“And So She Made Some Changes” was my first official publication. It appeared in a campus literary magazine called the MT Cup Review (a campus literary journal at Ball State University) in 1999 after I had taken two or three fiction workshops. At that point, I still considered myself a visual artist and had no idea that, over the next decade, writing would become my primary creative outlet.
This piece feels heavily influenced by Aimee Bender, though it isn’t since it wasn’t until years later that I discovered and began badly copying her work. As an undergrad, my literary heroes were Franz Kafka, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood, and Angela Carter — influences clearly present here. I loved magical realism, science fiction, fairy tales, and anything vaguely weird (I hadn’t yet heard the term “speculative fiction”), and I still do. Aside from a few attempts at straight realism in graduate school, most of my fiction continues in this vein: quirky, offbeat, and a bit strange — often with a touch of melancholy.
I find it interesting that these elements simmer through in my earliest work. Almost thirteen years later, after receiving my MFA and writing dozens of short stories, comics, book reviews, and a novel of speculative fiction, I’d like to think I have better ear for language and possess a more sophisticated sense of story. But it’s impossible to deny that the rudiments of who I am as a writer are already here, in this short piece.
+
She was born on a bright, sunny morning. Her mother, a happy, obedient sort, held the tiny child of vibrant, pink flesh and wetness in her arms and marveled at the jewel blushing with life. The father, a larger, dominating sort, scrutinized his new daughter.
“She cries a lot,” he said.
And so she was raised a princess, under the tender eyes of her mother, the queen of developed suburbia, and her father, a reserved king of his very own prefabricated stone-and-stucco two-and-a-half-bath duplex castle. She grew into that quiet and inquisitive sort who discovered a universe in the small confines of her own room — in the shelves lined neatly with well-worn books and colorful, wide-eyed toy animals lined in a row. And although she saw herself one day embracing the world outside her room, the thrill and fancy of imagination failed to display itself in her physical features. She had, indeed, inherited the pale and chalky pallor of her father, a fact that disturbed the healthy instincts of her mother who saw such a countenance as a sign of melancholy.
“My poor princess,” the mother said, “No rosy cheeks for Mommy, to brighten my day and show how you love me?”
This upset the girl greatly, and as she peered into the large looking-glass of the pastel half-bathroom, she wondered how to infuse color into those flawless, milky-soft cheeks. She gingery poked at them and watched for a moment the scarlet mark from her fingertip blossom and fade.
“That’s it,” she thought, and pinched both cheeks gently at first, then harder, and harder, till the tears spilled down her reddened flesh. She looked back into her reflection and marveled at the result, wincing still from the raw sting.
Every morning from then on she squeezed her cheeks. Her mother was delighted at the change and gave her princess daughter extra allowance for being so sanguine a child.
As the years progressed, she grew and developed, and soon a flood of hormones added fullness to a once flat and dimensionless body. The girl was happy and excited at the changes, especially as it gained her new attention from the smiling boys at school who bought her candy and chocolates. But her father was not so enamored of her new curves.
“Putting a little weight on there now, aren’t we, princess?” he asked.
This upset the girl greatly and as she examined her nude, pink figure in the large looking glass of the pastel half-bathroom, she wondered how she might quickly loose some of her excess.
“Of course,” she said, and took her father’s shaving razor from under the bathroom sink. She then proceeded to carve off the surplus fullness, scrunching her eyes at the sharp hotness and the deep, scarlet wounds that poured unto the floor, drizzling red syrup down her legs. But when she was finished, she looked a great deal thinner and mopped the burgundy floor with a sponge.
The father was pleased with the changes and complemented his slender daughter.
“You’re my little princess again.”
Sometime later she left home and went to school far away. She studied diligently and with that natural inquisitiveness for knowledge so rare among her peers, eventually graduating and earning a prestigious job designing buildings. The business where she worked made buildings of all sizes, and one day the building designers stood about wondering how to get more light into a top-floor room.
“Maybe you can open the ceiling to let the light in,” she said.
“Open the ceiling?” the designers laughed, “What a silly idea.” They suggested that building design wasn’t for her.
This upset the girl greatly, although by this time she was a woman with her own bathroom and large mirror, which she stared into and cursed her stupid thoughts. She wondered how she could avoid making herself look so foolish.
“I know,” she said and reached into her mouth to grab her tongue, which she pulled and pulled from her mouth like so much bright pink bubble gum. The tongue stretched long and painful, an aching rubber appendage, and she squeezed her eyes as she came to the end and tied it into a large knot. The agony of this action brought a flush to her cheeks, but she resolved it was less torment than the embarrassment of being wrong.
Time passed and she eventually married a man of the industrious and intellectual sort who shuffled about the house with his nose in books. She spoke to him of her hopes to make a life and a world for the two of them — of her desire to travel, see other lands, and her dreams to write about it which she had always considered since her days as a princess a natural and human need. But her husband barely looked up from his book, raising his soft eyebrows and holding his chin in careful deliberation.
“You do have a lot of ambition. Maybe too much ambition. I don’t like that much ambition,” he said and returned to his study.
The woman was once again greatly disturbed, and as she stared into the large bureau mirror within the master bedroom of their aluminum-sided, prefabricated one-and-a-half-bath duplex, she wondered how she could loose some of that bothersome ambition.
“I suppose,” she resigned and reached inside, through her navel to pull out her entrails. They came out slowly, in a long pinkish-gray, shimmering rope that piled upon the floor. She thought for a moment that it would never end, but it did eventually, and it hadn’t hurt as much as she had thought it should. Looking at the wet coils on the floor, she felt a pang then, an emptiness within her, which she tried to ignore.
“I had too much guts anyway,” she said, looking at them wistfully upon the thick, blue carpet.
Life continued and the woman never sought out her dreams. She lived, for many years, with the quiet and thoughtful man. And they were happy, though it wasn’t a pink happiness but a sort of dull yellow, the color of his aging hair. She increasingly felt during this time no need to rid or empty herself of anything until a day several years after the husband had passed away.
She sat upon the front porch of the aluminum-sided duplex, knitting a limp gray section of yarn, when a certain wind picked up her dried, silver wisps of hair and caused her to stand. The wind continued, a warm westerly directly into her watery, pale eyes which forced her to shut them. She held the railing of the porch and remembered the parts of herself she had lost.
The weight of time and regret manifested themselves so acutely her eyebrows furrowed and she felt a small ache in her chest. She clutched at her breast and stumbled back to pick up her knitting scissors, for she was not accustomed to such intensity anymore. And then carefully, as if following a pattern of paper dolls, she cut out her heart and held it before her.
The incision was dry, and she stood, slightly confused, watching the now raisin-sized heart crumble in her hands, its ashes mixing and blowing away into a blood-red sunset.