The Girl in the Flammable Skirt_ Stories - Aimee Bender [0]
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
“Bender’s taut prose works its wise melodies throughout this first collection … Each short story packs a heavy punch, and each should be savored. From cleverly comic to starkly surreal, Bender’s audacious characters surprise and delight. Sometimes, they even make you weep.”
—Boston Globe
“Bender’s world is strange and fabulous, an ultravivid, matter-of-fact presentation of extraordinary circumstances and bizarre fulfillments … Declarative and telegraphic, Bender’s stories read like modern fables—with a healthy sense of twisted humor thrown in for good measure.”
—Village Voice Literary Supplement
“A wild imagination, full of bikini-bold sexiness and brute deformity, shaped into art by the sure hand of a fabulist.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer, Best Fiction of 1998
“You don’t know weird until you’ve read this original, at times borderline-absurd short story collection.”
—Mademoiselle
“These stories plumb and expose deep tensions hidden in the mundane.”
—Washington Post
Aimee Bender
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Aimee Bender lives in Los Angeles. Her stories have appeared in Granta, GQ, Story, Harper’s, The Antioch Review, and several other publications. She is the author of An Invisible Sign of My Own.
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1999
Copyright © 1998 by Aimee Bender
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1998.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The following stories appeared previously and are reprinted by permission of the author: “The Rememberer” in the Missouri Review (Fall 1997); “Call My Name” in the North American Review (Spring 1998); “What You Left in the Ditch” in The Antioch Review (Fall 1997); “Quiet Please” in GQ (May 1998); “Skinless” (under the title “Erasing”) in the Colorado Review (Spring 1996); “Fugue” in Absolute Disaster/Santa Monica Review (Spring 1997); “Fell This Girl” in Faultline (Fall 1997); “The Healer” in Story (Winter 1998); “Loser” in Granta (Winter 1998); “Legacy” in Cream City Review (Spring 1997); “Dreaming in Polish” in Threepenny Review (Spring 1995); “The Ring” in the Massachusetts Review (Fall 1997).
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this work as follows:
Bender, Aimee.
The girl in the flammable skirt: stories / by Aimee Bender.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3552.E538447G57 1998
813′.54—dc21 97-44485
eISBN: 978-0-307-80446-4
Author photograph © Jerry Bauer
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
ONE
The Rememberer
Call My Name
What You Left in the Ditch
The Bowl
Marzipan
TWO
Quiet Please
Skinless
Fugue
Drunken Mimi
Fell This Girl
THREE
The Healer
Loser
Legacy
Dreaming in Polish
The Ring
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PART ONE
The Rememberer
Call My Name
What You Left in the Ditch
The Bowl
Marzipan
THE REMEMBERER
My lover is experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I don’t know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. It’s been a month and now he’s a sea turtle.
I keep him on the counter, in a glass baking pan filled with salt water.
“Ben,” I say to his small protruding head, “can you understand me?” and he stares with eyes like little droplets of tar and I drip tears into the pan, a sea of me.
He is shedding a million years a day. I am no scientist, but this is roughly what I figured out. I went to the old biology teacher at the community college and asked him for an approximate time line of our evolution. He was irritated at