F i ction /
$ 5 .00
“Her use of language always serves the purpose of illuminating the truth of our complicated lives. She never shies away from violence, love, insanity, disappointment nor chaos.” Paula Bomer, author of Baby & Other Stories
Dis
par
“Meg Tuite is all lungs and fists and brawl. In short, Meg tells her stories with sleeves rolled up. Go ahead and try her.”
P a t h o s
David Tomaloff, author of A SOFT THAT TOUCHES
DOWN &REMOVES ITSELF
“Tuite knows how to dig deep and scrape out the darkness...” Susan Tepper, author of From the Umberplatzen
“The beauty of her writing is vast, but often it is those startling details that pull you in like a magnet, because even if something is truly improbable in the world that those of us in the flesh and blood inhabit, on the page she will make you believe. And you will never look back.” Michelle Reale, author of If All They Had Were
Their Bodies
ISBN-10 098266469-9 ISBN-13 9780982664698 50500
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780982 664698
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P a t h o s
Meg Tuite Monkey Puzzle Press Boulder, Colorado
Copyright Š 2011 by Meg Tuite
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief excerpts.
ISBN-10: 098266469-9 ISBN-13: 9780982664698
M o n ke y P u z z l e P r e s s PO Box 20804 Boulder, CO 80308 m o n ke y p u z z l e p r e s s. c o m
Table of Contents 1. Distracted
1
2. Footfall
2
3. Unsaid
3
4. Eternal-E
4
5. Itch
7
6. Bipolar Menopause
8
7. Memory Freeze
10
8. Frost Bitten
11
9. Life Before Kant
12
10. Dad’s Strung Out Women Blues
13
11. Obstacle
14
12. Couple Busting
16
About the Author
Disparate Pathos
Distracted I drizzled for scraps of your malted banter. Blank as an open mouth, I stood listening, but not listening, to your numb number about your dog and the cost of living, when I really just wanted to reach up and litter you with my hands. Some girl strutted by and I traced the circles of your words as you openly gaped at her. I tried to find a way to squeeze into your mind and fit the distrust of myself in there, but I saw I could only beg for something you had no intention of giving out, even if I didn’t ask for much. You were distracted by the beauty that hovered around us. I was an obstacle you had come up against to wager your worth. Your language slid around me like a loose tongue and suddenly you were saying “goodbye” before I’d even pried my buttoned mouth open to stutter any damn thing. So I stood alone, rerunning the minutes I had dumb-lusted you, as the widening hole you left behind in your wake cracked me in half of what had barely been a half.
Published in Journal of Truth & Consequences, Dec. 2010 / Recorded on Flash Fiction Friday on WUWM as National Flash of the Week.
1
Meg Tuite
Footfall Anderson was a sallow troglodyte whenever I took him to a party. “Did you know that Parkinsons has been linked to the plague of poor foot care?” My friends would just stare at him. “They’re finding out that most injuries to the elderly are due to irresponsible shoes or shoddy footwear. Not just slipping in the bathtub.” Then they’d turn and glare at me, or walk away. It was not what you’d call inflamed conversation, but I had a thing for Anderson that no one else understood. This inert man combusted into something prodigious whenever we had sex. The first time I jumped him, I did it out of thankfulness. I had been on so many dates with cocky twaddle-heads who never shut-up about themselves that when Anderson showed up and actually asked me how I was, I kissed him. He was an enthusiast in the bedroom and, unlike the rest, he listened. Not surprising that he had a foot fetish. I became a regular at the pedicurist’s shop. Anderson spent hours wearing my multi-colored toenails and me down. So whenever my girlfriends looked at me in horror and screeched “why,” I just smiled and tapped my well-groomed feet.
Published in Full of Crow Magazine, Jan. 2011
2
Disparate Pathos
Unsaid Outside, the rain was a rustling tent of calm. Inside, Sonia smuggled a peripheral peek over at Ezra and suddenly her eyelid was a spasm of truth. Ezra was lying next to her awake with that smug smirk she liked to call his morning-after-sex face. Her mouth of straw twitched around itself into a conversation that would never transpire between them. Their sex was getting more and more like an Ezra-on-top-snorting-hissing-jump-thebones-get-this-over-with-on-with-the-day kind of thing, while Sonia lay moaning some kind of orchestral background to his movement. Every morning after they’d had sex, she castigated herself for the fake orgasms and the growing pile of dead air that was starting to knock the wind out of her. Ezra got up at some point, smiling and whistling some blithering tune, trotting around the kitchen in his underwear with his ribs, a long row of meatless tragedies screaming for something other than the meal he was making. He was heating up depressive Campbell’s chicken noodle soup with Saltine crackers sprinkled on top. His mouth, a constant moving itch, flapped over famous dead quotes and philosophical jokes that he never waited for a response to. He was his own audience. She attempted to follow the flow by dubbing over his endless banter with her own unspoken tirade. “Listen,” she’d screech, crushing his babble into a mosaic of sound. “Listen to me!” But the echo of her silence buried itself under that endless avalanche of the deadly unsaid.
Published in Perceptions Magazine, May 2011
3
About the Author
Meg Tuite is the author of Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011). She is also the fiction editor for The Santa Fe Literary Review and Connotation Press. She writes a monthly column, “Exquisite Quartet�, for Used Furniture Review. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Visit her blog at: megtuite.wordpress.com.
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monkeypuzzlepress.com
F i ction /
$ 5 .00
“Her use of language always serves the purpose of illuminating the truth of our complicated lives. She never shies away from violence, love, insanity, disappointment nor chaos.” Paula Bomer, author of Baby & Other Stories
Dis
par
“Meg Tuite is all lungs and fists and brawl. In short, Meg tells her stories with sleeves rolled up. Go ahead and try her.”
P a t h o s
David Tomaloff, author of A SOFT THAT TOUCHES
DOWN &REMOVES ITSELF
“Tuite knows how to dig deep and scrape out the darkness...” Susan Tepper, author of From the Umberplatzen
“The beauty of her writing is vast, but often it is those startling details that pull you in like a magnet, because even if something is truly improbable in the world that those of us in the flesh and blood inhabit, on the page she will make you believe. And you will never look back.” Michelle Reale, author of If All They Had Were
Their Bodies
ISBN-10 098266469-9 ISBN-13 9780982664698 50500
9
780982 664698
monkeypuzzlepress.com
ate
Meg Tuite