“The Owl” is a beautiful and tragic coming-of-age story, one that reveals the many small but profound moments that can impact a human life, and how the choices of individuals can have huge consequences. It highlights the clarity that can be found in youth, and contrasts that with the way exposure to organizations and institutions can break people down until they submit willingly, to a point where the tender bonds of friendship can no longer reach. The story begins and ends with a choice of cosmic proportions, and yet it is filled with all the beautiful and sorrowful tiny details of a fragile human life.
Stephen M.A is a gay, he/him, first-generation tribal descendant originating on a federal reservation in big sky country. He now lives and writes in New England. His stories can also be found in The Deadlands and Fantasy Magazine (RIP to the goodies). His other works, including the satirical space opera “Tiny Planet Filled With Liars,” and the Kirkus-reviewed novelette “Stan, Stan, the Bacteria Man,” can be discovered at smapublishing.com
Marissa van Uden: Thank you for joining us to talk about “The Owl.” Could you share with us where the idea first came from and how it developed from there? I’d also love to know … did you start with the character’s big decision that bookmarks the beginning and end of this piece, or is that something that emerged during the writing?
Stephen M.A.: Hi, Marissa. Thanks so much for having me. I’ve been a big fan of your interviews for a while, so it’s a real honor.
I hope you don’t regret it, because I waffled a bit about how truthful to be with these responses, but only a very little bit. As an elder millennial, I’ve long since abandoned my stash of fucks to give, especially in this Pandemicine dark age, so why not lay out the unvarnished facts? Life is short, and I may not get the opportunity again.
Your highlighting of the breakdown that occurs between people and their institutions is well-noted, and was absolutely the impetus for this story. In most cases, that idea-based premise would’ve been the primary driver for my writing. But this time there was also a very strong undercurrent of my own personal emotions, because I was drawing directly from settings in my own life, and doing so in the heat of an actual moment. That’s not the way I usually work, but 2023 was a particularly shit year among a string of them, and this is one of a few stories that needed to be written for myself, just to survive the winter if nothing else. (But thank fuck a couple sold, eh? Hooray for paid bills!)
It’s tempting to launch into a persuasive screed at this point, but I’ve had my fill after four fruitless years trying to change minds, so I’ll just baldly state the course of events which led to writing “The Owl” in September and October ‘23. It’s only a summary, I promise.
Some forty years ago in rural Montana, my prodigious conehead was popped out of the obstetrical suction cup which delivered me into this world. My grandmother’s Polaroid snapshot of a doctor sitting there in the tribal hospital room, on a metal stool, reading the literal manual for the very first time, is a real testament to my personal character, I tell you what. They had to hitch me up with a chain and tie me to a four-wheeler on the way in, and I can only pray they have to do the same on the way back out.
My driving force, through thick and thin, and nearly two decades of debilitating depression, was the certainty that humanity was both capable of great things and driven to pursue that better collective future in practice. See, like most of rural America, and nearly all of the Bible Belt, the culture I was born into told me the world was usually ugly, and people were always ugly, and the best you could hope for was to carve out a tiny bubble of security while constantly praying to god, so you’d get the final reward after this fallen existence. I chose instead to believe that people wanted to be better now, and such conviction survived for more than thirty-six years, thanks to thick doses of repressed denial, and despite this rotten empire’s best efforts otherwise.
But then that cursed winter the novel coronavirus arrived, and that spring a transparently hideous old man stood up there on television and lied about the effectiveness of our tools even while dismantling them, and urged everybody to sacrifice themselves and their loved ones so he could declare victory and hold onto power, and many people said, “no thank you,” and voted for the other guy—who was also a transparently hideous old man, but who was promising to be better, and who won that autumn and immediately stood up there on television, and lied about the effectiveness of our tools even while dismantling them, and urged everybody to sacrifice themselves and their loved ones so he could declare victory and hold onto power, and this time people agreed; even while the biggest waves of the entire pandemic were already visible on the horizon, towering ahead, and the mountains of bodies behind us weren’t cold yet. And even while epidemiologists were talking about case counts twenty-times higher than we were testing for even at the height of vigilance, and coroners were talking about veins filled with jelly, and cardiologists about hearts filled with time bombs, and neurologists about the toppling of the blood barrier, and immunologists about spiraling indicators in every single category of communal health, and plummeting life expectancies in every single age group, and all getting worse every single year.
