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Don’t you dare call it chick-lit: these are women of depth, trouble and grime living in Twilight Zone-esque worlds of personal and social dysfunction.
Buy from the publisher.
Women in Strange Places: Stories
You'll see how: house-sitting turns into kidnapping all-too often; a woman confronts an old monster of the past; an alcoholic learns about recovery and acceptance through the mysterious events in a lake; a sexcapade diary reaches long into the future; a former prostitute is revisited by the past; a magician finds magic again through an unlikely confrontation; a woman "born bad" struggles to negotiate her conscience with her desire; would-be friends connect too late; and a pyromaniac gets away with fires courtesy of her police officer boyfriend -- for now.
Be ready for the women.
Excerpt
From the story "Raging Love, for wherever you are"
Stephen was the only person that made me worry about my future and my own sanity when I wasn’t around him. And I didn’t like it. It was a feeling that snuck up behind me slow, mammoth, like a shark coming up behind a small fish as it bared its teeth.
Like that shark, Stephen was the moving inevitable. I’d never fallen in love before. Sometimes when he wasn’t around I hoped I would never fall in love again. I couldn’t imagine shedding that madness and then putting it on for someone else. I couldn’t imagine belonging to anyone else.
I hated it when he didn’t call me to say hi or to tell me he missed me; anything to remind me that he was alright. When he had to work long nights I worried if he forgot to call. I worried something awful had happened to him. That what-if feeling was capable of dropping the temperature in my already empty bed by so many degrees. We had a wonderful thing going. I feared losing him, every night he had to work.
When we met he caught me running out of a house with my gas cans just as the house began to catch fire. He arrested me for arson and trespassing and a number of things, but midway on the ride to the police station he pulled over and said he couldn’t do it. He was a lover of fire too, but he could never bring himself to actually setting one. After we talked he told me he’d protect me from police investigations, so long as no one ever died or got hurt by what I did. He respected me too much to allow arrests to stop me.
I would meet him here and there on his routes. He would help me dispose of evidence and held on to any nice things I wanted to keep from the houses I torched. We talked about many things. He’d tell me I was a nice distraction from the boredom of his routes. Three months later we fell in love. The night we did, I invited him to come with me and watch a burn.
I made designs for him with the gas and some other neat little chemicals I had. I wrote his initials in flames into the wall of a hollow living room. He stared in awe as the chemicals glowed and then sparked alive. I loved that they distorted the material they rested on, the air around them, the chemical composition of what they were themselves – merely to represent him for a few gorgeous seconds.
Being without him drove me crazy. Feeling the weight of him next to me in bed was like being moored to an ultimate safety. Not having that feeling for more than one night made me feel lost. And on the night things went to hell, back in October, I hadn’t seen Stephen in almost a week. He got sent off to a training in Chicago.
I had to relax.
I put on tight black jeans and a thin, fitted black sweater. I went down into the plywood and stone basement and got my duffel, my gun, two gas cans, and four boxes of long-stem matches.
I drove a half-hour down to my preferred Southvale, where the history of the once artsy neighborhood was being erased by bulldozers to make room for condos. I planned on condos being my next project once they were up. But until then, I remained hung up on abandoned old houses.
There weren’t very many to choose from that night. If I hadn’t hesitated so much in the nights previous I probably would have found some good ones before they were dozed out.
I felt that it would be better for me to burn those houses. Better me than some idiot with a hardhat. The concept of eminent domain was a soft spot for me. I came from money. I was raised in a way that taught me that it had to be earned, never flaunted, and always given to those who needed it. Most people wouldn’t know I was rich just by looking at me.
It was only apparent through my house. I lived in a very nice house in a beautiful neighborhood. I earned it through my own business a few years before. It was nicely decorated because I loved it. My thoughts and my days were dedicated to it.
It was a gift to myself for my work, and for not needing to take anything from anyone else. I was about to add even more goodness to it because I planned to ask Stephen to move in with me when he got back from his trip.
