime. You worry that her armored teeth will tear into a nostril and change your face forever, but you can’t turn away. She says: When you put on some years and sprout a coupla hairs on that skinny chest, I’ll show you how girls like to be kissed so you don’t fuck it up when you’re at bat. The prospect terrifies and thrills you and makes sleep impossible. You never receive the lesson because, unbeknownst to you at age nine, Junebug will be found dead in a cow pasture three days after your eleventh birthday, pantyhose around her neck. During the next full moon, her boyfriend Doggo will beg for a priest, a cell, a sentence, swearing that Junebug torments him from beyond.

      Not your fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Lynch’s; hers are dangling hypotheticals. Ooh, law, if I was your mama, nothing on the fat green earth could ever pull me away. I’d kiss you till your skin looked like a tomato.  

      Not your mother’s, not anymore, not unless you count your cruel dreams that trick you into being sure of her. You don’t give voice to it, but Papa gauges the longing in you anyway, like a cool palm on a burning forehead, which he doesn’t do because he’s too busy telling you to quit bellyaching and go catch the bus already.

      He lifts a bluegill from its coffin of ice. One hand holds it still while the other slices it from chin to tail, in one clean sweep. A sharp, silver kiss. You avoid looking at the cold, complicated eye. At the mouth stretched wide in a silent scream. Papa opens the stomach cavity and commands you to watch. If you glance sideways and squinty, the jumble of pink and blue and gray is nothing more than a nest of waterlogged party favors that smell like rotten teeth. You gotta cut it out of you, boy, he says. Just like this. Whenever you think you miss her, you just cut it out.

      With his fingers, he scoops the slithery insides onto a square of wax paper, tells you to carry it to the trash. You are careful to grip only the edges of the paper. You hold your breath. You close your eyes. You take four steps forward. At first you think you trip over the dog, but no, Mama took Goose with her when she left. Then you think you trip over Waffles, the dog that lives in your mind, the one Papa won’t let you have because he says he doesn’t need another goddamn life to steward. You’ve tripped over Papa’s muddy shoes kicked off and left by the door. This was supposed to be a lesson on how to cut out the weakness of need, and instead, it’s become a demonstration on how far fish guts travel once they’re free.

      What starts off as a stumble turns into violent collapse. The floor, the cabinets, the walls, the screen door. . .all splattered with what you were instructed to throw out. Father’s footwear, and ghost of dog gone, and hope of dog imagined too. All flecked with the insides of a fish no bigger than a heart. Papa drops the scaling knife and hollers himself into hoarseness.

      A kiss from him has never been more out of reach.

      You’re certain it would feel like sunshine on the crown of your head, that kiss. That it would tell you what you’re desperate to hear. But it never, ever comes. Nine is not too old to want that. Nine is a hundred years away from too old. (And even then.) You’re not better off learning to be hard. That’s just a thing you’re told by someone too afraid to admit that there is some kiss we want.  

***

Lucy McBee is a former high school English teacher who currently works as a copywriter and ghostwriter. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review and the minnesota review. She lives in Austin, Texas.

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Two Questions for Donna Shanley

We recently published Donna Shanley’s evocative “AFTER-WORDS.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the physicality of words and stories in this piece — the narrator with the “weighty” stories to try to hold him back, the fluttering pages, the word hanging like “imprinted smoke” above an empty chair. It makes me think of kotodama, a belief that words can affect physical reality. Do you think words can have this power? 

I believe that people can be influenced by the stories we make about them; that they can, to an extent, become those stories, so in that sense, words shape reality. This piece is about how every person’s life is a story, which lives on and colors the daily reality of those who knew them, even after the person has gone.  It is also about the writer’s way of capturing a story, of anchoring it with words–the way the main character catches the pages which chronicle her absent partner’s journey, and pins them down with pebbles and seashells. 

2)  The imagery here is so beautiful, I love the “papers curling in invisible fire,” the “crisp wing-beats,” the “red, trailing sparks.” Again, the stories/words are so physical and real! How do you see the story being told here? 

