Friday 6/14/24
I'm the last person who wants for motivation, but if you desire to give me some, I'll take it.
How about a prose with some recent fiction from The Sun--a section from a story--versus a section from "Fitty," which has come up lately, like in an entry earlier today as I work again on the book in which it's in, and that letter courtesy of Jonathan Hutchison.
This is from Kate Osterloh's "The Bleeding Woman," the entirety of which you can read here.
Ready?
I wake to the end of the miracle. That’s the mischief of miracles—they don’t always last. Everything I thought I’d left behind has come back for me. But blessed am I among women. I’ll never stop saying that as long as I live. Even though some days are less blessed than others. Backwards blessed. What others might call cursed.
I dreamed of laughter like a thousand angels caught sharing a joke, but I woke to the old blood—coils of tissue slithering down my legs, soaking my robe, the sheet, the floor. I have only one child, though I’ve poured out enough blood for a hundred at least. My daughter is still dreaming happily, no idea of the execution scene I’ve created in our bed. Oh, to be a man with a man’s clean body, a man’s holy ejaculations. What would that be? To be free of the rhythms we can’t change but must surrender to?
I get to my feet, and the old ache is there, a heaviness dragging me down. I shuffle, stumble, can’t keep the blood from going everywhere. I’ll have to haul a cistern of water to clean the sheets—not that I’m complaining! I just feel ridiculous, a hot, familiar feeling, even though there’s only me and my daughter to see the mess. I’ve always been ridiculous. I’ve tried every which way to curb it, but like this blood, it can’t be curbed. I wear the wrong colors and my hair is wrong and I smile too big with my gums showing and my fleshy neck hangs too low and I’m happy when I shouldn’t be. When my husband married me, I was young and could be forgiven. Then I bore a daughter, which wasn’t ideal, but I promised to do better next time. Then I had a quick dozen miscarriages: weeks of hope and dreamy nausea followed by black blood and pain that made me grind my teeth to nubbins, to say nothing of the agony of apologizing yet again to my husband for all the trouble and the lack of a son. He wasn’t particularly clever or pious, but he was always good to me. I kept telling him to cast me off and find someone to give him a son and fulfill the commands of God’s Name, but he stayed. He liked to say he wore his eyesight out on my ugliness, and I couldn’t help but blush at that—that he would give up his eyesight to look at me.
The last miscarriage brought a never-ending flow, the final refusal of my womb to do what it was created to do. We saw healers and priests and shamans and old aunties. We spent my dowry and my husband’s savings, sold off livestock, discussed selling ourselves into slavery, and finally retreated to the comfort and anonymity of poverty. Then one day my husband died. He went clean and fast, smiling at my ugly face, content with his fate, leaving my daughter and me to live among the widows and the pious poor.
Why am I the most blessed of all women? Because it doesn’t matter how unclean I am, how ridiculous, or how much we shout at each other when she’s in a rage—my daughter loves me. My gorgeous, fatherless girl. Halfway to womanhood, and her smell is changing. She used to smell like milk and apples. Now she smells like a woman’s sweat. Like fragile virginity. She’s old enough to marry, but what’s the rush? I can keep her with me a while longer. No harm in pretending she’s still a baby. After all, she’s mine. If God’s Name loves us half as much as I love my daughter, I pity Him. What terror. What unbearable joy.
That was the only secret I kept from my husband—that I love my daughter more than I would have loved a dozen sons. More than I love God’s Name. A great sin. Enough to piss off any god. And God’s Name has quite a temper, even compared to the thundering deities of our occupiers. I paid for my joy in blood, until the laughing man from Nasrath healed me. Why didn’t he tell me the healing wouldn’t last?
Yeah...
We don't really need to say anything, do we? Want me to ask if you want thousands of more words of that? Because I don't think you do. That's her third story in The Sun, by the way.
That letter to Safranksy reproduced in the September 2022 entry on here pertained to "Fitty." In other words, he was offered the story from which this excerpt comes. Just so we're as clear as possible.
Ready?
“This part of the feather, where it attaches to the bird’s bone, is called the calamus.”
Sometimes Carlene filled in for Ms. Okum because Ms. Okum had chemo treatments. She’d lost her hair, but she only missed the ends of Fridays.
Carlene could not add a lot to a science class. A few bird facts. She’d bring in a feather she had found or a nest that had fallen to the ground. The class was lax. Final period. She liked getting to be in a room with Fia for the second time in a day.