Even while the administration still works to bury the data quicker than the bodies. Even while thirty becomes the new sixty for heart attacks and cancer.
All cumulative.
And then, as circulating strains began lapping measles in the great race of infectivity scores, that murderous old clown quadrupled down and fomented the bloodiest scientific dark age in American history, quietly upending more than 200 years of the most successful public health apparatus the human species has ever enjoyed—in only one of his several ongoing genocides—and in 2022 my grandmother, who’d received a scientifically miraculous reprieve from Non-Hodgkins lymphoma and was more than a year into remission, began receiving infusions from oncological nurses without masks, and scans from radiological technicians without masks, and evaluations from geriatric doctors without masks (who cited that clown’s CDC guidelines when declining to test), and kisses and prayers from friends and family and former students without masks, and then suddenly, predictably, hospice aides without masks, and then nobody at all, because it was just rumpled sheets on an empty bed.
So many prayers. Heard so clearly through so many bare faces. Spittle flying in the pictures they insist on sending me.
In 2023, a storm of mini-strokes spurred a million tiny blows, followed by vascular dementia, and my grandmother was murdered by geronticide three weeks after I’d also said goodbye to my four-pawed baby girl of sixteen years, whose squamous cell carcinoma sucked her dry too fast for chemo to start. She hadn’t even made it through her first summer in our new forest home, where she was set for a long overdue retirement, in comfort at last after so many hard years spent purring next to me in shitty basement caves and rattling attic lofts.
And I can still remember the touch of them both in my arms, Marissa. Precisely.
Perfectly.
But I never saw my grandmother again, because the very same sorts of people who’d spent the last four years breathing knives into her face while bawling through their chin diapers would turn the journey into 2,000 miles of life or death consequence, and I would not force that risk into her unconsenting body, or mine. Even my best P100 cannot stand up to the vast breadth of American slaughter all on its own. She told us every year that she wanted to be safe, for as long as she was capable of saying so. I agreed. I agree.
She trusted us. Trusted them. She shouldn’t have. But the history of every single American plague is carpeted in the victims of its denialists and their obsession with business as ‘normal,’ who never seem to struggle for repeat bookings in any decade, and always love a good headline about being silenced, especially when they walk among the highest halls of government and media.
And yes, when it came time to write, the very first thing I saw was the owl looming above us all.
I knew immediately that my narrator would welcome the owl’s arrival. But it took until the very last page before I realized I needed to feel my own hand on the trigger in the bargain.
The dream home—though not yet the dream office setup, it's close enough for now.
MVU: That is such a powerful, heartfelt, and moving statement on the society we live in, and especially the brutality of indifference from those we once trusted. I feel you on all of this, and the force of it is clear in “The Owl.” Thank you for sharing this intimate background to the story.
I loved the blending of the surreal cosmic scale with the tiny details of the more mundane human life in a small community. Was this something you were intentionally balancing as you wrote?
SMA: Yeah, absolutely. It all came together very organically, I think because my theming and the basket of ideas to be explored were very grounded in the location and life experience. Though the story isn’t actually set in my hometown valley, that was certainly in my mind’s eye throughout, down to the thickets on my country street in the foothills, where my family eventually found its longest-term house in the town’s second tribal development. So I knew all the details by virtue of my own senses and childhood memories, and that made it easy to rifle among them and call one into action exactly when needed.