I see the images as reflecting the absent person’s journey, his moods and perceptions, his flight into a different story and, eventually, the end of that journey—a departure which is physical, but also not final–a new page turning in both stories: his and the narrator’s. 

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AFTER-WORDS ~ by Donna Shanley

“A story is a flighty thing,” he’d say, “see how an open book looks like a soaring bird.”

The first sign that he was turning into one was the question mark at the corner of his mouth. Then the flashes of spidery black light above his head, as thoughts scribbled themselves into being.

She told him weighty tales of castles and oaks, monuments and mammoths, hoping they would bind him to the earth, to her. But she’d seen a word circling him while her hands shaped bread and her mouth shaped poems. A wanderer’s word. The day he vanished, it hung like imprinted smoke above his empty chair.

She searched the sunset for him, and the dawn. A page unfolded against the sky; fluttered to her window like a parchment moth. It settled on the sill with a high sweet chime, the flick of a fingernail on crystal. One word brush-stroked on the paper: Bellbird. Others followed in a flock, filling the air with crisp wing-beats. A solitary word or letter on each, rimmed with frost or leaf-mold, or scored, deep and red, trailing sparks.

She plucked them from the trees and the shore, breathing in their birthplaces.

Desire: the slip and glitter of panting deserts

War:  poppies, unpetalled

Quiet: chrysanthemums and cloud-shawled mountains;

H: the mouse-tracked dust of a hermit’s cell. He’d once told her how he’d woken from a dream and tried to remember a place called Home, and couldn’t.

She imagined him everywhere, writing himself into the future. She shouted stories of love and return as she scattered the pages on the table among half-eaten suppers and withered flowers. Her hands moving swiftly, she captured them under pebbles, seashells, and cracked china cups, fearful that they would fly away and leave her with only the blankness of his absence.

One morning, she found the papers curling in invisible fire. The wanderer’s word flickered once, starry, in the ashes, then went out. Her mouth shaping no, her fingers shaping hope, she ran to the place of wraiths and unfinished wishes; knelt and pressed her ear to the grey slab, afraid to hear the thud of a full stop. Heard instead the whisper in the grass. The rustle of a graveyard ghost is just the sound of another page turning.

***

Donna Shanley lives in Vancouver, where she can see mountains and sometimes, a half-inch of ocean. Her stories have appeared in Vestal Review, Ellipsis Zine, and Flash Frontier.   

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Two Questions for Stephen Tuttle

We recently published Stephen Tuttle’s stunning “Rescue.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) That last line is so devastating and beautiful: ” Anything, we tell ourselves, that might distract him from the goodness of his heart.” Do you think the parents will manage to distract their son? Or is he already irrevocably connected to that goodness in his heart?

Not a chance. To my mind, the problem of this story is one familiar to all parents, teachers, mentors, guides, etc. Namely, what to do when a child (or student or whatever), sees a situation in ideal terms, but you see it more practically. I’m embarrassed to consider the times someone has wanted to do the right/best/good thing and I’ve been the one to say, I know that’s right and good, but it’s also expensive or time-intensive, or inconvenient. In the end, I think we all know what it means to be on either side of this equation. Here’s hoping we might be the dog-loving child a bit more often than we are the distracting parent.

2) The whole story is a heartbreaker, from start to finish (well, except for the expensive video game system, that sounds lovely!). The parents, here, clearly struggle to navigate this situation. Do you think they will learn to cope better? Or, as the story hints, will they simply try to distract their child from “goodness”?

Sadly, if they figure it out at all, I think it will come a beat too late. This is not an autobiographical piece, per se, but I know well enough the expectation that a child will grow up and become a bit more realistic, an expectation so often followed by a lament for their loss of innocence or magic or wonder. In that sense, I think the “goodness” of this story is an impractical but lovely thing that we can choose to accept despite its impracticality. Alternatively, and like these parents, there’s the option to distract from that impulse, which is easier in the short term but comes with a loss of something essential and beautiful. 

