WILD LIFE: COLLECTED WORKS FROM 2003-2018 AVAILABLE NOW FROM MATTER PRESS!
WILD LIFE: COLLECTED WORKS FROM 2003-2018 AVAILABLE NOW FROM MATTER PRESS!
http://matterpress.com/press/
I’m so excited to announce that my fifth collection of flash fiction has released and is available now directly from Matter Press!
From a review by Kristin M. Ploetz at JMWW:
“The dozens of literary journals that published many of these stories the first time (Jellyfish Review, Smokelong Quarterly, FRiGG, Wigleaf, Hobart, Yemassee Journal, and Guernica,…
PANK Magazine :: Guest post :: My Compliance by Sara Lippmann
That summer, we went to The Sagamore in Lake George. It was the first and only time my family, paternal grandparents, uncle, aunt, and cousin, took a vacation together outside of a mandatory, claustrophobic Passover hotel. Mostly, we saw each other on High Holidays. My father had a fraught relationship with his younger brother; my mother didn’t click with her in-laws, who shrank from the word “lobster” as if it were cancer while she couldn’t get enough. But there we were.
Here I am: on the left beside my first cousin. There is no date on the back of the photograph. I’m guessing August 1979. August 1980.
35 years. How reliable is my memory, how good? A few isolated details break through the fog, but questions loom. New information passed along later has penetrated my consciousness, become subsumed as fact. Secrets persist.
How does one stitch together a narrative from fragments from wisps, from disparate snippets of life real and imagined; flesh out a full picture when so much is either unknown or unknowable? It is inevitable, to fall prey to revisionism, tossing scraps into the pot of nostalgia for a comforting stew, even if the initial moment is anything but. One funnels an event through a rose-colored lens while another witness recasts the same moment through shadows, which is both subjective and prerogative: to reconstruct a past to forge a story, one that resonates with consistency, threads to a particular present. We choose our filters. Memory is fluid, not fixed. There is no absolute truth, only ever-shifting points of view.
The photo, however, is tangible. A form of proof. If nothing else, it’s a start.
The last you remember, you had cut yourself with the paring knife. Onions wept milky pus. Your husband handed you a towel. Not the monogrammed one, you said. Pale blue of your wedding. Not the one your grandmother appliquéd with drooping mushrooms. Not the one stained with tomato sauce. Not the one used to mop up the spilled bug spray. The bees would not budge from the window frames. They wanted excitement. Honey seeped out of the walls. You could slice all the way to the wax and see the larvae tucked like pearls. This was not as pleasant as it sounds.
- "Vampire" by Tina May Hall at The Collagist (the whole issue is stellar)
Ours is an era of transition, Michaels concedes the next class. He clears his throat. Uncertainty, however, cannot erase the past. Otherwise, what are we doing? He throws up that word—integrity! A few flippy gray curls graze his neck like he's forgotten the barber. He leaves out: how fucked we all are.
- "TK" by Sara Lippmann at Wigleaf
No one knew what to do when the lights went out. Some went to sleep because the lights were out anyways. Some went to bed but didn’t go to sleep. The time would go more quickly. Some ate the ice cream. The ones who were alone were mostly scared. Some ate the ice cream, but were scared anyways.
He spits.
You mean Jehovah’s Witness, he says, coming out of the bathroom. I had a classmate once who wouldn’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Wore burgundy bloomers and smelled like canned spaghetti; now, there’s a home life.
The B&B from our honeymoon was run by Jehovah’s, I say, but it is a digression. That couple serving blood pudding thick as pucks, just how you like it, have you seen a happier marriage? Their pamphlets warmed our bedside, glossy faces slid carelessly in the tub. You said you could live there forever, with your currants and clotted cream, never leave the countryside.
That’s because I assumed everyone was Catholic, he says, working a water pick.
I slide over on the bed.
My brothers played foosball. In my mother’s closet among party dresses suffocating in bags I’d hide while in the basement rods spun and missed. Sometimes I’d carry a jar of olives, but usually I kept my hands free in case the KKK should happen to hop the porch and catch the wink of chrome on our doorpost and torch it all down to reach me.
That’s reasonable. The Ku Klux Klan in suburban New Jersey, he says, toothpaste foaming.
I vow to try harder.
It was a game, I insist.
He spits.
You mean Jehovah’s Witness, he says, coming out of the bathroom. I had a classmate once who wouldn’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Wore burgundy bloomers and smelled like canned spaghetti; now, there’s a home life.
That’s because I assumed everyone was Catholic, he says, working a water pick.
I slide over on the bed.
Later, I tell him, they left notes. My brothers had this painstaking script, they were at the arcade, they wrote on long yellow pads, they landed roles in All My Sons, studied Mandarin, or so they said. It was a matter of faith. Our house howled from poor insulation. After school, I’d dive beneath their covers, cradling division tables and lozenges encased in snappy metal, waiting as the hours collapsed, my brothers fleshed in Ronald Reagan masks from the Land of Confusion video blaring all night on TV while I dreamed between asteroid sheets, alone in their empty twin beds.
I didn’t sign on for this pity party, he says, peeling knee socks. They are gold in the toe.
Wait, I say, fluffing a pillow. Thing is, I was ready. Word travels fast. Soon as people found out they wouldn’t stop coming. The neighbor’s cat would curl up on the sill, lick his paws as the boy down the street beat the brass knocker; kids from the late bus ravaged beds of daffodils; my brothers’ friends drew deli straws.
Now we’re talking, he says, propping onto an elbow. Now I’m ears.
We’d camp out on the roof or fill the bath or trail off in the fields behind the middle school, where the sledding hill met Devil’s Creek and my brothers and I released tadpoles after they’d sprung legs. Leaves we would salvage from each other’s hair then string them up, tracking pine needles, tracing soft chins, my fingers smoked stiff and chitinous—
What?
I roll toward him. It is instinctive. I am a moth, searching for a glint of something. Who doesn’t want approval? Never once was I punished or caught. Picture me: Silent as a prayer, splitting chicken breast from its kosher waxy rib, as if I hadn’t just been fucked four ways in the mouth.
Turn over, he says.
I’m telling you, I say, but face the wall anyway.
He licks my neck as if it were ice melt. I think of that cat scratching glass. Life is easy. Already I’m elsewhere, coin in a slot, a mercury ball shot through a maze of other people’s belongings, but tonight once it’s done I keep going, long past the fun—Jane, you wouldn’t know love if it hit you.
