"Too Many Emus"
featuring white trash saints, nice soap, uncharted interiors, advice regarding cutlery, feelings about death and synthesizers, and one tiny moment in which nothing is wrong
New Today at AC: Jerusha Crone, “The Gospel”
In the morning I wake up before him to shower. I use his nice soap that’s clementine and tuberose scented. This pisses him off but I’ll send over a couple more bucks to cover the expense. I climb back into bed and kiss his cheek but he doesn’t like morning sex so we just lay there for a bit laughing until we cry. When we get up he makes two cups of coffee we drink at the breakfast table by the flowers he brought home from the restaurant—paperwhite narcissus, liatris, alstroemeria and marigolds.
He says he loves me while we’re having sex in May. I start crying and say it back and we look at each other, but do not smile. Later, we go to the 4am bar a block away where we tell the staff we are siblings like Abraham and Sarah in the Old Testament tale. I wear my smallest green and white dress before sundress season but he says it’s so cute. We make out in the photo booth but the images never come out and I call a friend crying while he steps outside to smoke since she texted him and he says he really needs to be there for her right now. I drunken run home with him following behind. I sit at the breakfast table with my bags packed, feeling every shade of lilac known to man.
You’ll always choose her, I say.
I’m here with you.
He calls her while I shower and I wait naked with the door closed for him to hang up.
Thank you, he says.
I’m sorry. I will not be resented.
There’s not like, a checklist of things we’re looking for in a story we publish, but if there were, this one would hit all the boxes. A sharp, caustic, funny narrative voice? Check. A willingness to pull off the occasional highwire act of syntactical weirdness? Check. Prose that feels precise and intentionally uncontrolled or perhaps precisely uncontrollable? Check. Feelings about death? Obviously. Exposition involving emus? Hell yes.
Read “The Gospel” by Jerusha Crone, now at Always Crashing.
/ From the Archive
We’re doing whip-its in Milo’s room and his new girlfriend is there. We are cold to her because she is a freshman and an interloper and also because it seems like the powerful thing to do. She isn’t sure about doing a whip-it but we egg her on and so she sucks from the icy cold canister while we cheer. There’s one tiny moment in which nothing is wrong and then it breaks wide open. The girl teeters and then tumbles like the statue of a felled dictator. Hard-bodied like she’s been petrificus totalised she crashes straight onto Milo’s drum set and takes out all the cymbals with a cacophonous exclamation point. Some of us are laughing but not all of us. The boys grab an elbow and heave her onto the twin bed. “I’m fine,” she says, because there is nothing else to say. One of us retrieves the canister from under the bass drum and we keep going.
Speaking of prose that pulls off the trick (“trick” is not the right word) of being intentional and precise while reeling out of control, have you read Hanna Bahedry’s “Facewine Culture”? Or—I mean, if the answer’s yes, and it really should be—have you read it recently? Here, among the chaos of the scene above, I find myself admiring the sentence “Some of us are laughing but not all of us.” The understated unease of that moment. It’s really something.
/ Elsewhere
“In reading a text, we mutate it with our gaze, however briefly, in however isolated a setting. In less conventional works, the reader is often asked to search / investigate, map out the potentially chaotic or uncharted interiors of the work.” AC contrib Mike Corrao’s Surface Studies is now available—like, right now!—from the mighty Action Books!
“Steve Gergley’s stories are meticulously weird, tender, and hilarious,” says Shane Kowalski, regarding AC contrib Steve Gergley’s The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories, which, like Mike Corrao’s Surface Studies, is out now, but unlike Mike Corrao’s Surface Studies, was published by Malarkey Books. “Bring a knife,” advises Ben Niespodziany, which isn’t bad advice for life in general. You never know when you’ll need a knife! They’re useful for all kinds of things, not just cutting people. Here are a couple of Gergley stories we published not too long ago, if you’re wondering what you might find in The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories.
Hey, while we’re at it: We do our best to keep on top of what our past and present contributors are up to, as well as, you know, other cool/interesting indie lit stuff, but with the demise of social media and the long breath while we’re all waiting for what comes next it can be hard sometimes to keep up with things. If we’ve published your work in the past, and you’ve got something cool that’s come out or is about to come out, feel free to reach out to us—we’d love to know what you’re up to!
/ Today’s Soundtrack
More synthesizers! More synthesizers, dammit!