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Rescue ~ by Stephen Tuttle

Our son came home with this nearly dead dog. He watches these videos on the internet where people find wounded, abandoned animals and rush them to a veterinarian, and before you know it a dog or a bird is running or flapping around its forever home. We tried to say no but looked at his face and lost courage. Sure, we said, let’s get this guy the help he needs. Then we put this flea-ridden bag of bones in the car, taking care not to touch any of its mange or its open wounds, and we drove to a place that said it could take care of dogs like this. It could die within the hour, the vet said, but asked if we’d like him to care for it anyway. He didn’t know what it would cost, but at a minimum, we were looking at several hundred dollars. We looked at our son and we looked at the dog and we looked at the vet. The vet was shaking his head just a little like he was thinking we should cut our losses. But we looked at our son looking at the dog, and we said do it, spare no expense, heal this dog. Later, we buried the dog in our backyard because it was cheaper than cremation. We asked our son what the dog’s name was, and he said he didn’t know. We asked where he found it, and he said he couldn’t remember. For his birthday, we plan to buy him an expensive video game system. Anything, we tell ourselves, that might distract him from the goodness of his heart.

***

Stephen Tuttle’s fiction and prose poetry have appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Nation, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere.

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Two Questions for Kim Steutermann Rogers

We recently published Kim Steutermann Rogers’ whirlwind “What Happened to Meg?“

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I like how the two tragedies play off each other here — the tragedy of the tornado from the narrators’ childhoods as the backdrop to the tragedy of what has become of Meg’s life. The wreckage after the tornado against the wreckage after Meg’s abuse. The impaled cow against the impaled man. Powerful stuff! Do you think the tornado somehow played into Meg’s (and the narrators’) experiences? Or was it completely incidental?

The tornado and its aftermath changed everything for Meg and very little for the narrators. Before the tornado, Meg and her friends were all kids being kids, laughing and playing games. Then, the tornado orphaned Meg, and in a powerful twist of fate, Meg’s life changed immeasurably. She lost her parents, her friends, and her future.

2) And speaking of playing off each other! The title against that last line — I love the implied guilt in both. What Happened to Meg? lets the reader know these friends lost touch with her, even after seeing her at the reunion and What happened to us? lets us know — they realize it. How do you think they will handle their guilty feelings?

I love that you picked up the play against the title and last line! Sadly, I don’t think their guilt will cause them to change their behavior. Not now. They’ve been walking away from the reality that is Meg’s life—that could just as easily have been their lives—for decades. If they were going to help Meg, they would have done it years ago. The only difference is now they are able to admit how drastically they let down their friend. But continue walking away? Yes.

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What Happened to Meg? ~ by Kim Steutermann Rogers

At our 20-year reunion, we’ve gathered, this time in a courtroom, Meg at the defendant’s table, face as rough as tree bark, eyes like knotholes in her head. The prosecutor shows photos to the jury, one of Meg with a man at Twin Pines, a motel still patched with plywood from the EF5 tornado that tore through our southwest Missouri town when we were kids. Meg’s sitting on the floor propped against the bed, one hand holding a bloodied cigarette, the fingers of the other hand bent in a multitude of unnatural ways. The man lies behind her, impaled through the gut with a knife. What happened to Meg, we ask each other, we who only return home every 10 years.

After high school, we’d drifted apart, leaving town for college and careers, among us a gynecologist in St. Louis, professor of engineering at Washington University, and master contractor building monster cabins for the mega-wealthy at Lake of the Ozarks. Meg stuck close to our hometown, waiting tables after bouncing around from one aunt and uncle to another. We heard stories of Meg closing Donna Mae’s Diner each night and heading to the lake. We heard she’d pull out a lawn chair and drink whatever 12-pack of beer was on sale at Main Street Drive-Thru Liquor, chain-smoking Virginia Slims, the same brand her mother used to buy. We heard stories of a string of traveling salesmen. What happened to Meg, we asked the last time we came to town for our 10-year reunion, when she showed up, one eye tomato-red, her upper lip split, and purple splotches around her neck.