Many small-time townies really love the idea that they exist in isolated bubbles, firmly outside the mainstream reality that the rest of the world occupies. And while I think this is true of every small town, it’s especially amplified in those lonely mountain communities where the next settlement is genuinely a dozen or more miles away. And it was especially true prior to the digital age, when entire chunks of the country lived culturally in 1958 for about thirty years, give or take. All the way up until the mid-’90s, there was a very tangible sense that most of the people in my community were living their lives exactly the way their parents had, and even many grandparents, who’d been the first to live with electricity at all. That made it easy for people to disavow responsibility for their presence in the world, then let them pick and choose when and where they decided to be part of it again. (Much like every morally correct protest movement in history, caring about preserving the biosphere is always a burdensome outta-stater plot, but there’s always time for being scared of Russians and anybody with darker skin, fyi. Even on a remote tribal reservation, and especially one that’s been forcibly settled by white communities for generations.)
My goal was to highlight this collision between a small town’s insistent internal mythology of removal, and an equally insistent external reality bearing down on us all. The cigs and the brand names and the gravel back roads are magic charms, and many people out there will absolutely wield them into the grave, proudly so, even when their avoidable doom is literally staring them in the face, plastered across the entire sky. I can admit this now, where once my need to hope for better days would have forbade that truth.
And yes, I admit to taking full pleasure in wielding my micro-generation’s highly specific impresa, too. It was good to hear Paula in the Walkman, and feel the chunky plastic buttons in my mind’s hands, and smell the oiled dust pluming out of threadbare tires, for a while.
MVU: The narrator of this story goes through many ups and downs in his own life, but his attention in this piece is on those around him: in particular the three childhood friends who became his found family for a time. For me, this gave the story a poignant empathy, his concern always on the others even though ultimately he can do nothing to change their decisions or the course of their lives. Can you talk a little about why you chose to tell this group’s story through this character’s eyes? Was he always the narrator for this piece or did you play with other perspectives first?
SMA: The narrator was set from the beginning, and he was always going to be a recaller of other people’s lives. Both because he’s the one who survived to the end, but also all of my own memories up until the day I got on the train for school in New York exist that way. My inner alienation and the vigilant anxiety it saddled me with made it impossible to ever feel like I was doing anything but observing (and usually avoiding) the real lives happening all around me, at least until I left. I’ve also never been able to constitutionally detach myself from the negative consequences of bad decisions, and often felt like I cared more about bad things than the people they were actually happening to, who were usually addicted to performing that specifically Western flavor of nihilistic stoicism even while self-igniting. And at the same time, I was so deep in multiple closets of my own that I know I’m still only aware of the barest sliver of goings on around me, in that town.
Still, the circumstances of widespread poverty can spur tons of melodrama in kids before they learn to be stoic (at least the ones who don’t just shut down instead), and I have a lot of very tragically romantic recollections as an invisible elementary gay, of observing the junior- and high-schoolers all around me, who all seemed to constantly be swooning and fighting and dying (or getting “pregnant disappeared” like my mother once had with me).
It was also personally important for me to replicate the true circumstances of my background, in which you look up one day and discover you’ve been surrounded by sexual assault your entire life, and never realized until that moment how much splashback trauma you’d received in secondhand, from so many different victims.
They claim to treasure the trust and intimacy of their close numbers, but there’s nothing and no one a small town loves more than disappearing another rape. Tell you what.
MVU: I loved your story “The Weather Man,” published in the latest issue of The Deadlands (#34). It’s a story filled with howling winds and swirling smoke and haunted grief, and also a story that deals with the betrayals of love for the sake of a religion, as well as unwanted goodbyes. Without giving too much away for those who haven’t read it yet, what was the genesis for this piece? What draws you personally to these themes?
SMA: Thanks so much, that’s very kind, and I’m so grateful to The Deadlands for having me. I hope you don’t mind following along as I take a lengthy detour into the circumstances behind that other piece, which overlap quite a bit with “The Owl.”
As I’ve said already, I’m in a moment of great reckoning with my conceptions of this life, and unfortunately for many of the people in my past that means a great row of dominoes is in the process of falling, as I pluck away all the parts of their decency that it turns out were just projections of my own hopes, and discover that they’ve been doing and tolerating terrible things all along, and I shouldn’t ever have expected otherwise.