I hated people and corporations with money who flaunted it, especially when the flaunting made everything look the same. When they distilled variety and history into perfection born from a template, I had to do something.
I found the right house at the desolate corner of Prince and Turner. It was a small one-story house and it was begging to go. It looked like an animal that had been shot and was still standing, purely out of instinct to live, even if living meant standing around with a mortal wound.
With the gun tucked firmly down the back of my pants I moved under the webbing of DO NOT CROSS tape around the property. I had to make sure there was no one inside first. The house had stone steps leading to a small porch, and black iron sconces on either side of the front door. I grabbed the doorknob and twisted it, surprised to find it unlocked. Inside it smelled like mildew and human shit.
I pulled my gun and held the flashlight under it. “Who’s in here?” I called. “Answer me right now!”
I walked through an empty living room with holes gouged into the walls and the floor. Every step I took creaked. I was very careful, placing one foot directly in front of the other. I then passed through a small den and then the kitchen. It was reduced to a cascade of tiles on the floor, and exposed bones of tubing in the wall.
There was a door at the end of the opposite hall, across from the bathroom, that led to the basement. I opened it wide and aimed the beam into black room. The wooden steps were long collapsed, and only left behind part of a landing and part of a splintered rail.
“Who is in here?” I shouted down. I heard nothing in response.
I sneezed. As I turned away to close the door, I thought I heard something shift down there. It was a very slight sound, and could have been anything – a draft moving through sheets of plastic for all I knew – but it was subtle enough to make me aim the beam down again. I inched my way into the doorway a little bit, getting to where the landing frayed off.
“Hello!”
I waited in the high-pitched silence. I felt like I was standing at the bottom of a pool at night. My heart was starting to go faster than my breath was able to accommodate.
I didn’t hear anything again, so I backed away slowly and shut the door. I walked out to the car to get my things.
The gas was the color of honey in the flashlight’s beam. I coated the front rooms first, watching the old thirsty floor drink it.
I thought of Stephen and the way he would laugh in his sleep.
I retraced my steps with the second gas can, dousing the walls and the window frames, blessing everything like a priest with honeyed holy water.
Stephen should have been there to see the peace of it all. I was a shadow moving among shadow. The only sounds were my breath and the splashing gas. I was there to hurt no one or nothing. It was the same feeling I’d get when I was with him.
As a stress reliever, fire had always held my hand, but now more than ever I needed it as a literal expression of me and the raging love I had inside me, that scared me at every turn. I knew the blaze in that house would be big and beautiful. It would remind me that it was okay to love.
I lit the matches fast and dropped them on the floor as I went through each room. The flames started to catch and I walked around. As they fed and fucked one another I had forgotten about the holes in the floor. My leg went straight through one, mere feet from the front door. I hit my knee on my outside leg incredibly hard, and the feeling of the floor having disappeared from under me had left me disoriented.
The heat and light grew around me. I watched as flames crawled closer to me, first following the path of the gas and then going where they pleased with their strength. I bent forward and tried to pull my leg from the hole without catching my hair on fire. I freed myself and stood up. The box of matches went up in flames behind me.
I ran to my car down the block. I was smiling, and fearing the inevitable roar which I knew that for a moment, even though I’d parked half a block away, would push its heat onto my face like an engulfing kiss.
I leaned against my car and squeezed at my knee. The house glowed and fell into itself for about two minutes before a massive explosion happened. It was perfect. There was a split second where the back and front sides of the house expanded out simultaneously. Flames squeezed out of the side windows to make the broken glass and ancient bottles on the ground look like glitter.
Black smoke twisted into the air. I was confused yet elated. The house couldn’t have had any gas still running to it. It didn’t make sense that the house would explode like that, even with all the gasoline I used.
The next day I slept late. I woke in the afternoon to do laundry and get the smell of smoke out of my pillowcases.
I watched a news-at-five teaser about the Southvale burn. It was the fifth one that month and authorities were still investigating. I smiled.
Authorities were always investigating.
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