Every weekday during our Kickstarter drive, we'll publish a new excerpt from Unstuck #3. If you enjoy what we do—or if you just want a big pile of autographed Rick Moody swag—please join our Kickstarter campaign.

"The Undependable Global Positioning System 1.2: Icelandic Module," by Rick Moody

You have chosen the Icelandic Module of the Undependable Global Positioning System, which will enable you to fail to grasp your exact position in the country known as Iceland, or in any other country, should you elect to use Icelandic coordinates while travelling in Lesotho, Malaysia, etc. The Icelandic Module is bilingual, with both Icelandic and English texts (see practice guidance module below), and is a product of Undependable Global Positioning, LLC, a multinational entertainment provider incorporated in the State of Delaware, with corporate offices in Hoboken, NJ, and Springfield, MA. We are not liable for harm or injury during the use of this device. 

Where to?

1.   Við erum lítið land, með miklum expanses ljós og rými. Á veturna myrkri, eilíft myrkur, þegar það er bara ljóma hádegið að benda á möguleika á sólarljósi, er það oft raunin að í andstæðar skíðamaður norðurljósin shimmer á sjóndeildarhringnum, sérstaklega þegar þú flýja útjaðri OKKAR stærsta borg, Reykjavík. Margir hafa villst á meðan reynt var að ná þeim norðurljósin, en að reyna að koma til hvíldar í himneska insubstantiality þeirra. Í raun, það er hugtak, hér á landi, drukkinn á magnetosphere, sem bendir á móti okkar ferðamanna sem eru eftirtektarverð fyrir einn-sinnaður stunda á norðurljósin. Það væri fínn staður til að byrja ferð þína. (We are a little country, with great expanses of light and space. During the winter dark when there is only a glow at midday to suggest the possibility of sunshine, it is often the case that there are aurorae shimmering on the horizon, especially when you escape to the outskirts of our largest city, Reykjavik. Many have become lost while attempting to rush into the womblike comfort of the Northern Lights, while attempting to dwell in that mysterious, shimmering insubstantiality. There is a term here in Iceland, drunk on the magnetosphere, which suggests tourists who are single-minded in pursuit of the ionic phenomena. Now begins your journey.)*

* Icelandic being a language mostly unmodified since medieval times, there are necessarily false equivalences in these translations. We do not guarantee that the two linguistic renderings bear any resemblance to one another. For a complete Iceland text, go to www.ugps.com/iceland/complete.

2. Þú veist hvernig á flugvellinum á Keflavík sögðu þér að þú ættir ekki að aka burt af vegum með rauðu nema þú varst að leigja fjórhjóladrifs ökutæki? Við held ekki að þú ættir að hafa áhyggjur af því að svo mikið. Það er bara svona hlutur sem vátryggjendum krefjast þess. Þú ert ekki að fara að sjá the óspilltur wilderness ef þú færð ekki út þar í innri og hafa sumir gaman. Svo hvers vegna ertu ekki að fara á undan og slökkva hringvegur áður við komum til Reykjavíkur, því það er bara annað European City einhvern veginn, og þeir eru alltaf blaring ö frá öllum verslunum, það er allt Björk allra tíma í Reykjavík, og þú getur notað allt að borg mjög hratt. Ég var sérstaklega vonsvikinn með typpið safninu sem fer eftir nafni Íslands Phallological safnið. Þú vilt hugsa stað eins sem hefði meira áhrifamikill víðáttan. The hvalur hani var frekar stór, ég viðurkenni það, en þegar þú færð niður til að horfa á skordýra penises, það er bara ekki mikið að tala um. Reykjavík má klárast í dag eða tvo, treystu mér. Það er bara of mikið steypu. (You know how at the airport rental agency in Keflavik they told you that you shouldn’t drive off the roads marked red on the map unless you were renting a four-wheel-drive vehicle? We at UGPS Iceland think otherwise. Don’t worry about that so very much. Don’t worry about the insurers. You’re not going to see the pristine wilderness if you don’t get out there into the interior and have some fun. Go ahead and turn off the ring road before we get to Reykjavik. You can use up Reykjavik rather quickly. I was particularly disappointed with the penis museum (the Iceland Phallological Museum). You’d think a place like that would have a more impressive display. The whale phallus is large, I admit it, but in the case of the insect penises, also on display, there’s just not that much to talk about.)

3. The mikill hlutur óður um ferðamannastaður heitir Gullfoss er að það bara er ekki að margir þar. Eitt skipti sem ég fór þangað eftir lokun, og það var enginn í kring, en rekki af póstkort mynd var enn standa út að framan, svo ég hjálpaði bara mig nokkrar. (The great thing about the tourist destination called Gullfoss is that there just aren’t that many tourists there. One time I went there after closing time, and there was no one around at all. There was only a rack of picture postcards standing out front. I helped myself to a few. More importantly, no one was guarding the waterfall itself, which is the biggest in Europe. You could walk down there and have a look without interference. It was one of the few times the incessant nattering of my brain became inaudible to me. You have not been brought this far, to Gullfoss, just to look at a waterfall. You have been brought this far to see Langjokull, the glacier, over there in the distance. Maybe you have seen the occasional glacier in your time, but you have not beheld the majesty and strangeness of Icelandic glaciers. These glaciers are more ancient, more merciless, more heedless of mammalian affairs than any others outside of the Himalayas, so why don’t you just head out in that direction now, toward the glacier.)

4. Það er rétt, er a einhver fjöldi af þessum vegum unpaved.

5. Vissir þú koma gönguferðir stígvélum? Þar sem við fáum nær jöklinum í þessu insufferable hálf-ljós, er það líklegt að puny leiguna bíl, Yaris þinn er að fara til að mistakast. (Did you bring hiking boots? Because as we get closer to the glacier, in this insufferable half-light, it’s likely that your puny rental Yaris is going to fail. Even though it has a standard transmission and you are trying to use the lower gears, the Yaris is not designed for the roads nearing Langjokull, a terrain devoid of farmhouses or anything else man-made. It’s just you and the glacier now. So maybe you will want to pull over and put on the hiking boots. And gather into a rucksack your duct tape, jacknife, and protein snacks.)

6. Það er satt að það er mikið af djamma á Íslandi. Íslendingar sem eru áskilin fólk með þurra vitsmuni og mildi, eins og að hafa góða aðila, og það virðist að þriðja hvert íslensk unglingur byrjar í hljómsveit, og svo mikið af þeim, í æsku þeirra. (It’s true that there is a lot of hard partying in Iceland! Icelanders are a reserved people, with a dry wit and an austere gentleness, but they also like to have a good party, and it does seem that every third Icelander starts a band, and so a lot of them, in their youth, spend most of the weekends in the city watching bands and abusing whatever cocktail of drugs and alcohol they can get their hands on. We have to admit reluctantly that the mapping agency to which we subcontracted the mapping of the roads around the glacier declared insolvency last weekend. Later, we saw these guys passed out in the public square near Laugavegur, apparently having celebrated their bankruptcy at length. As a result, the mapping around the glacier, where you are presently located, is kind of bad.) 