It’s also been terrible to discover how much of that had infected me, and how many horrors I had already normalized via internalized mythmaking, especially as an ostensibly lifelong liberal who’s always said I was radicalized by Weekly Reader in third grade. Yet such lessons continue apace in these years of the Second Nakba, and the efforts of a Democratic administration to construct a respectable new holocaust on back of the old, as has always been that party’s function in this government, when you strip away the legends and examine actual actions and decisions.
People get a lot of cover out of the idea of “good people” and “bad people,” because anybody who’s a good person can never do anything bad when you play by those rules. I spent my younger life surrounded by good people. Good, decent Americans. Good Christians.
Good small town folk.
Many of them Jesuit colonizers living on blooded land, by the way, but what’s that in the face of good folk? It took the community literal minutes to disappear the memories of the Indian School whose doors only closed in the ‘70s, even while my family’s first tribal apartment was in Indian Town, right next to the Mission which stands to this day; but that’s only because good Americans value comity and forgiveness from their brutalized minorities, and it’s easy for one church to hide away in a tiny town with ten of them, even when it’s the tallest building in sight.
While I respectfully withdrew from churchgoing at the sage milestone of first grade, I still hid so many parts of myself at behest of those good people, who told me those parts were bad, and demonic, and reprehensible just for being different from theirs. I did it for them, because to make them into good people who were worth doing it for meant my own life would be good too, even if I wasn’t a believer myself.
But I have come to understand how consistently so many of the modern religious have already checked out of the problems in this world, since they’re good people who know they’re going to get a good reward because of apocalypse, not despite. And that means every time you need their help these days—need their reckoning—you discover you’re actually standing alone inside an empty room.
Their own books tell them to do Great Works in this life, but now they insist they can never be anything but small and bloodthirsty without his direct intervention otherwise, which they choose to see or not see at their own convenience. I am burdened by the realities of living in this world in whole sum. It seems they are not, at least not any longer, because each new body tossed on the pile is just more proof that they’re right, and I’m wrong, and the eternal reward is nigh no matter what they do, as long as they believe in him while doing it.
I find that all horrific and disgusting, and it drives my thoughts and writings accordingly in these days of days.
Anyway, even if I hadn’t already known it, I would definitively know now that they’re wrong. They’re dead wrong. There is no after. There is no reward. There is nobody waiting for a grand reunion. And I know they all know it. They’re flailing. Their entire lives are about convincing themselves to keep believing despite all evidence, because the more baseless their faith the truer it is, and they’ve put in too much time to give up now. And I’m glad I can skip the trouble, because I felt my grandmother in my bones during every single day I’ve ever breathed on this Earth, a pole to my magnet no matter where we each lived or how far apart, and dreamed of her for all of those thirty-nine years, until that precise moment at 3 a.m. when she vanished last autumn, and she’s been gone ever since, and now in this fourth decade my dreams are filled with strangers and shadows, and I haven’t felt a fucking hint of any kind. Not even the faintest whisper of a touch on my outstretched hand, no matter how long I hold it up. The only place she exists anymore is my own waking memory, there can be no other conclusion.
Because there’s no goddamn way she would leave me all alone like that if there were any other possibility.
Citrine, 16, before the end
MVU: The terrible things that “good people” do, and the normalizing of horrors, truly is something we all need to reckon with. I think your stories deal with these themes so beautifully.
When you start writing a new story, do you usually set out to hit a specific mood or particular story element? What mix of outlining or organic writing do you tend to use?
SMA: Before I went pro, all my stories started as a single moment or sequence, often set to music, but these days they usually start as a concept; though sometimes a vignette, like the owl standing astride the world.
I would say, generally, I’m very driven by the voice of my narrators. My entire life I’ve been drawn to strong narrative voices, even when third-person. I’ve always enjoyed feeling the author in my head in a very tangible sense, to be able to converse with them directly and privately, and I really detest those ivory tower theologies that try to dictate otherwise.