We’d all met at camp the summer before middle school. We were at the lake playing canteen bucket brigade when the sky turned eggplant and sirens pierced our skulls, prompting counselors barely older than us to shepherd the group to a nearby church basement. We spent the night huddled in humidity, clutching each other’s hands after the lone flashlight among us went dead, and crying for our mommies and daddies. When firefighters freed us the next morning into the arms of all but one set of parents, we blinked in the sunshine, the sky scrubbed clean, to find the church’s roof gone, trees stripped of leaves and life, a cow munching on grass, no mind to the metal fence post sticking through its midsection. 

What happened to us?

***

Kim Steutermann Rogers lives with her husband and 16-year-old dog Lulu in Hawaii. Her essay, “Following the Albatross Home” was recognized as notable in Best American Travel Writing. Her journalism has published in National Geographic, Audubon, and Smithsonian; and her prose in Gone Lawn, The Citron Review, Atticus Review, CHEAP POP, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She was awarded residencies at Storyknife Writers Retreat in Alaska in 2016 and 2021 and Dorland Mountain Arts in 2022. Find her @kimsrogers.

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Two Questions for Dawn Tasaka Steffler

We recently published Dawn Tasaka Steffler’s poignant “Why you drive seven hours to Yreka to check up on your little sister after she moved there with your Mom.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love the details you’ve chosen to reveal the narrator’s (and the little sister’s) life — they’re so specific and poignant. How did you manage to balance giving the reader just the right amount of detail without over-revealing the characters’ stories?

I think the balance of detail happened pretty organically. Trying to fit three people and almost two decades into fewer than 300 words meant I had to be selective and put my white space to work. But, God it was fun! I spent quite a bit of time moving the sentences around like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to find the “right” cause and effect to the web of interactions. Ultimately, each sentence had to pass the following test: is it its own self-contained universe? And does it put pressure on the sentence that follows?

2) For me, I feel like the narrator is a brother/son (knowing about her name on the boy’s bathrooms at school, being ignored while playing with the train set, the way the mother took the sister for pedicures but the narrator nowhere), but is it possible that the narrator is actually a sister/daughter?

Ha, Cathy, you’re not the only one who has asked that question! This piece originated in a Sarah Freligh workshop and her first read was of two sisters. In revision I tried to embed details that would clarify — artfully — that this is a brother and sister, because in my mind’s eye it was always this way. But I re-read it now and see how the two sisters still lurk in the shadows. So, yeah, I guess it is possible. And I actually love how this piece really seems to want to hang on to that potential. So good job, flash piece, you win!

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Why you drive seven hours up to Yreka to check up on your little sister after she moved there with your Mom ~ by Dawn Tasaka Steffler

Because Thanksgiving is next week. Because in the back seat is a grocery bag full of glossy college pamphlets that came to the house. Because last month you mailed your sister a birthday card and it came back undeliverable. Because your dad said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if your mom is using again.” Because your mom’s most recent Facebook post was about how “Pluto is shifting into Aquarius for the first time in over 200 years and the Good Lord knows I’m ready for a fresh start and transformation!!” Because your mom moved up there last summer with a boyfriend she met in rehab. Because your dad yelled at your sister, “If you’re so smart, why are you so fucking stupid?!” Because your sister scored a freakin perfect score on the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. Because your sister’s name is written on all the walls of all the boys’ bathroom stalls at school. Because you were jealous when your sister got to move to Florida with your mom after the divorce and smug when she came back halfway through the school year. Because your mom always took your sister out for pedicures but she never took you anywhere. Because your mom promised to help build train tracks for your Thomas the Train set but she didn’t, she put on a video of Thomas the Train instead, then sat on the sofa with your sister, teaching her how to french braid her Barbie dolls’ hair. Because your mom read you Goodnight Moon every night at bedtime until one day your sister was born and she stopped because was so sad all the time.

***

Dawn Tasaka Steffler is a fiction writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She stopped in Yreka once for sandwiches while on a road trip. Her work appears in Heimat Review, SoFloPoJo and Many Nice Donkeys; upcoming in Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, Alternative Milk Magazine, and MicroLit Almanac. Find her on Twitter @DawnSteffler.