7. Sjá, í fjarska, nú, hvernig ljósin eru undulatory, hvernig ljósin eru öll scorbutic, leyfa þér að vera niðursokkinn í þeirra mömmu-faðma, þeirra Bear-merja, þeirra Maronite, mariculous þeirra, þeirra mind dendriform. 

8. Bókmenntir okkar er ríkt með sögum. Foundational skjöl okkar eru sögur, þar sem menn sem heitir Erik drepa aðra menn með ása, insuring sem þeir eru herleiddir til afskekktum stöðum, og hver þá bægja ströndum Norður meginlandi Ameríku, sem þeir nafn Grænland í því skyni að stuðla að samkomulagi þar. (Our literature is rich with sagas. Our foundational documents are sagas in which men named Erik slay other men, usually with axes, insuring that they are subsequently exiled to remote places, for example, the coast of the North American continent, which they name Greenland, in order to promote settlement back home. It is unlikely that, while you are driving in the outback, you will encounter any axe-murderers, but all Icelanders, more or less, are related to all other Icelanders, so if you should happen to encounter a living person, which is doubtful, that person might be related to the Erik renowned for his axe-murdering. Drive away from him. But under no circumstances should you attempt to drive your rental Yaris through a stream.)

9. Jæja, fá út og ganga þá, ekki vera lily-livered og veikburða, þú puny manna.

10. Það er satt um álfa. Sumir af the sterkur, og sjálf-úr Íslendinga, krakkar sem geta farið út í eyðimörkina og lifa fyrir daga á súpu úr soðnum mosa, trúa þessir gaurar á álfa, og hefur verið þekkt fyrir að byggja, kílómetra frá einhverju manna bústað, sætur lítill álfur hús sem lítur út eins og eitthvað sem gæti verið hannað af svuntu-þreytandi hausfrau frá Indianapolis fyrir vinum sínum með safna Mania, nema að þessi álfur hús úr tré, í stað þess að vera úr Bisphenol A í Shanghai . Sem þýðir: að álfur hús þú ert að sjá núna er ekki ofskynjanir. (And it is true about the elves. Some of the most robust and self-made of Icelanders, guys who can go out into the wilderness and live for days on a soup made of boiled mosses, these guys believe in the elves, and have been known to construct, miles from any human habitation, a cute little elf house that looks like something designed by an apron-wearing Indianapolis hausfrau for her friends with collecting mania. The elf house you are seeing right now, in the middle of nowhere, is not, therefore, a hallucination brought on by exposure and fatigue.)

11. Vissir þú að koma þeim orku snakk?

12. Vissir þú að koma með nægilegt framboð af vatni? Þú ert tugi kílómetra frá næsta bæ, en það er hægt að jökull ferð mun koma í gegnum heyra í vor. (In spring, there will be some glacial melt.)

13. Hvers vegna ekki bara að keyra bílinn inn í þessi gljúfri nálægt Bláfell? Þú fékk tryggingar á bílinn, ekki satt? Svo sem gefur skít? Vissir þú að á 19. öld var munnur helvítis orðrómur að vera á Íslandi? Það var orðrómur til vera einn af eldfjöllum á Íslandi. Svo þú ert, fyrir alla intents og tilgangi, í helvíti, sem er líklega ótrúlega öðruvísi, segja, PS 321 skólahverfi í Park Slope, Brooklyn, þar sem þú getur fengið fjórar mismunandi tegundir af fryst á fjórum mismunandi hornum? (Why not just drive the car into that ravine near Blafell? You got the insurance on the car, right? Who gives a shit? Did you know that in the 19th century the mouth of Hell was rumored to be in Iceland? It was one of the volcanoes in Iceland. So you are, for all intents and purposes, in Hell, which is remarkably different from, say, the PS 321 school district in Park Slope, where at a certain intersection you can get frozen yogurt on all four corners. Do you feel the folly of your lifestyle now? I know a guy in Brooklyn who once applied a superheated butter knife to his own manhood in order to forestall compulsive sexual activity. I am betting that no one who comes this way on foot, to Blafell, in order to see the dance of the Northern Lights, would be willing to apply a superheated butter knife to his manhood. Lay yourself down on the lichened steppe and feel what the earth feels like. Now you can listen in a way you have never listened. In fact, the Icelandic module of the UGPS is equipped with a special Silence Playback function that will allow you to record and play the ambient silence of extremely remote locations such as this one. We have a special demonstration recording from Snaefellsjokull, where the cliff walls are especially high.)

14. Bless, Gangi þér vel, og vera viss um að heimsækja okkur í sólinni Íslandi aftur. (Like all UGPS modules, the Iceland module is equipped with a Last Will and Testament flash-recording capability, and a memoir-writing subroutine, which you can use if you have enough time on your hands, and are bored with unheated stew that you have been eating out of a can. At least now you do not have to worry about whether to go to that dinner party in Williamsburg. You can sing Icelandic drinking songs, or, if you like, you can dig up some of that Hakarl, which is basking shark that has been buried in the ground for four or five months. It has a strong ammonia flavor.)

Read the rest of this story in Unstuck #3.

Every weekday during our Kickstarter drive, we'll publish a new excerpt from Unstuck #3. If you enjoy what we do—or if you just want a pair of deadly-stylish Unstuck sunglasses—please join our Kickstarter campaign.

"L'Enfant Du Paradis," by Kellie Wells

I fled the womb prematurely—tossed from the pot, truth be told, when I’d just reached a simmer, coming out half-cooked. She who had grown impatient and expelled me took the trouble, however, to swaddle me in the severed toe of a stocking, and she dropped me into a teacup like a lump of sugar and delivered me to the rear entrance of the theatre with this note: Fell from the moon. Please feed.

The manager of The Funambules, who trafficked theatrically in the willing gullibility of others, was briefly bedazzled by the idea of a demitasse of wriggling moonlight in his midst, and he turned me over in his hand, gurgled at me soothingly, My little bumblebee, l’enfant de lune, and then his eyes turned to glittering ingots, kaching!, when he saw in my miniaturization, my tomthumbery, great stage potential, and he flim-flammed, by way of a promise of steady employment, a part-time contortionist newly arrived to town, persuaded her to care for me and silence my shrill bleat, which she did, cleverly, with an eyedropper full of the nectar of flowers that suckle the hummingbirds. As I hungrily cheeped, Nathalie sang to me, Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot, prête-moi ta plume pour écrire un mot. Sometimes for Pierrot she substituted the name the manager had given me: Limoges, fragile little Limoges. But Nathalie feared I would succumb to my underdoneness, or, were I somehow to survive, would remain only a thimbleful and be crushed under the madding feet, so she found a charitable soul willing to help and this Samaritan delivered me, fortuitously, across the ocean and into the hands of Dr. Teleborian, an ambitious pediatrician who longed to be the salvation of sickly infants.

As I was not a tiny, wingèd, vibratory creature, I could not be sustained by the sugar of rutilant flora for long. Dr. Teleborian could see that what I most needed in order to finish ripening into a sustainable boy was sterile warmth, and so he designed a glass oven that would provide shelter to prematurely evicted tenants like me and encourage our tiny hearts to blossom, help us gain the necessary amplitude for living. (Later, upon hearing the story of Hansel and Gretel, I would urge the siblings to leap willingly into the witch’s oven, where I believed they would be baked into adults and made ready to return to the world, which they would find hostile and disagreeable of course, but so it is. Until then, they would be safe from its rough vagaries in the warm, dark oven of childhood.)