From the old man narrating “The Owl” to the Interviewer in “Tiny Planet Filled With Liars,” most of my stories birth themselves through feeling the texture and tempo of those fourth-wall words, and all the moods and other elements flow from that source. I’m very grateful for it, because I never have to struggle for my first page. A strongly sensed narrator lets those words just fall out of me, and then I have a reliable inner partner to do the hard work with afterward.
MVU: Do you have a system for gathering ideas? And how do you decide what to work on next?
SMA: I’m a lifelong ruminator, so part of my mind is constantly working, and I have no choice but to keep an unwieldy .txt file of quick ideas and other jottings or I’ll forget too much. But I have to be completely taken by a muse in order to work work (work work work work), and then I do so obsessively and for days on end, at all hours, especially the dark ones when I feel most alive.
Choosing which idea to pursue next is usually the same muse-driven process, though sometimes I’m scanning that .txt list with a more direct objective. Then once a story is started, the final pages in its document become the repository for swiftly spiraling shitstorms of more in-depth notation, which I delete as I go.
It’s not until something is nearly done that I’m able to just power through when the driving impulse wanes, and even then I need to have already made every important decision. “Tiny Planet” was the one and only time I was able to keep up an actual godfearing workaday schedule for writing, and it’s probably not coincidental that this was the peak of 2020’s short-lived precautions when the entire world was cooperating with me. It was also absolutely glorious to really invest in a home office for the first time (in my last apartment), and triply so now that I’m in a new dream home. It definitely makes writing easier in all respects.
MVU: What is a favorite piece of writing advice that has served you well?
SMA: I’ve never been one to really seek or heed advice in generalities, but my heart goes to Jessica Behm, who was my (nonfiction) expository writing instructor in New York. It was a school-wide mandatory, usually run in the sloggiest way possible by dozens of randomly available adjuncts, but Jessica was a goddamn force who really loved writing, and everybody in her class reaped the reward, and I literally stood in line to demand having her for both required sessions.
She took everything on its own terms and never had any hard rules beyond “you all MUST stop writing suddenly and realized, please I beg of you, it hurts me physically,” which was really saying something, because she was a literal Bohemian goddess and immaculately fit master dancer whom pain must surely have bounced off like shimmering diamond rain. My diva worship was just off the charts, there’s no way around it; it’s really unseemly, and I hope she never knew.
She didn’t just improve my writing, she shaped the way I approached the filmmaking I was actually there for in the bargain, and she continues to influence my fiction to this day.
It was an intoxicating revelation after a lifetime of being met with bewilderment or disengagement, even while always being lauded as “a good writer” growing up, in whatever small context that ever had meaning. She gave me the gift of knowing what it’s like to earn the attention of readers who reward your ideas and the beauties of your language with the same effort in kind, and I’ve been trying to chase that high again for the last twenty years.
Thanks, Jessica. And sorry I still use both of the bad words all the time. Like, all the goddamn time. I suddenly realize that’s a problem.
MVU: What are your biggest influences as a writer, both childhood influences or more recent fiction that you’ve read, watched, or played?
SMA: I was a thrift shop and library kiddie growing up, and I read constantly for eighteen years. I don’t know if I’ll ever get back to those days, especially now that I’m making all this sausage myself while still living with the scars of anhedonia, but I’m so glad it’s how I chose to spend my time back then. Pulp fiction, classic sci-fi, and airport blockbusters were big on the secondhand racks. Plus almost the entirety of the original Star Wars extended universe, which shall live forever in chrome and die in FULL canon, I swear it.
I feel like everything I’ve ever read influenced me, though I usually struggle to recall the specifics. But I’ll always know the very first chapter books I ever owned myself.It was the E.B. White boxset, a birthday gift, received at the pizza arcade on Brooks Street back when the Kmart still had a smoky luncheonette that looked like E.T.’s kitchen table.
Kindergarten, 1989. Ivory enamel cardboard, colored illustrations on the box, immaculately messy pen drawings inside the novels. My bookcase is some harsh utility-wire shelving unit, corporate beige, that rattles like a stockyard at the barest touch, because my bedroom is technically the spare office in our new tribal apartment in Indian Town, and my young parents have big plans with Amway, and bunking there like a stowaway is my privilege as the oldest. (They’ll make up for it in our next tribal house with my very own mini half bath with a sliding door, just in time for puberty.)
