Kittentits, page 26
That’s it for ghosts. No Evelyn, no Mombie. Meanwhile every single night Jeanie sneaks up on me in dreams. Dream Jeanie wears glasses and a black Morbid Angel T-shirt. We’re always at the mall and clipped to my belt loops are all these jangly keys.
Little Bitch, Little Bitch, your hair is so fucked, she always says to me. You look like a parakeet with bangs, she goes. Here I stop to check my hair in the window of B. Dalton. And she’s right, my hair, it’s a nest of something.
But—and this is important—No wonder Jeanie calls you Fucktard I am truly not dream-thinking. No wonder she calls you Little Orphan Dumbass, I don’t go in my head. My twig and mud hair, my jingle-jangle keys, it’s true, but dream Jeanie’s got glasses, not X-ray eyes. She can’t see inside my head where my thoughts boil to visions, to actual premonitions of future me. She can’t see badass Mall Arcade Manager Molly like I can. Sometimes at night when I put little Butter Pat to sleep I hear the reverby shimmer of pinball synths even.
Here’s what Sister Bitch the Intake Nun said my first day here: You are a pilot of sorrow now, Molly. Today’s but the first day of the rest of it, she said.
So far that griefy bitch has been right, but I refuse to give in. I keep my chin up like a lunch tray, a baseball mitt, a target. Days I spend kissing Vandalisa’s ass under fast-moving clouds, at snack eat the body of Christ and wipe the crumbs with donated napkins. Nights I dream of Jeanie cleaning her glasses and grinning big, her T-shirt torn, her teeth spit-licked and shiny. So shiny I see the future play like a movie across them, and in the future harshness is real, it’s a cat-kill-kitten world still, but for once finally I’m the fucking lion.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So many people, living and dead, helped me in the years it took to write this book. I am forever indebted to Gillian Flynn and Emily Bell. Emily shaped the story with a deft and gentle hand, as did Maya Raiford Cohen, who asked all the important questions. To everyone at Zando and to Eli Mock, who designed the cover: Thank you. Your time and attention to my work means more than I can say.
Deepest thanks to Kent D. Wolf, whose endless enthusiasm, humor, and remarkable patience kept things alive. It’s been a long road, Kent, but here we are. Thank you.
Thank you to my teachers at Wichita State University, especially Margaret Dawe and the late Philip Schneider, who both did their best to whip me into shape. Thank you to my teachers at Florida State University, especially Julianna Baggott and Mark Winegardner, who both read this in its earliest, ugliest draft and never once told me to put it in a drawer.
Thank you to my colleagues in the Department of Literature, Writing, and Film at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Your kindness and support during the most difficult period of my life meant everything. Thank you to my students, past and present. Your devotion to your own stories gives me life.
I am so grateful for Anna Thompson Hajdik, Jessica Lauer, Katie Burgess Steenerson, Crystal Sutheimer, and Kendra Unruh for their friendship. I am grateful for my friend Nahal Suzanne Jamir, who is haunted the way I am haunted. I could never have done this without you, Suzanne. And to Daniel, whose philosophical insight, musical encouragement, and dear friendship sustained me through the final stretch: Thank you.
Thank you to my family for their longtime support, and to my parents for their years of hard work and sacrifice. To my mother, Connie Wilson, for encouraging me to be a reader despite the very real possibility that it might one day lead me to write a novel full of vulgarities.
Thank you to my late husband, Jeremy Herrmann, who is present on every page.
But most of all, thank you to my son, Theo, who pulled me through the harshest darkness and turned everything into light.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HOLLY WILSON’s work has appeared in Narrative magazine, Redivider, Northwest Review, Short Story, New Stories from the South, and elsewhere. She was a Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University, where she received a PhD in creative writing. She grew up in Kansas and currently makes her home in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, where she lives with her son. She’s an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
Holly Wilson, Kittentits