The prognosis for a featherweight such as myself was not at all favorable before Dr. Teleborian designed the baby hatchery, and hospitals were skeptical about the true efficacy of such a contraption, so the doctor, soon to be the savior of half-baked foundlings everywhere, wisely decided to leave it up to the public, which always decides in favor of a spectacle after all, and he put us on display at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, next to the cyclorama that promised all on board a Trip to the Moon as it flapped its wings vertiginously. 

Gawkers flocked and marveled at the tiny human beetles on their backs, kicking their twig-legs in the air, in defiance of their puny beetlehood, and sentimental spectators cooed at the hourly feedings. I believe some secretly rooted for our demise so as to feel they’d gotten their nickel’s worth, but there were also those mothers or future mothers who wept upon our terrariums and howled with such sincere vigor that this became my inaugural memory—rain pinging against the roof—which explains why I have always felt a fond stirring in my chest during a thunderstorm. 

Dr. Teleborian later confided to me in a letter that Leon Czolgosz, lonely, rumpled, aimless anarchist, possessing the brooding and solitary mien of one orphaned at birth, had visited the baby hatchery regularly, taking a particular shine to me. He’d tapped on my window with a look of liberation in his eyes and broken into a sob only moments before pulling a revolver from his coat and assassinating President McKinley at the Temple of Music. I recall a vague feeling of incipient sorrow, and I do not doubt that it was on this afternoon that my empath’s attraction to desolation sprang into being.

Despite this eclipsing national tragedy, we created such a sensation at the Expo that Dr. Teleborian set up at Coney Island a permanent sideshow of Les Enfants du Paradis, as we came to be known, alone in our glass mangers, shepherded into the world by grim-lipped nurses in stiff hats. Children screamed in the background, lofted into the air by a rickety roller coaster, and I grew anxiously, millimeter by millimeter, the smell of spun sugar reminding me of that first and saving supper. At night, I gazed out the window at the welling moon as it dribbled light upon the water.

Being a sickly spectacle is, whatever the outcome, necessarily a short-lived career, and so, my first performance a completed success—I lived and plumped, though I remained a runt loaf, was the toast of medical journals and also a shining symbol to the mothers of ailing infants of natal odds overcome—I soon found myself unemployed and back on the other side of the pond, inhaling once again the greasepaint of my beginning, wrapped in torn tulle and cradled in the worn cap of a gendarme, lying contentedly in the prop closet at the theatre. I was made the charge of that part-time contortionist who had saved me, dear Nathalie. She was elated to see I was less comfortably cradled in the palm of her hand, and she was pleased to have steady work at last and a captive, if diminutive, audience. She stretched the eager taffy of her body, twisted it into cheerful shapes, and made me howl with infant delight. She fed me crusts sopped in warm milk from the tap-dancing goats, the pickled eggs of skylarks, and a gruel she concocted from the vendors’ confections, and she let me chew on the chiffon sash of her costume. Such a diet was sure to make of me an antic and jovial fellow who could balance himself on the fine rope of a silk thread, she thought, perhaps make of me even an aerialist or a star-eyed mime who conjures hilarity and sorrow from thin air. I only wish Maman had fed me such gay cuisine, Limoges, said Nathalie with a distant dreaminess as she lay on her stomach and rounded her body into a C, piloted each spoonful into my mouth with her foot. 

All the Funambules took an interest in me. I was their kith, chipped from the moon (which they believed to be their country of origin), and I walked first on my hands and then on a briskly rolling ball and finally, grudgingly, on two feet across a dull, unmoving landscape.

When I grew to the height of a bucket, I began to juggle: first buttons, then boysenberries, then tree toads, who, although cooperative, were so dizzy afterwards they lay on their backs, paddled the air, then quickly fell to snoring. My industry pleased the stage manager, who waggled his unpruned shrub of a moustache at Nathalie and appeased her considerable sweet tooth with a lusciously pink three-tiered torte, the very color of the silk pantaloons the danseuse who pirouetted on the backs of galloping pigs wore, pink as a hungry tongue. 

As I gained sovereignty over my modestly lengthening limbs, each performer attempted to recruit me for his specialty: there was the man with the feathered legs whose stovepipe hat no gale force could knock from his bald head—Abraham Chicken he was christened; the twins, Amelie and Garance, conjoined at the wrist, who inhaled so deeply and widely that they flattened the flesh of their abdomens into a sail, leapt in the air with the grace of sugar gliders, and lilted like a slip of paper to the ground; the catgirl, Yvette, who sprang onto window ledges and ignored everyone she met; Madame Mondieu, the woman who read tragedies from the newspaper aloud, turning its pages with her toes, as she balanced a corpulent man atop the palm of each hand; the tumblers who somersaulted like blown tumbleweeds up walls but toppled to the ground whenever they tried to traverse a level surface; and Nathalie, of course, who looped herself into words, one after the other, contorting into a story, her body’s memoir: There… once… was… a… girl… with… arms… so… long… they… required… their… own… beds… their… own… places… at… the… table… 

At the end of each performance, she twisted my feet, angled my legs, dotted the i with my head, and held me up to the audience: Le Fin; and there was something about the sight of my stunted boy’s limbs cursively knotted for the spectators’ entertainment that caused them to cheer and burst into tears and toss lilies at our feet. That first night, Nathalie found a birdcage full of the finest bonbons at her dressing table, and every night after a new and enchanting confection.

Read the rest of this story in Unstuck #3.

Every weekday during our Kickstarter drive, we'll publish a new excerpt from Unstuck #3. If you enjoy what we do—or if you just want a pair of deadly-stylish Unstuck sunglasses—please join our Kickstarter campaign.

"The Curtain," by Lindsay Hunter

The man behind the counter had urine-yellow nails and a lady’s ring on his pinky, the stone pink and heart-shaped. The band was loose, that stone spinning round and round, and a painful looking knob of knuckle kept it from falling to the floor, where it’d likely be lost forever among the doll’s legs and old magazines and stained postcards and old packets of little-girl undies.

Can I try this on? she asked him. Tried to work up some passion for him—maybe the gray, pubeish hair thatched at his neck? Maybe the thick veins in his arms? The small neglected gut might be good for some pity something or other…but no. And that was fine. Can’t win ‘em all. She held a purple camisole between her thumb and first finger, dangling it. It was sexy because it was lacey and barely strapped, but it smelled like everything else smelled in this place, this second- or third- or hundred-hand shop: car fumes, feet, breath, and if you were lucky a bright choke of air freshener. 

You can, the man said. He was working a wad of something behind the sharp lines of his mouth. Gum, or some kind of chew. He had the mouth of a turtle born the year Jesus was, his glasses were scratched into a fog, he was wearing, she could now see, some kind of chopped up blondie of a wig that was too tight and was maybe why he put so much into working that cud in his mouth. Focus on this instead of that. He was a real dumbass, she thought, the words coming to her like old friends. 

Dressing room? she nudged.