The shelves in my younger siblings’ bedroom are a bright red plastic Handi-Snacks tower, liberated from the Rod’s IGA alleyway in the dead of night. The rugrats don’t even want it against a wall, they display it proudly in the very center of the room, looming between their two small beds like an Easter Island trophy. They keep nothing but a handful of dirty clothes and a tattered copy of “Garfield: His 9 Lives” in the entire thing. I watch my mom scurry toward it in the Coupe’s headlights, heart pounding as I scan the alley, sure we’ll be caught by the eponymous Rod and thrown in the clink at Deer Lodge, and several years later a cat gives birth in the lowest bin and we keep one of the kittens—both long dead now after years of roaming the fields—but that gigantic red plinth is still standing as far as I know, wherever it is. It’ll probably outlast the entire town.
It certainly outlasted my eventual employment at Rod’s.
The lights in our new apartment are all that hideous fluorescent ring, and the ceiling is popcorn, and my bed is just a thin mattress on the floor. The boxset is the only thing on my wire shelves, and I feel so grown up and portentous when Mom tucks me in and I reach over to grab a tome, after making sure my rattling old fan is turned on to keep the gremlins away, because those fuckers will get you otherwise, trust me, Mother.
I’d already watched the Charlotte’s Web VHS at my grandmother’s house down in Missoula so many times, scurrying out of town in her bright red Chevy hatchback the minute her classroom bell rang, and any time it came on the TV for Friday Night Movies. So many times, even though it’s the saddest shit ever, have you seen it? Don’t see it if you don’t feel like sobbing out of every single organ in your entire body over a cartoon spider. But if you do, it’s really the cream of the crop. I can’t recommend it enough, especially the songs. All bang no skip.
And I flew with the trumpeter swan, which is quietly the most racist shit ever, but still can’t help capturing the desires of a boy in the mountains. And I scurried with Stuart before he became an insufferable Hollywood commodity. Immediately thereafter my wire shelves accumulated other books to cement the habit, and I found myself in Times Square with the cricket, and knew that my real life would never truly begin until I lived in that very same city, no matter how long it took to get there. I was right, unfortunately.
When Wilbur finds Charlotte’s last tiny baby in the barn, I can taste the sick-day ginger ale in the small glass bottle, and touch her thickly veined mottle blue carpeting, and smell her Tabu toilette. The oak tree has a yellow ribbon tied around it for troops in the Gulf, and its leaves are always dappling the front window in the living room, where the tinkle of the ice cream truck comes through, across from the heavy lumber door whose bell I ring when playing mailman on a Playskool folding table outside. It’s a shame she’ll only live there for a few seasons before moving yet again. I don’t know if my siblings even remember the house, but its bright red cedar shingles and huge white shutters look exactly the same when I finally find it years later, trawling the streets in my own busted Chevy, new driver’s license shiny and hot in its turquoise velcro wallet.
She’s deep into a decade-long interlude in Tucson by then, having left me to live the condo life with Shirley, her dearest girlfriend and confidante. There they have spicy beans for breakfast and commiserate about useless men in divorced semi-retirement, and attend church events three times a week at soaring glass cathedrals floating in the middle of enormous sun-flayed parking lots, where old dudes in blazers fervently seek post-War tail and a close personal relationship with Christ. Back in fourth grade, just after her betrayal of my love, she’ll arrange for me to skip school for an entire month, when I’ll visit her down south and adopt the habit of wearing neon-colored tank tops tucked beneath billowing linen blouses, and get yelled at by the village manager for donning a Sea World T-shirt in the pool, then never swim in public ever again. Once a week we’ll trek to the enormous desert supermarket with the city’s first ever air curtain system shrieking at the doorless entrance, to get Chinese takeout at the hot bar and stand in the cavernous freezer section for a while. Then we’ll spend the evening howling at Mrs. Doubtfire or Sister Act on the VCR while spilling sweet-and-sour sauce on the plush cream carpet—Shirley screaming, “Judy!” in helpless panic as I nearly choke to death on hilarity and chicken. Finally, we’ll retire to the lanai for virgin cranberry coolers and verbal harassment from the ancient African Grey across the sidewalk, who’s named Reginald or some shit, and whose owners are half his age and fully under his talon.