They were almost neighbors. Fia’s father Reginald taught social studies at the school. His name sounded imperious to Carlene. He told people to call him Reg, but he looked like he winced when you said it. Carlene knew no eyes like Fia’s. They absorbed the world. Blotting paper in ocular form. People often bored Carlene, even her husband Jake. Not that that was his—or anyone’s—fault. She found connections rare, but she didn’t like to think that was because she was smarter than people, though she understood quietly that was a big reason. It had been Jake’s idea to open up their marriage. Carlene never thought she’d be an open marriage person. They both dated women, but never the same women, everything kept separate.
But Carlene could watch Fia watch the world and never get bored. She felt as if it were possible to reach out her hand and feel the thoughts in motoric motion as Fia looked at whatever she was looking at, formulating internal sentences, ideas, strips of knowledge as if weaving a highly personalized, durable basket to tote what was necessary for a stellar future.
She lived four streets over and she read the books that were assigned for class in a fraction of the time it took the other kids, but she still stayed after school when Carlene helped the kids who struggled with Shakespeare.
Fia did not struggle. When no one in class could understand a line by the Bard and the students became pouty and picked their fingers, Fia would sometimes stand on her chair in the back of the room and translate the words into more modern English, acting out a part of a scene to boot. She was at her best with an air-drawn dagger.
That made everyone laugh, the girl less than five feet tall, spinning about on the compromised platform of her seat-based stage.
Tension broken and focus restored, Carlene continued. As each head dipped back down over its owner’s book, she’d nod a little smile toward Fia, whose eyes were held in brief abeyance in these moments, ready to resume their absorptive pursuits upon acknowledgement of a connection that needed no formal acknowledgment. Carlene knew that was the best kind, even if it had been new to her. Fia simply knew.
In science class on a Friday when Carlene filled in for Ms. Okum, Mark Renner, the fake tough kid who really just wanted more people to say hello to him, passed the feather that Carlene had brought in to Fia, who was the last to receive it, and said, “Put this in your ass, Hobbit.”
Fia launched from her seat, pulled up the bottom portion of her Joy Division T-shirt, and said, “Look at those abs! Hobbit my ass. Each one of those abs could make a fist and pop you in the mouth. Bitch. That’s fitty,” she concluded, drumming her stomach with a small, balled hand.
Fitty was her word for “fit,” Fia later explained, when she had walked over to Carlene’s house to return a volume of Coleridge’s Shakespeare criticism, and it was also her word for badass. In the classroom, the feather, forgotten, had fallen to the floor, and the children crowded in a semicircle for a closer look at those prodigious abs, as Fia became Fitty forever in that moment.
“I still think it’s a winning phrase,” the young girl said in Carlene’s yard, blades of grass between her toes, which she bent and twisted, wondering how much practice she’d need to tie a knot with them, as they discussed what Fia viewed as exciting phrase-making, and exciting writing.
“Well, Fitty,” Carlene began, saying the now-official name, “I think you can find a better one.”
They sat on plastic, mildew-streaked chairs with sun-warped arms, not too close to the sprinkler but close enough that it wet Carlene’s calves and the bottoms of Fitty’s feet when she stretched out her legs, before the water went once more in the opposite direction. The Coleridge had been tossed beyond the sprinkler’s reach under a birch tree, and Fitty thought about saying how maybe if you planted the book a tree might grow there or conceivably a weed because Coleridge could give off a weedy vibe, given that he seemed awfully critical of most things he read.
“Go ahead, hit me with it again,” Carlene resumed. “Get it out of your system.”
Fitty had premiered the line a few days earlier after school, in Carlene’s classroom, with the building mostly empty. Her friend Martha needed help with Macbeth, and Fitty wanted to memorize exact lines and scenes and where they came in the play so that she could recreate them in her head.
“You feel bad for Macbeth at the end,” she had said. “This poor bastard, being force fed into the mouth of reality like that.”
She said the line again on the lawn, only slower, like her tongue required extra time with it.
“What? It’s good. It’s a winning line.”
“Fitty…”
“Mmmm?”
“Don’t force feed people into the mouth of reality.”
She paused and blinked, in mock surprise. “Are you upset you didn’t come up with it?”
“You know me so well.”
“But you have to admit,” Fitty finalized, the conjunction being her way of conceding the point, the water again at their legs and feet, “I read the absolute fuck out of some of those scenes, don’t I?”
“Of that there is no doubt,” Carlene said, and the child’s laughter lodged in her brain.
I'm simply not the person with whom to be doing this. What is in these pages is true. And it's very easy to prove as much, adding proof to proof.
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