But she already knew where the dressing room was, knew there were two rooms at the way back of the store, stalls really, one closed off by a white curtain, the other closed off by a curtain dotted with strawberries, both guarded by a stuffed coyote stricken with mange. Thirty-four dollars, marked down from sixty-eight. 


Read the rest of this story in Unstuck #3.

Every weekday during our Kickstarter drive, we'll publish a new excerpt from Unstuck #3. If you enjoy what we do—or if you just want a pair of deadly-stylish Unstuck sunglasses—please join our Kickstarter campaign.

"Sob Story," by Leslie What

Thirteen finalists sit onstage in folding chairs arranged in a V formation, white tissues scattered like crushed roses beside their shoes. Janelle’s chair faces the audience and marks the point of the V upstage. From her vantage point she has watched the field dwindle from about a hundred on Friday evening to the dozen who have survived Sunday morning cuts. The formation has evolved from ten rows of ten to this V as contestants have been “tapped out” by a circulating judge. The eliminated contestant folds up his or her chair and carries it off the stage and out of view. Janelle’s chair has been center stage since the beginning. Luck of the draw got her into this coveted position; skill has kept her here. She’s the number-two-ranked wailer in a world of sorrow. Only Numero Uno, downstage and center right, sits between her and the prize. His name is Ernesto and he was once her Numero Uno, before an ugly divorce. 

While most contestants dress business formal or casual Friday to stress their professionalism, there is always a token masochist or two painted into skintight vinyl and strappy stilettos. The tattooed lady to Janelle’s immediate left is this contest’s token masochist. 

“My blisters have blisters,” says the tattooed lady to Janelle, which makes Janelle sad (a good thing, for the purposes of competition) because blistered feet prove you’ve been somewhere. Janelle is going nowhere. She’s spent yet another weekend sitting in a chair, rehashing what’s already happened, beating herself up for every stupid mistake she’s ever made, feeling sorry for each indignity remembered from her twenty-nine years on the planet.

The competition—Blubberfest Northwest (BFNW)—is a feeder event in the U.S. crying marathon network. The rules are simple: the one who cries the longest, cries the hardest, wins. The top three finishers will represent the region at Nationals in Baltimore. 

Contestants weep, whimper, blow their noses, wipe their eyes. The rules allow them to go five seconds (about the time it takes for a drawn-out sigh) without visible sorrow. Cheating is ignored, unless you’re caught, in which case the judges have unlimited discretion to ignore the infraction, issue a penalty, or—if they’re feeling petty—disqualify you. Some contestants cut themselves or twist off skin tags or avoid dental care—anything to maintain a constant edgy state of discomfort. Janelle is old-school, preferring a strategy that depends on a firm grasp of a technique known as psycho-traumatic regurgitation. It’s more satisfying to troll the inner depths of despair than to use cheap parlor tricks like adding vinegar to Visine.

In this round she has sat for nearly an hour, knee-to-knee, back straight, chin up. Her eyes brim without spilling; she can tell a teardrop is forming from the pressure of the lids against her lashes. If she can hold that teardrop in the lacrimal lake for another thirty seconds, give or take, she’s sure to earn bonus points for style. Tear suppression is one of the more difficult feats and one of her signature skills; she’s hoping for a hefty point award. 

Statistically, more women than men compete in these marathons. Statistically, more men than women win. Janelle knows this to be true because she was formerly married to a statistician. Contestant #7. Numero Uno. Janelle is Contestant #49. Ernesto is her square root. Her ex is the only competitor to best her consistently. He’s ranked first in the world and has won more contests than she has entered. Acknowledging this statistic adds a few easy seconds of distress. Ernesto leads the field by ten points, not an insurmountable number, but a slight advantage is still an advantage. Ernesto is the handsomest, most charismatic man she has ever met, excluding her father. 

More than anyone else here, she deserves this win. Ernesto is a heartless prick who wants to see her lose much more than he cares about winning. Unlike her, he doesn’t need the money. A cousin he didn’t even know just died and left him a fortune. He must sense that she is thinking about him; he cocks his head enough that she can see the curl of his grimace, which, from where she’s sitting, looks exactly like a grin.

There are three kinds of tears: basal, reflex and psychic. Each type of tear has its own chemical composition. Basal tears are the normal salty lubricant that coats the eye and protects it from disease. Reflex tears, with their salad dressing of sugars and proteins and urea, fight injuries and allergens. Psychic tears are those tears earned by suffering, and they are richly nourished with hormones and potassium and manganese and protein. Ernesto relies on reflex crying. Psychic tears are Janelle’s forte. As luck would have it, she’s PMS this week and everything seems that much worse.

The tattooed lady, AKA Contestant #52, rakes her forearm with high-polished red fingernails. The blood drops that appear increase her agitation. She’s looking good, meaning she’s wailing like a madwoman. So many terrible things are associated with blood that it tugs a few tears from Janelle, what professionals call an “associative push.” You hate to give anyone an associative push if you can avoid it, but no one can keep track of all the triggers. Except, perhaps, Ernesto, whose diary reads like a spreadsheet.

But even someone as controlling as Ernesto can’t control her memories, her feelings. Janelle cannot forget discovering her father after his suicide, the stain of blood on his shirt, the sticky cold clot that attached to her fingers. He knew she’d be the one to find him after school while her mother was still at work. He knew it was the best way to get back at her for talking to the social worker. He knew he’d be the one people felt sorry for. Intellectually she knows her father was a damaged man, but here’s the beauty of it: emotion rules intellect. The memory of her father can’t be washed away by tears, by therapy, by logic, not even by love.

Thank God.  

Even if the rest of her life had been perfect she could have gone all day competing on the single memory of finding him dead. 

Spectators have paid a hundred bucks to be crammed into Portland’s Rose Quarter on the hottest weekend of the year. Quite a bargain for this much live entertainment. Unfortunately, the air conditioner has been on the fritz since Saturday evening. Competitors complained that the portable fans were drying cheeks and eyes, but everyone has toughed it out. Kind of gratifying, actually, to see the audience suffer. The heat has bonded competitor and spectator, given the layman a sense of what it’s like to sit uncomfortably on stage for days on end, and made the competitors empathetic to the plight of those who can only stand by and watch.
Janelle’s eyes sting from the way she’s held them open to girdle her tears. The judging panel confers, but before it reaches a decision and announces her bonus, there’s a scream and a cry of “Oh my God! She’s had a heart attack. Help!” Even the judges lose their focus in the rush of activity: uniformed medics appear from the wings, disappear into the crowd, and reappear pushing a large woman on a little gurney. A siren approaches from the north. The medics perform chest compressions and hook up their patient to oxygen and an IV. A man cries, “Mama! Mama!” There are wannabe wailers in every audience but this may be the first time that a spectator will make The Oregonian’s front page. 

Her bonus is forgotten in the pandemonium. A tear spills, another follows. Her distress at losing the points is real.

Ernesto turns his head, ever so slightly, just enough to let her see his calculated, neutral expression. He could kiss you so deeply you forgot you’d lose your job if you were late one more time. They trained together when they were an item, watched disasters on YouTube and volunteered to bring coffee for families of patients enrolled in hospice. He played her perfectly. He is her soulmate. She is not his. That’s the problem. 

