Something Must Happen

As I walked Sophie this morning in the neighborhood, a raven flew over us. Caw! It greeted. Some people find signs everywhere. Am I, for instance, to deduce that our encounter with the raven means that the Baltimore Ravens will beat the New England Patriots this weekend (and perhaps win the Superbowl?) Our perhaps our raven was Edgar Allen Poe himself, making his rounds in Baltimore on his birthday?

Not long after, Sophie pooped—a turd the size of a little, hard, malformed pinky finger. She hasn't pooped in days, after being given an antiemesis drug at the vet to stop a sudden bout of vomiting and diarrhea. It was a small big victory for a dog that's been eating white rice and turkey since Monday night and looks like the Hindenburg. I will never know if she thought the raven inspired her.

I don't even know how to feel about the raven myself. Although I am not some new-ager who thinks the universe bends to my will at every turn if I meditate hard enough, I am not opposed to finding meaning and patterns in everyday life. Some people find signs in nothing. They are the same people who don't read fiction because, as they explain, they don't understand the point in reading something that's not true.

I tend to think of fiction not as untruths but as possibilities. Just as I stretch my reality every day by daydreaming about 10-minute miles or speculating why Sophie and I have seen a raven (or why Sophie got such a stomach bug in the first place), fiction always begins on the premise of "what if?"

I'm surprised when, in a lot of books I read these days, nothing really happens. They're beautiful color field paintings or abstractions. I suppose a lot can be inferred from them. But on some level, I'm interested in discovering what the author inferred from them, why he or she was driven to examine this possibility.

I am surprised when the same thing happens in my work. I muddle around in a feeling, but nothing actually happens. What do I want to happen in my novel-in-progress? Why am I worried about the feeling of the fabric on someone's dress, the smell of a New England peninsula in the summer, if I don't know what my main character wants, why she has found herself in the situation she's in?

Something must happen. People must die. People must want to die for beliefs, for fame, for riches. People must overcome. People must be incredibly disappointed, beaten down. In the end, people must somehow find a way. In the end, dogs must poop.

Something must happen.

I'm Okay, You're a Boston

Saturday a new dog will come into our life—Sophie, the Boston terrier. She's six or seven (or maybe five, fingers crossed) and missing her front teeth. She's had a melanoma removed from her back leg and mammary cancer from her breasts that may or may not return. She was a breeder in a puppy mill and is just now learning to be a dog (ie, play, walks, relaxation).

Regardless of what Sophie still needs to learn, she will have a lot to teach me. Dogs are so much better than people, and I say that as someone with a good deal of lovely human friends. Dogs are patient (except when it comes to food or car rides), take their baths with as much dignity as they can muster, are never angry with you or pick a fight because of some existential emptiness in their hearts that they think can be filled with drama. They don't care what you look like or smell like or whether you make a hundred grand or twenty. They just want to bury their butt into the side of your thigh and fall asleep with you in arm's reach.

Dogs can cultivate bad habits, for sure. However, through patience and training and positive affirmation, they usually stop peeing in the corner or chewing their leg or barking at leaves. I can't say the same for myself. All my life, I've been a controlling codependent, wanting to take care of people, falling in love with the most broken of souls. Of course, broken people never want to be fixed. No matter how much I love or sacrifice for them, no matter how much I rationally explain to them the destructive ways of their behavior, it doesn't matter. Unlike dogs, people will simply do what they're going to do. Unfortunately, they're smart enough to take off that plastic funnel around their head and go right for their own jugular.

I always felt like a failure when I couldn't save someone. Sometimes, with those people in my life now who are slowly sliding down a hole, no longer within arm's reach to pull back up, I still do. But my years of adopting old, broken Bostons have helped. They want to be good little citizens. They're selfless and will remodel themselves to please you. And I get to mitigate my Sisyphean behavior, turning it into something positive. I can save my little Boston children. At least, for a little while.

And they've helped me become a better citizen as well. In fact, I daresay my first Boston got me out of a very long term, pretty unhealthy relationship. I know I can judge a person by his or her interaction with my Boston terrier. Whatever tragedy lurks in the corners of everyday life will be tempered somewhat by the fact I can hug my little fur baby as tight as I can until the pain becomes manageable. I've gotten through breakups, deaths, rejection, you name it, by burying my nose in the familiar scent of oatmeal shampoo and Fritos.

The greatest tragedy of I've ever had to endure is when my Bostons died. Who is there to comfort you then?

And so comes Sophie. I'm not nearly over Shirley. Shamefully, I still cry almost every day (although not as much in public anymore). My heart still feels like a smoldering grayed charcoal lump after a barbecue. But I know once I see my little google-eyed monster waddling off the plane (yes, she is a little overweight, and yes, she will be flying via private charter with two other Boston terriers to Manassas, Virginia, on Saturday), that I will feel a little more like myself again—old girl dog Boston mommy is back in the saddle.

