As promised, Girl Lit as written by Kristen Stone. Below are five short pieces that I can’t begin to quantify, but to let you know, they are all from her Domestication Handbook, which I shall hopefully be writing about here in greater length.
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More notes for a suburban memoir
I grew up near a famous, once-sexy beach. Girls go wild in the bed of a pickup truck. The backseat of a convertible. (Spilling out the sides.) They patrol the edge of the sea at five miles per hour. Grinding the sand down finer and finer. Honk and eat snow cones from the chair rental man. Their mouths rimmed sticky in the shimmering heat. Thick boys play Frisbee, jumping and rolling like busy dogs.
Try to avoid the sea turtle nests which are marked with orange plastic ribbon, like the edge of a construction zone: no trespassing. The leathery fists below the sand. Sometimes when they hatch they inch on their bellies, riibbed like the roof of a mouth, towards the bright hotels instead of the soft ocean edge.
When this happens, they die.
Some say, when light ordinances are proposed, that the sea turtles need to evolve faster. Survival of the fittest. Teach their nervous systems the difference between floodlights and the moon.
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Notes to hold the place
We, underage, were refused entrance to the House of Leather. Instead, read Best Lesbian Erotica 2003. Which was available for purchase at the local corporate bookstore chain. In the Gay/Lesbian/New Age/Native American aisle.
I hid it in my camera bag, a leathery gift from my dead grandfather, in the closet. As if to incubate. The book started to smell like wood and dust, like my grandfather’s house. Each time I opened it though the stories were the same.
She had since gone to college. I would send her e-mails about the book. People don’t really do this, do they? She wrote back telling me not to worry. She fell in love, she broke her arm, she fell in love again. She would see me at Thanksgiving. (Signed with a sideways heart.)
For instance there was Troi the butch cop, who wore a pinky ring and cruised for straight women at clubs. She fucked them in the backseat of her black SUV, behind tinted windows. I had a crush on Troi, until the penetration started. At which point I would put the book back in the camera bag, in the closet. Shaking with something like disgust: a scabby girl, bewildered.
I couldn’t figure out who these things happened to. or how.
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Failure to write a suburban memoir
Has anyone ever asked you to pull yourself together? Instead of now I lay me down to sleep, it’s what parents in yellow houses whisper as they tuck their children into bed.
This is a song of praise and of mourning. I am writing this because I love the suburbs. This is the beautiful swell of music when she comes in the morning to take you to school (she is about to leave, and soon you will have your drivers’ license). The foggy morning, in her green car, and she slides onto the highway and you lean back and close your eyes, unafraid of dying. And then you are at school, and she puts her arm around your shoulder. At the end of the day, the shadows grow long on the black asphalt and in the spaces between the few remaining vehicles.
(Nothing ever happens.)
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Writing that makes your mother sad
This is an investigation into the relationship between the book and the body. After I went away to college, my mother found the book in my bedroom and said to my sister: gross.
There were no stories in that book about holding hands. I tried to write one and failed. None about how it feels to have someone trace the contours of your ear while watching But I’m a Cheerleader under a sleeping bag while waiting tensely for her father to come back from work, at the Olive Garden near the Speedway.
Or about going to a construction site to make out because it’s surrounded by woods, for a little while longer.
(But how else to know how? Books are for learning.)
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I think it is perverse to write a memoir.
It is not a real bedroom. There is not a real door, but a screen which she’s covered in tissue paper decoupage, a translucent membrane through which her little brother’s Pokemon cartoons jump and glow.
This is the closest you’ve ever come to someone else’s clutter. It implies the body that lives inside; you dizzy. She turns off the overhead lights and plugs in a strand of Christmas bulbs: stars, draped over the iron bed frame.
Everything pretty here came, hand-me-down, from her aunt, a hairdresser downtown. On the dresser are paintbrushes, notebooks, hair ribbon. The walls are a faint green, like bile.
The Christmas lights throw tiny patches of light on the green wall, spots of red and blue and a brighter green. The television, grainy, balanced on a shaky bookshelf, plays a quiet documentary about sea turtles.
The photograph you took of her last week hangs on the wall with a thin stripe of silver duct tape. She’s standing at a construction site in the back of her neighborhood. A place that used to be woods. Soon, it’ll be houses, big ones made of foamy stucco, not small, like hers, stuffed with wind chimes and bunk beds and silent baby brothers. In the photograph she crosses one arm over her chest and looks away. Her hair, now bright red, is rendered a black blur.
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Kristen Stone is a baker, writer, and youth advocate. Her first book, Domestication Handbook, was published by Rogue Factorial in 2012, and her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Adrienne, 30xlace, Glitter Tongue, and elsewhere. She runs Unthinkable Creatures, a small chapbook press and printmaking studio, out of her home in Gainesville, Florida. Find her here: Future Imaginary and Unthinkable Creatures