The final thirteen are exhausted, but getting this close to the end provides a temporary boost. They’ve been at this all weekend, taking their thrice-a-day allotted breaks for nutrition, elimination, and power naps. They’ve cried through morning coffee, through nightcaps, and through medical emergencies. They’ve cried through phone calls with invalid mothers, through memos from stressed-out bosses, through hunger pangs and tingling hands and feet. They are allowed to take medication for headaches and sciatica, though any good marathoner defers treatment for fear of being disqualified for falling asleep. Not to mention the belief that a little pain never hurt anyone.

The tattooed lady yawns, which might be real or might be a sneaky attempt to knock out the competition, because yawning makes you forget about crying. Contestant #14 catches the yawn and before he can stop himself, he’s rubbing his eyes and yawning again. He’s lost in the yawn. The circulating judge clocks the time and signals the referee and taps #14 on the shoulder.

#14 hits his forehead with his palm and says, “Darn it!” He’s a new competitor, a good sport, who should feel proud to have gotten this far. He has a bright future ahead of him. #14 picks up his chair, folds it, and does a hangdog exit to the traps.  He bows and waves to the cheering crowd as both he and the chair are lowered beneath the stage. 

It kills you to get this close and be tapped out, and all because you lost your focus for a moment. You learn to take comfort knowing you can use the humiliation for the next contest. Janelle suppresses a yawn, suppresses thinking about suppressing the yawn. She stares at the stork bites on Ernesto’s neck, his only visible flaw, to keep her juices flowing. She sees him reach into a pocket and bend an elbow to blow his nose. He’s not the technical player she is and is probably snorting cayenne. He must know she’s watching him and she can almost see him doing the calculations in his head. What is she thinking about? How’s she holding up? How can he make her remember the pleasure and not the pain? 

It’s clear that he’s severed the string that once attached them, while she’s clutching a cord that’s gone slack. Why can’t she let go? Here, at least, in the throes of competition, this inequity is a good thing.  It fuels her sadness. Ernesto underestimates her. Always has. Tears spill over her eyelids and splash her cheek. She’s crying an unnavigable river. She’s sick of coming in second, a sentiment that is good for another bout of tears.

#14 is up on the JumboTron. “I’ve always been bullied,” he says. “The other kids called me a crybaby, but who’s laughing now?” Everyone gets an exit interview after being tapped out. The fallen confess in detail about the horrors and humiliations that led them to compete. It’s a vicarious thrill to hear about other people’s sorrow. If you’re good, you find an associative push. If you’re an amateur, you just feel superior. Though nobody wants to give away his strategy, the loser who is voted (by applauseometer) to have the worst life can still earn a consolation prize of five thousand dollars, so there’s an incentive to tell all (or lie) and become an audience darling. Some contestants never go all the way, yet still earn a living with consolation prizes. Milkers, Ernesto calls them.  Go big or go home.

Read the rest of this story in Unstuck #3.

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"Armstrong," by Patrick Somerville

We moved into our new offices on a Thursday and they burned down completely around 3:00, so we were out of the new offices and back into the old offices on Friday morning. Armstrong was the one who started the fire, I think. I saw him messing around with the shredder after I got back from lunch, and then later I could hear him spraying WD-40 into it, and we all know how those things can spark up and get overheated. When I saw him outside after the evacuation he was sitting in the back of the ambulance with the oxygen mask and his hair was sticking straight up. I didn’t say anything to Fred or Gwen or any of the others because I need Armstrong, even though he’s an idiot, and I actually like the old offices better anyway.

“Let’s get going,” says my dad. “We’ve gotta be there by two, Val said.”

“This isn’t normal,” I say.

“She wants to do it.”

“That doesn’t make it normal.”

“It does for us. Today it’s normal.”

We leave the house, and Dad asks if he can drive my car. He always does this. His is stuck inside of his garage because the garage door doesn’t work anymore, and he never even intimates that he is going to fix it, and his nice 2005 Nissan Maxima is going to waste. I agree to let him drive, and one block later, after he runs over a pedestrian crossing sign and wildly guides the car back to the road, I make him pull over in a 7-11 parking lot and we switch. At least he admits that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing out there anymore. He just calmly pulls the car in and we switch and that’s that. No discussion. Maybe this is why he doesn’t care about the door.

At Valerie’s house we attend the funeral of her hamster solemnly and have cheese and crackers afterward, at the wake. The total attendance of the funeral and the wake is three. Me, Dad, and Valerie.

“So Val,” I say to her. “There’s this guy at work.”

“Oh yeah?” she says. She’s usually up for things like this. She’s not at all bitter about being by herself, and besides, I don’t often try to set her up. She is beautiful, and I love her to death, but she is strange, and needs someone who’s right for her. I think of her as a fully realized individual, but I have also concluded that it’s hard for fully realized individuals in this world. Right now she is wearing black pajama pants, a black t-shirt, black socks, a black fanny-pack, and she has a black scarf tied around her head. She has crumbs from the crackers all over her chest, and is watching me, smiling.

“What’s he like?”

“He’s about five-five, not exactly bald,” I say to start. Best to be honest.

“Okay.”

“He loves animals like you.” I am thinking of the time Armstrong brought the fishbowl into the office to liven up the third floor break room and then completely forgot about the fish. It got ugly. One day I went in there and found Diane Hodgkins reaching in by hand, picking out the fish and dropping them into a Ziploc. She was crying. 

“That’s good,” she says.

“The most important thing,” I say, “is that I can just feel the good inside of him. You know? When you’re walking past someone and you can just feel it?” This is completely true. Armstrong gives off something, just like Val. I love him to death. Now he’s divorced and he hardly gets to see his kids because they live in California, and I want—no, need—something good to happen to him, too. My sister is something good.

“That’s a sweet endorsement, actually,” says Val. “That makes me want to meet him.” She removes a curry mint from her fanny pack and puts it into her mouth.

“That makes me want to meet him, too,” says Dad.

Val’s hamster died for unknown reasons, and she has it in her head that it was murdered by the landlord. She invited him to the wake and the funeral, and after we’re through with the crackers she tries to claim that since he didn’t come, he is guilty.

“That’s a stretch,” I say to Val.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” she says.

“What is that?” asks Dad. “Rumsfeld?”

“You haven’t met the guy,” Val says, still talking about her landlord. “He’s shady. He’s always standing out in the parking lot, washing his car. Every day, I mean. In little shorts. Smoking cigarettes.” She looks down, as though this last detail has confused her. “He told me once he wants to be a banker.”

“Are you still feeling down about all of this?” I ask her. “The death? It’s okay to admit it.”

“No, actually,” she says. “He was just a hamster. I always wanted to let him out of his tank and see whether he would run out of the house. How long do you think it would take for him to start thinking of the house as a kind of tank, do you think?” She looks at me wide-eyed.  

“I don’t know.”

“I had fantasies about how strange it would be for this brown hamster to be sitting in a tree in the park, hanging out with pigeons. Intense fantasies.”

“That would be something,” says Dad.

“What do you think the pigeons would think?” asks Val, turning to him. Now we are locked on to the kind of dialectic she likes. “Do you think they’d reject him for being unable to fly?”

I tell Dad it’s time for us to go. 

