An Excerpt From “Family Extravaganza”

“You’re every woman’s fantasy of a volcano. Look at you, baby.” Mom would snuggle up to me and try to drag me up on her lap like I was a Chihuahua in a St. Bernard’s body. “You’ve got the makings of a science project.” She’d rub my corpulent belly that was giving my knockers a run for the money. “Every day you could blow your fuse or blow a tire, you never know, but I say, keep on singing, baby, keep on singing and it’ll never catch up to you.”

I really wanted to slip some of my Zyprexa in her mimosa to see if she could see what I saw in her, but I never did. She was so full of some kind of life that neither of us had ever experienced. She was hopped up on a drug she’d never known. Mom’s psyche had become mutilated when she was a child. Some rank neighbor’s father had molested her for years, annihilated her kid-dom. She told me once that she didn’t speak for a year after that. “My mom never prepared me for bankruptcy,” she said. “What was there to say?” she’d ask and wander into an abyss that felt like trying to dig that hole to China. I knew what it felt like to dig for something that I’d never find.

“Rein them in baby, rein them in,” she’d say. I told her the bras she bought me were a structural engineer’s fantasy, capable of shooting boulders at any enemy who crossed us. She’d laugh and pull up my shirt, saying, “By god, you’ve got a goddamn gorgeous mountain range erupting on your chest.”

Mom was a true fan no matter what I did. And I barely did much. I attempted to date sometimes. Manager Pete, or some guy who ordered a 9-piece original, or another one who went for a 24-piece bucket without looking beyond my breasts—didn’t matter if they were single or had an entire family at home— would wait for me outside when we closed up. I let a few of them suck on me in their cars in the parking lot after hours and I could understand what the marrow felt like in those bones after they’d ripped away all the meat. What is it about the weight of a breast that makes a man lose his faculties and become a slurping, corpulent baby? I guess those weren’t really dates.

So, the psychiatrist took me off the Zyprexa before I launched into the girth of the state of Texas. He told me I would lose the weight on this new drug and that I was the psychic equivalent of a teeter-totter. I never met anyone that didn’t peer over the precipice of something.

“Family Extravaganza” appeared in Meg Tuite’s book, Bound By Blue, available from Sententia Books.Purchase yours today!

Beth Couture is an assistant editor with Sundress Publication and the secretary of the board of directors of SAFTA. She is also the fiction editor of Sundress’ newest imprint, Doubleback Books. Her own work can be found in Gargoyle, Drunken Boat, Yalobusha Review, the Thirty Under Thirtyanthology from Starcherone Books, Dirty, Dirty from Jaded Ibis Press, and other publications. Her first book, a novella titled Women Born with Fur, is due out in the fall from Jaded Ibis Press. She teaches at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, PA.

An Excerpt from “Breaking the Code”

There is something about an unbroken line that makes me want to rip it apart. All horizontal and level and yet one hit of acid and I detect only ripples, bending, rigorous expansion that doesn’t speak the language of the linear.

My mother had cancer. It was floating submarines that attached themselves to her ovaries. I am sixteen with the same oval glass face that stares my mother back at me.

The gray eyes, tightened lips and blonde long hair that rats up in knots on an elongated body that mom didn’t have. She used to work away at the knots that felt like gum stuck to my scalp while I screamed until she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d finally cut them out. I grew up with empty weed patches around my head that she tried to cover over with the remaining bush. Her hands were magicians.

I’d sulk around the house and tell her I was bored. “Baby, break the code,” she’d say. And a book would appear laid out on her long fingers. One I’d never seen before that had me swimming in a vast ocean of some strange girl I wanted to know and be while my mom sipped tea across the room absorbed in her other universe as far away from me as the sky.

My mom told truths. Her lips formed words like philosophers. She spoke in large circles that moved inward like a labyrinth and I would follow the spiral as far as I could until I got lost. “Baby, listen to the voices that walk inside of you. They will always lead you to those places you don’t want to go. We always have something to say about someone else. Sew that pattern up in someone else’s housedress and move toward the sharks.”

“Break the Code” appeared in Meg Tuite’s book, Bound By Blue, available from Sententia Books. Purchase yours today!

Beth Couture is an assistant editor with Sundress Publication and the secretary of the board of directors of SAFTA. She is also the fiction editor of Sundress’ newest imprint, Doubleback Books. Her own work can be found in Gargoyle, Drunken Boat, Yalobusha Review, the Thirty Under Thirty anthology from Starcherone Books, Dirty, Dirty from Jaded Ibis Press, and other publications. Her first book, a novella titled Women Born with Fur, is due out in the fall from Jaded Ibis Press. She teaches at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, PA.