The Final Lap

Busy week before the holidays! First, putting out the winter issue of jmww. There's some great stuff in here, including an interview with Laura Ellen Scott by newest jmww editor Elizabeth Buchanan, and work by Richard Peabody, Robb Todd, Daniel Long, Barbara Diehl, tons of book reviews, and more.

Also, my interview with Mona Simpson at The Nervous Breakdown. We talk about her latest novel, My Hollywood, and the currency of love in the world of nannies and domestic workers. My favorite nanny in literature? Ole Golly from Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy. Anyway, I hope you check it out.

Happy holidays!

Off to the presses

There's nothing more exciting about putting together an issue of jmww. You proof the stories and code them for HTML, and only you, not even the editors (who only know what has been accepted in their respective sections) know the entirety of the issue. And there's amazing work and you're proud of it, and you're walking to the party with the biggest diamond in your purse, bright as worlds, and no one can see in in the dark folds of leather. Not yet. You smile conspiratorially: you just wait.

I'm hoping to have the winter issue of jmww up on Monday, December 19th. Not much waitin' left.

Story Archive: Big Boy

I started "Big Boy" with an idea that the Big Boy statue in front of the restaurant would be supernatural in some way, that the restaurant would be some way station from the nether regions of the Twilight Zone. That people, emotionally and literally would be trapped there after seeking refuge from the cataclysmic events of their lives. And I guess it still does, in a way. But in the original version I wanted Big Boy to eat them or something, maybe. He definitely existed, in my mind, in the uneasy space between symbolism and literalism.

There is an actual Big Boy restaurant (or was; I haven't been in a awhile) in the Delaware Welcome Center Travel Plaza in Newark. I love travel plazas, the same way I love hotels. I would love to write a story collection about one or both.

Thanks for Roxane Gay for publishing "Big Boy" in Emprise Review. It's always been one of my favorites:

When Emma disappeared at the Bob’s Big Boy at the travel plaza in Wilmington, she was wearing a knitted green cap that looked like a frog. This much Loretta remembered. Loretta also remembered the way the girl had spun in a slow circle behind her mother, Deirdre, examining with her blue saucer eyes the tired travelers who had descended upon the Formica and leather way station where Loretta worked. It was the Friday afternoon after Thanksgiving, one of the busiest each year, and Loretta was still seven hours away from the flannel sheets she had purchased earlier in the week for her and Larry at Boscov’s holiday sale. Deirdre, an angular woman with wan, penetrating features, had leaned over, digging in her red Coach bag for her matching wallet, blocking Loretta’s view of the three-year-old girl in the ski jacket.

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Greetings from the Eastern Syndicate Racket

This weekend, I did some holiday shopping I wasn't planning to do. You see, in November we all took a big trip for my mother's sixtieth birthday, and, as the result of the expenses of the trip, we decided not to give each other gifts for Christmas. But when December arrived, my mother and I began to hedge. It feels so strange not to give each other anything on Christmas, we agreed. How about a ten-dollar gift each?

I don't know whether this agreement was made in good faith because, as you know, it's damn near impossible to buy anything for $10 these days. So maybe we crept up a little closer to twenty. Or over. But still under forty. At least for now. You see what I mean?

I actually wish for Christmas we could just have dinner at the table and have a sustained conversation, each of us asking the others genuine questions about our lives and activities and attentively listening to the replies instead of getting sucked into television and football games and tabloid magazines scattered about. Maybe that is the emptiness I feel that I must fill by giving gifts. Maybe I've been conditioned all these years that the true way to tell someone you care about them is to spend countless hours finding the perfect present.

But perfect gifts sometimes come in small packages, or not even wrapped at all. Even though there will be some crumpled gift wrap on the floor after it's all said and done, each of us flush with something plastic or woven or printed that we didn't really need, the best gift is that my family will be together and we'll be healthy, that no one is alone in a nursing home or hospital or separated by great distances physical and emotional. Who knows how many years of these holidays you're gifted? And each one, in so many different ways, is priceless.

New Fiction: The Birthday Present at Blue Lake Review

The last thing Stanley expected on his birthday was company. From the living room window he watched the gold El Dorado arc into the driveway next to his truck. The small explosions of gravel underneath its faded white wall tires, along with the engine’s choppy motor, threw his pulse off kilter. He smoothed the Brill-creamed locks of blond hair, what was left of it, to his skull, wondering if Cindy had come back from the dead. It was the only present he wanted. His hand rattled against the doorknob as he opened the door.


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