“Let me know,” I say to Val on my way out, “if you’re interested in the date with Armstrong.”

“Okay,” she says. “I am.”

“He’s a good guy.”

“I trust you.”

“Good.”

*   *   *

Armstrong is the type of guy who makes the office bearable for me. If he weren’t there making all the mistakes that he makes—mistakes like accidentally spilling toner all over the carpet by the Xerox machine and then walking around with more toner on the bottom of his shoes, accidentally forgetting to make sure the legend lines up right with the map we’re putting out to give to people on the tour, accidentally sending emails meant for me to anyone else in the office whose name also begins with the letter R, accidentally pulling his hamstring while trying to roll his chair down the hall to someone else’s office while still sitting, accidentally tripping over the extension cord downstairs that’s hooked up to the whole server and shutting us down for two days, accidentally going on vacation without leaving a vacation greeting on his voicemail so a couple hundred messages pile up and I have to run damage control the whole time he’s gone, accidentally addressing Ray, who is gay, as “Gay” in a meeting, accidentally leaving the top off of his instant ravioli and spraying the red sauce all over the microwave, accidentally farting in the elevator right before Gwen climbs on board, and accidentally burning down the new offices—the office would run like a well-oiled machine, and we’d be efficient and productive. This is my worst nightmare. 

If we run like a well-oiled machine, and are efficient and productive, then Fred and Gwen get the credit, and they get crazy, totally crazy, and make my life a living hell. So I want Armstrong to stay around as long as possible. I have no idea why he hasn’t been fired yet. If I were his boss, I would see no alternative but to fire him.

“You wanna get some chili for lunch, chief?” Armstrong asks me on the phone. 

“Sure, Armstrong,” I say. “I’ll see you down there.”

I have a two-inch by two-inch window in my office, and after I put down the phone, I roll my chair over to it and look out at the other building, across the alley. If I crank my chair up as high as it goes, I can get a good angle and see a bird’s nest built into the top of a tree on the corner out front. Right now the chicks are all cheeping, and as I watch, the mother lands on the edge and starts distributing something, one by one. I take it as a sign. I think of my own mother, who is dead.

At lunchtime we walk the five-minute walk together and enter Chili Jack’s. Armstrong gets confused inside of the entranceway because he is standing too close to the door and the door swings out, not in, but eventually he backs out of the way and we go inside. Chili Jack’s is one of my favorites. They have one item on the menu, so in effect you have already made your meal choice by entering the building. I appreciate Chili Jack taking me out of the equation completely. 

“So listen, Armstrong,” I say to him, once we sit down. He is stuffing a napkin into the front of his shirt, and I note this, because it’s a responsible thing to do. I am starting to plan.

“Pass the hot sauce,” says Armstrong, pointing. “The really hot one.”

“You remember my sister?” He met her once, I know, at the company picnic. I brought her along to show her the people I work with, because she didn’t believe me whenever I told her. But then she was there on the sidelines when Gwen tried to play volleyball with everyone else and sprained her ankle in the uneven grass of the park and fainted on the spot, and everybody panicked, as though Gwen wasn’t a human being but rather an emperor or a czar. They brought in the ambulances, and I remember being annoyed because it was my serve next, and we were winning, and it was just a sprained ankle.

“Not really,” says Armstrong. “Why?”

“I want to set you two up.”

“I don’t know, man,” says Armstrong, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

He tells me he might not be ready. His divorce was only final, he tells me, four years ago, and since he was married for twelve years it seems to him that it’s going to take eight more years to get over his wife.

“That means you’re not going to see anyone until you’re forty-four,” I point out.

“I know,” he says. “I’m looking forward to that age.”

“Listen, Armstrong,” I say. “Your formula isn’t right. Life isn’t long enough for you to achieve full recovery.”

“I’m just not in any hurry,” he says. There is an amazing amount of chili on the napkin, and one small chunk, I see, has even landed inside of his collar, and is slowly sinking down toward his neck.

I help him with it. 

“She’s great,” I say, after we’ve done our best to get the spot out. “She’s worth overlapping into your mourning period.”

“What’s she like?”

“I don’t know,” I say, shrugging. “Sweet. She’s just a sweet human being.”

He is nodding now, and I think my persistence is paying off. Armstrong isn’t used to people treating him this way—treating him like he may be worth something—and his anxiety boundaries are falling apart.

“Is she hot?” he asks me.

“This is my sister.”

“You can still tell,” says Armstrong. “I could always tell with my sisters. People are lying when they say they can’t tell whether their siblings are hot. Or their parents.”

“All right,” I say. “I’ll tell her you’ll call.”


Read the rest of this story in Unstuck #3.

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"The River Trick," by Lincoln Michel

Upstairs Jack uses knives, Mrs. Murmur prefers pills, and Lloyd drops electrical appliances into his bathtub. We all have our vices. I, for one, drink heavily. I try not to on the job, though; with suicides, timing is everything.
Patricia and I moved into this apartment complex four months ago. We had been having a hard time making it in the city, and after I lost my job driving subway cars, we could no longer afford the rents. It isn’t so bad here on the outskirts. We have a nice building made of solid brick. There is a small garden in the back and we can take our cats, Spick and Span, outside to dig around in the flowers. Patricia has a longer commute, but I get to work out of home.

My various neighbors try to kill themselves at least twice a month. They are not very good at it. Upstairs Jack’s kitchen is stocked with plastic utensils. Lloyd doesn’t bother plugging the toaster in and sometimes doesn’t even fill the tub with water. Mrs. Murmur fails to realize you can’t overdose on sugar pills; the placebo effect just doesn’t reach that far.

In the mornings I eat a sawed-in-half grapefruit and a bowl of cereal. If I can, I exercise. Twenty push-ups, twenty pull-ups, and a twenty-minute run. It’s easier to remember that way. Afterwards, I check my schedule. Each month I take the stack of orders from the Apartment Wellness Committee listing the who/what/when/where. I lay out my schedule, squeeze my neighbors into their proper slots.

Of course, sometimes the clerk forgets to fax an appointment or else I sleep through my alarm and rush down the hall to find Mrs. Johnson or Upstairs Jack crumpled on the floor, neck wrapped in a broken piece of twine, glaring at me.

Mix-ups, complications; these are the inevitable kinks in the hose of human operations. Yesterday, Patricia burned my toast while talking on the phone with her sister. I understood.

*   *   *

It isn’t anything sexual, the suicides. I feel I should make that clear. I was raised in the country, a full-fledged farm butting right up against my backyard. When I visit my family, they ask me about this.

“We hear that people in the city do weird things in bed,” they say.

“We hear they are perverts, every last one.”

“We hear of acts that aren’t right to speak about in proper company.”

“Well,” I say, “it’s a crazy world every which way you look.”

But as far as I can tell, the suicides are not a part of this. My customers do not seem to be in any erotic throes. I do not find them with wet latex hanging from their limp organs or flecks of fake blood dotting their exposed nipples. They are always properly dressed, their faces curled in pain, not pleasure. I know there are people who believe that sex is an extension of death, but I have never experienced this. Things are what they are and not other things.


Read the rest of this story in Unstuck #3.