Grandma insists we swap turns between her bed and the rollaway every night to be fair, and we often fall asleep giggling about something from America’s Funniest, and I can still feel the oscillating fan leaving my face to touch hers in the darkness, over and over.
When Mom calls and asks if I miss home, I say no, and I can hear the pain in her chuckle, but I don’t apologize.
But I forgive Grandma for leaving, of course; especially since she soon feels the retort of her own betrayal, when Shirley up and gets married again, and this time it sticks, and she’s back to living alone, and now the family isn’t even there, so she starts doing a snowbird instead.
I won’t be back to Arizona until high school, when we limp into her mountainside doublewide after several days in the Utah hospital that snatched her out of the air when her towed camper turned into a blender on the highway, sending her poor animals pinwheeling into the Mormon outback like shrapnel. I can still see my vision tunneling into blackout at the video counter in Rod’s where I take the call from Mom, bagboy apron suddenly choking me down. We go back for her dog a week later, rescued by a clearly abused foster boy who barely speaks but still spent days coaxing it inside from the sagebrush, and I sleep with terror that she’ll burn herself into a crisp on the nuclear hot hood of her stupidly black replacement beater that barely fits the dog in its stupid back seat. I discover later that her specific brand of Ford Explorer tires were under NHTSA recall for spontaneous shredding, but I don’t bother telling anybody, because I know they’ll only shrug and say what can you do now, god had a plan, the government didn’t. But a month later when she’s crying under my hands as I try to unmold a bouldered spasm from her shoulder blade, I know I’d sue anybody in the entire world to get revenge.
When I’m forced by poverty and guilt to drop out of college and go back to working in the ER at home, Grandma’s just starting chemo after her double mastectomy, so I detour my flight and stay with her for another month to help out around the trailer and drive her to Weight Watchers and church. I’m deep into Vonnegut by then, sneaking Camel Lights on the patio while watching javelinas trot by in her immaculately tended cactus garden beneath a mountain, and the whole desert is quite surreal in such extended trilogy. And just the other month Rachel Dolezal was fired by the Tucson school district my grandmother once subbed for, right up the street; though Grandma had left the state a decade too early to open an Only Fans herself, and thank god for that, because the latest asshole has thoroughly trashed all her hard work in the Street View. What a prick.
I can still drive every inch of her road just by looking at the map, and see the saguaro forest lining the washouts on Picture Rocks in my mind.
I breathe such a sigh of relief when she ultimately moves back to Montana in her old age, even while I’m already long gone myself. But I’m trapped in Brooklyn at the bottom of depression’s deepest well, and I can only climb up far enough to look her in the eyes twice more in all those years. Then I leave the city I loved for three decades, and several years later the first plague arrives, and I can never return home again.
Anyway.
Like I was saying, those were my books once, and they were good.
MVU: Thank you so much for joining us to talk about this amazing story and your life as a writer. Can you let our readers know about any new projects you are working on or upcoming releases to look out for?
SMA: Thanks again for the hospitality, Marissa, and for the indulgence of allowing me to hang my whole ass out here, which seems to be the only rational response to this current era, in my very humble opinion.
I’ll be spending the year finishing and shopping around a few more stories, in hopes of picking up another couple bylines for the release of my shorts debut “I Hate You All: a misanthropunk collection,” which is currently on pre-order, and is also scheduled for author-narrated audiobook release next year. Otherwise, my hope is to refocus in ‘25 and dive back into “Stand on the Rains,” the sequel in my satirical space opera series, but we’ll see where the vagaries of life and the industry take me.
I’d love for anybody who’s interested to keep in touch at smapublishing.com/newsletter while I find out what comes next.
