By Aimee Parkison
Featured Art by Chris Leonard
1.) You Sound Drunk, You Probably Shouldn’t Leave the House Today
We never speak of the reasons for her drinking, though her husband was in the navy overseas, a high-ranking officer, leaving her alone at home. When I was a child, whenever her husband was away, my neighbor would visit my mother, stumbling into our house, reeking of whiskey and crying about her husband, not wanting to be alone at night. She was the type of woman other women called a doll. Pretty, slender, elfin-faced with no children, she was youthful and kind with an aura of fragile, feminine innocence nurtured like a pet in a well-swept house with caramel aluminum siding and wooden shutters painted sunny-sky blue. A divorced woman also abandoned by a man, my mother felt sorry for our neighbor and asked me to stay over with her to keep her company, since my mother had to watch my baby sisters and had work in the early morning as a secretary at the meat-packing plant. I packed my tattered overnight bag and skipped over to the neighbor’s neatly decorated house, where I slept in crisply laundered paisley bedsheets in her husband’s place as she attempted to fall into a drunken sleep, shivering, curled against my back, spooning me. Sensing her dreaming, I woke in the dark with her hands on me. I was thirteen when it started, fifteen when it ended with her fingers creeping inside me. I pretended to sleep. At sunrise, she cooked me a breakfast of burnt buttered toast dusted in cinnamon sugar while warning me about men. She watched me eat as she sucked her fingers while sipping bourbon-spiked tea.
2.) Don’t Ask Me Why
While my best friend Kristy was starving herself in college, I found my dreams in a donut hole. As Kristy slowly faded away from malnourishment, I found hope in a pocket of cherry pie, that place where the filling missed the crust, not quite air, not entirely empty, sweet bubble bursting on my tongue. After Kristy weighed herself after eating a cup of bone broth and felt guilty for having the broth, she would skip rope for an hour before sleeping that night as I found the truth baked between the layers of a flaky buttermilk biscuit, my life purpose in a turnover turning, meaning tucked inside a savory fritter frittering my time away. I was fat, and Kristy was thin. Kristy was a Barbie without breasts, and I was Rubenesque. A well-meaning boyfriend had advised me to “familiarize myself” with the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens, who often painted women with large, fat bodies. Kristy and I were the best of friends, though she was so afraid of becoming full-figured that she refused to eat, to avoid being like me, though she loved me. That was all that mattered, all anyone else could ever see until she was admitted to the hospital and was told she would be force fed through a tube if she didn’t start to eat. She wept, and the doctor threatened her. Her parents pleaded with her and asked me to convince her to take a single bite. She smiled warily. Still, she refused food, didn’t want anything to do with it because she was afraid of being fat like me. Though she was too weak for her heart to make it through the night and was being tube fed, nurses tried to save her while I was in the bakery near the hospital eating donuts straight from the box. Stuffing my face with dingdongs, I was worrying about Kristy, how I would ever live without her, when a woman I didn’t know walked up to me and asked why I was letting myself go.
3.) River Girl and Delta Queen
Mississippi sky like a watercolor sundown, River Girl finds me, her Delta Queen, in the wake of frothy river water. Like an elk jumping over rocks, she leaps from stable to garage to barn to my arms in the trailer park. Some people who live here are secret millionaires, men say. I’m going to marry one someday. Other people live with a million secrets like my friend Kamba and me. We never told anyone about the man who asked to use our phone on one of the nights when our mothers went out dancing. Alone in the trailer, we let him in our house to help him, though we knew better and were not allowed to open the door to strangers. He pulled a gun on us in the kitchen. He jostled Kamba in a headlock and then shoved her into the closet. On the kitchen floor, he tackled me, then he tugged Kamba out of the closet and he put us both in a headlock and then threw me in the closet, before throttling her in the living room. He went on like that, taking turns choking us, stripping us, controlling us, slapping us, biting us, outraging us, strangling us, while tearing through every room of the trailer house, until he was exhausted. After he left, we stumbled about the trailer while cleaning up the evidence in every room. Before our moms returned, we were ashamedly mopping up our blood, our secrets, and our urine with vinegar, bleach, tea tree oil, tears, and dish soap, as if the crime were ours. Even now, as women, we’re still certain we will be blamed if our mothers find out.
4.) Pinocchio’s Tunnel
If you’ve ever gone to an amusement park without being amused, you know certain places are full of lies meant to keep rubes happy. In a pageant of big mechanical toys, lines move slowly for rides that go too fast. On the road to the park, a woman named Mary Miller sells handmade objects called Heavenly Babies in her unauthorized roadside stand. Mary comes from a long line of ancestors who were dollmakers of Nuremberg, goosewomen carving wheeled horses, later recreated life sized at the entrance for Pinocchio’s Tunnel, that little dark place where I couldn’t help remembering my uncle, who disappeared from prison after seven years of solitary confinement. Raised in poverty as a child, he grew into a man who always carried large sums of money, bundles of crisp bills he called “cheese.” One of millions disappearing with him every year into oblivion, that slippery category of the missing where headlines are clickbait catacombs, his illegitimate child, a delinquent, was kept in a Catholic home for neglected boys, his name appearing in droves of obscene letters. Whoever George was to the letter writer before disappearing, after coming back to us, he grew into a man devoted to justice, working for the law to catch the killer at the amusement park. “Heavenly Babies” was the amusement-park killer’s name for his victims, and that name gave Mary Miller an idea of what to call her creations, which she sold outside the very park where the attacks happened. The killer was a curious type of rapist, who only wanted to assault women who were with men—boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters. For a long time, I wondered why he chose couples, why he killed the man but let the woman live, then my grandmother explained it to me. Women were considered property of men in her day, and the Heavenly Babies killer wasn’t just motivated by sex but by the old-fashioned notion of stealing another man’s property. Intending to take a woman from a man, he robbed even me, but when I was attacked at the amusement park, it was different. I was with my friend, another girl who was mistaken for a boy because of her short hair. Almost Heavenly Babies, we were forced to do things to each other at gunpoint until he realized I wasn’t her property.
Aimee Parkison is the author of several books, including Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, winner of the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Parkison is Professor of Fiction Writing at Oklahoma State University and serves on the FC2 Board of Directors. Her fiction has appeared in Best Small Fictions and in literary journals such as Puerto Del Sol, Five Points, and North American Review. Her newest story collection, Suburban Death Project, was published by Unbound Edition. More information is available at www.aimeeparkison.com
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