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"Heightmap of Her Countenance," by Matthew Derby

Breach pulled the trigger and I fell backwards into a cosmic trench, tumbling through the gritty haze for what felt like scores of lifetimes all strung together with light and needles. My spine pulsed like a rabbit heart. I was a hundred and fifty-two years old, but I felt much older, like a wise alien with mantis eyes. I felt I could predict the weather by palming the textured air. I opened my mouth and there was a symphony spraying in red jets from my gums. I was a close-up of a popsicle melting over a sleeping mink. I bit down on time’s rubbered teat and dangled there until everything went cool gray and fizzed.

I woke up on the floor underneath the coffee table in a warm pool of my own fluids. Breach was making fake waffles in the petakiln. I groaned and he looked over.

“Wicking pad’s on the couch,” he said. I draped the pad over my body and let it do its thing. It felt like a thousand octopi were crawling all over me.

“How long was I out for?”

“About twelve hours,” he said. The waffles shot out of the petakiln onto a ceramic shingle. They were syrup-infused and ready to hand-eat. 

The pad evaporated and I sat up to look myself over. I still had a good deal of my original body left. Almost nothing on the inside but my brain, about half my spinal column, and a length of small intestine—but my face, back, and all of one arm still had the original skin, and looked okay. I was considered lucky in that way, but what was luck to people like us? We got some sweet new organs and limbs, which allowed us to witness 50% more tragedy than our parents, who had died so long ago that we could hardly believe we’d even come from parents.

Read the rest of this story in Unstuck #3.

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"The Invention of Separate People," by Kevin Brockmeier

Once, not so long ago but before our time, all people were the same person. That’s not to say that they weren’t immersed in their own lives; they were, of course, as people always have been—millions of fish in their millions of bowls. It’s just that they were equally immersed in everyone else’s. 

In those days it was possible to browse the spice aisle at the supermarket while you lay in bed reading a book, harvested lemons from an orchard, went snailing past a traffic accident on the highway, and hammered a piton into a rock face, coloring the air with that marimba-like sound of steel entering granite. Every moment contained the traces of all the others, so that even the most irresistible gust of excitement or laughter was accompanied by someone else’s rage, wistfulness, drowsiness, petulance, and fear. The best experiences were inextricably wrapped up with the worst, the happiest with the most miserable, and no one received so much as an instant of life without also dying somewhere. That was just the way things were. People were accustomed to it, never having known a world in which everyone wasn’t the same person, a big little aging athletic young lazybones who was everywhere anyone was.

Though there was love back then, or something like it, there was no privacy. Dating was effortless, and frequently inadvertent. Now and then people would find themselves spending time together in the flesh rather than apart—that’s all—and how, they might wonder, would it feel if two of their ankles brushed under the table? If two of their hands touched? If two of their bodies made love? Romances were fixed into place with an orderly tock-tock-tock, like tiles a mason was situating on a floor. And if the day came for you to settle down and marry, you would simply turn your gaze inward and sort through your galaxy of other selves until you found one beside whom you could agree to spend a lifetime.

*   *   *
 
Maybe such love wasn’t love at all. That was what one part of everyone believed. He worked as a dispatcher for a small-town hospital, and on overnight shifts, when no one’s brain or heart or shotgun went off, he would sit at his desk and let his mind wander. What would it be like if people knew as little of each other as that pen standing in his cup knew of that clock hanging on his wall? What if people could be separate, truly separate, a whole planetful of genuine individuals, completely alone inside their bodies? No one but a mystic could imagine such a thing, and even then only in wisps and snatches, but this particular part of everyone could not stop trying to make sense of the idea. He was sure that the world would seem bigger, and he himself bigger inside it, if only it had a little more mystery.

Whenever a portion of himself ruptured an artery or lay jerking for breath on the pavement, he knew it at once, and frequently, if that portion was nearby, the signal on his phone would flash and he would take down the details so that he could dispatch one of the ambulances. The long minutes as he sat rushing toward himself were horrifying. He never grew used to the feeling. 

He had learned over the years that to distract himself he should concentrate on being other people, stronger ones, with bodies they could ignore if not indulge. His favorite was a woman on the opposite side of the world who worked repairing floral coolers, servicing their motors, sprayers, thermostats, and condensers. All day long she drove the city streets, from the coast up to the hills and back, maintaining her company’s machines. He was fascinated by the way she could spend a full eight hours wielding pliers, valves, and wrenches and still smell like flowers at the end of it all, a perfume she hardly detected except when she saw herself as he did. They were two small parts of everyone, the pair of them, separated by multiple oceans, and he knew that his was not a life of hers she especially noticed, yet occasionally he wondered if he did not, in fact, love her. 
Sometimes he found it hard to be so tiny a fragment of other people. A molecule of her—that’s all he was. No, not even a molecule—an atom. He fantasized about introducing himself to her as a total stranger, a piece of herself she had somehow never met. 

“You might like me if you got to know me,” he would say.

“Take a chance,” he would tell her.

Maybe the concept was senseless, but he kept turning it over, examining it again and again in his own poor parcel of people’s minds. Love, he thought, or at least the idea of it, needed risk, impenetrability. It suffered from too much certainty. Somewhere far away he was a little girl making a chain of paper dolls with her safety scissors, snipping them free where their hands came together—and here he was in his office, in the middle of the night, wishing he could make the same series of delicate snips in real life. Everything was connected. It was just that the strings were drawn too tight.

Read the rest of this story in Unstuck #3.

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Check this blog each day during the fund drive to read a new excerpt from Unstuck #3. We'll kick it off tomorrow with a peek at Kevin Brockmeier's new story "The Invention of Separate People."

Barry is wearing the coat he bought at the store in the West Village, the store where the girl at the register smiled at him in a way he had not been smiled at in a long time. So he bought the coat. When he took it up to the register, he noticed she had a scratch on her cheek.

Your cat? he said, pointing.

She blushed. No, she said. He wasn’t supposed to ask, is what her face said.

Oh, I’m sorry, he said.

He bought the coat with cash. He wanted to leave her a tip. Is there a tip jar? he asked.

She shook her head, fast. Her blush deepened. This isn’t a coffee shop? she said. He bought a sparkly green bead bracelet at the counter, because it was there to be bought, in a jar, an apology. Do you get commission? he said.

No, she said. This is a used clothing store.

With the blush, the scratch on her cheek stood out like a small crackle of lightning.

     —from “The Coat” (Unstuck #1)


Aimee Bender is the author of four books. The most recent, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, won a SCIBA award and was a New York Times bestseller. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, GQ, Harper’s, The Paris Re­view, Electric Literature, HOBART, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and heard on NPR’s “This American Life.” She lives in Los Angeles.


Interview by Molly Laich

UNSTUCK:  I was at the MacDowell colony and the writer Kevin Moffett and I were talking about novel writing versus short stories. I was complaining that writing my first novel was difficult, but that all my teachers said I had to write a novel in order to get ahead. Kevin told me that you had once said that you never worried about what medium you were working in—that you just started writing and whatever it turned into was fine. Can you elaborate on that a little? Do you have a preference for short stories or novel writing?

AIMEE BENDER:  I like that Kevin Moffett.  Yes—I have, many times, started something thinking "Aha! This is a novel!" only to find I had finished it in three pages.  That has really happened multiple times. So I just don't think I can know for a while—I'll just write and see what unfolds and if it seems to be opening up to more scenes versus happening upon an ending that I like, then it seems to have a novel feel to it.

Mainly I think that all your teachers saying you had to write a novel to get ahead is tricky. Yes, they are more publishable, but if you are not inclined to write a novel then it seems like a forced thing, which usually doesn't help.  There are poets in the world, after all.  They're not writing novels.  If you like writing stories, write stories! The audience will be smaller, but who cares? As long as you know you have to work another job, something I have always pretty much counted on, (and novel-writing in no way assures otherwise), the pressure dwindles a lot, I think.

UNSTUCK:  What are some non-writing things that inspire your writing? Plays, movies, TV, life, etc.

AIMEE BENDER:  Everything! I'm about to use part of Caryl Churchill's amazing play Cloud 9 in a talk on fiction.  Just saw 2001 again and I can't get enough of that one.  Really love the Louie show on FX—I think it's like reading a really good short story over and over.  Louis C.K. is so smart and open and strange and moving.  And life, yes.

UNSTUCK:  What have you been you reading lately?

AIMEE BENDER:  I just read Sheila Heti's new book, which I liked a lot, and now am onto Teju Cole's Open City which makes me, once again, want to listen to more classical music.  I like reading about classical music.  Also reading Wonderland, which is about a pianist.  Also reading about plants.

UNSTUCK:  You sometimes write about sexy women behaving badly. Here's a meta question for you. Do you get a lot of questions about writing about women? Do people say you are a feminist writer, or not feminist enough? Is it annoying to have your gender brought up in the first place?

AIMEE BENDER:  Not a lot of gender questions but some—my favorite moment was at Reed College, which is super liberal and very academic and a little pressured because of that.  Great place, but a little pressured.  I read a story called "Debbieland" about junior high school girls beating up a girl and after, someone asked why I wrote about such broken women and girls. And as a woman, didn't I feel a responsibility to write strong women? I loved it as a question because it sets me up so beautifully to contradict that assumption.  A perfect pitch to an eager bat.  Because who wants to write strong all the time? Or read strong?  Who is strong all the time?

Feminism has opened up in such a way that happily we now no longer need just strong women figures and characters but just women of all kinds.  It's like how we know we'll have reached some better, more varied place with Native American portrayals in the media when there's a film with a non-wise Native American person.  That's happening with writers like David Treuer but it's just at the start.  Some people do call me a feminist writer and others no—it's such an interesting subject to me so I'm happy to discuss it.  I'm also interested in generations and where women's rights hits all of us at different ages—me versus my mom versus my 19-year-old students and all that.  My older sister could only wear pants once a week when she was in elementary school.  That seems unthinkable that that was only six years before me.

UNSTUCK: How does teaching affect your own writing? Do you learn things from your students?

AIMEE BENDER:  I really love the social aspect and talking about fiction, which is one of my favorite topics.  Teaching also constantly reminds the teacher what she values and that is good. Keeps me honest.  I do learn things from my students—they read different things, they get younger each year, literally, so they are good lines into culture too.

UNSTUCK:  Regarding your process for story writing, I've read that you often start with an image or single sentence and that everything you write necessarily has a tinge of autobiography, even if it doesn't literally come from your experience. What was the magic spark that set off "The Coat," which appears in the first issue of Unstuck? How did the story come about?

AIMEE BENDER:  I can't really track the autobio—it's there, it has to be there, but it is camouflaged by the story even to me.  Years later I can sometimes figure out the spark but usually there are multiple sparks.

"The Coat" originally came from an assignment to write a story off of an MFA art student's photograph of a man hanging up a frame on a wall. A man with a beard, in a coat. And so I was wondering why he did that. And maybe the spark of me in there is I am interested in the idea of an empty frame, of framing something that is not there.  In marking absence in that way.  That's abstract, but I am repeatedly interested in that.

UNSTUCK:  You've said you're interested in fairy tales because they use plot as metaphor.  I am very interested in that idea. I can see that at work pretty explicitly in your story “Appleless” in Fairy Tale Review, where it appears to me that the apples represent female sexuality, and that a certain woman's failure to freely partake in the apple eating makes everybody nutso. My teacher at the University of Montana Kevin Canty told us in workshop that in a short story, we learn who the characters are by what they do. Is this something you're consciously aware of when you're writing short stories? Does it have a place in novel writing?

AIMEE BENDER: No, not consciously aware—most of the better writing I'm able to do happens when I'm paying less attention to what I'm doing.  Characters do things, yes, and
it's good to get them out there and very fun to write about characters who are “do-ers” (as many writers, including myself, may find initially startling—writers are often both watchers and doers, so there's an impulse to have the character watch a lot and that can get static.  It can work at times but is trickier).  In a fairy tale, things happen, pianos fall from the sky, holes open in the earth, foxes turn into nymphs, so it doesn't have to be explicitly character-motivated to affect and impact and even be generated by character.  That has felt so freeing to me. And yes—all true for novels too.

UNSTUCK: How much are technique and process and theme consciously present in your initial writing process? What order does it come in? Do you write first, and then think about technique in the rewrite? How would you explain this to your writing students?

AIMEE BENDER:  Theme is usually not very present.  Ray Bradbury has a great quote about how the first draft is burning down the house, and the second draft is picking through the ashes.  I always liked that.  That the beginning can be fast and messy and all over the place and as you go through it you learn.  But speed allows certain choices to happen and it's helpful to try to sidestep the more judgmental analytical mind and get to the more visceral stewy stuff.

UNSTUCK:  Do you feel famous? I think you are pretty famous, as far as writers go. What is it like? Does it ever hinder or get in the way of your writing or your life to be attached to a name that pretty much everybody in this community is familiar with? Does it lead to having haters? Do you ever have the experience of meeting someone who thinks they know all about you because they've read your work? Are they right? Are they wrong?

AIMEE BENDER:  Fun question—an unusual one.  I mean, fiction writers are not the most visible of groups, so within that group, there's a smaller group that can recognize my name, and maybe an even smaller group that has read my stuff.  My daily life is not interrupted in any way.  But—it's largely really nice.  I love going to readings and having people come up
and tell me what their experience is of my writing—that is great!  I also still have readings where two people show up and I know them both and have dinner plans with them after.

When my first book came out, there were a few haters—I think I was younger and had a first book and so it was a little more loaded publicly.  And still there are a lot of Amazon reviewers who really, really hate my stuff.

As far as people thinking they know me: once I dated a guy who was making all sorts of assumptions about me based on a character and wondering if it would work out due to that.  That was so annoying and frustrating! I'd never felt that before in so personal a way. But generally people don't seem to assume too much or at least they're not telling me.  Usually people think I'm really “normal” compared to the strangeness in my writing but I think that skips over the weirdnesses in all of us.

UNSTUCK:  What are you working on now?

AIMEE BENDER:  Working on stories which are coming along.  And starting to put out bait lines for a new novel fish.

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Molly Laich is an Assistant Editor at Unstuck. She reads and writes in Missoula, Montana. Tweet her (@MollyL) or visit her blog at mollylaich.com.