Old Wives Tales
(Originally published in issue 66 of Whiskey Island, Summer 2015)
OLD WIVES TALES
In which the boy swallows the pit of a peach. His flesh becomes soft to the touch and blond hairs cover his body. He bruises as time passes, red and purple. He becomes more round and his bones go soft. His heart becomes wood-like and almond shaped. Cyanide flows through his seed and he becomes a passive danger. Friends call him nectarine and he’s unsure why or if he should be offended by it. He feels most comfortable hanging loosely from the branch of a tree.
In which the girl slides the razor across her calves and thighs and beneath her arms. Her hair, red and thin, is gone for a short time, and when it grows back, it grows back brown. It irritates the skin. She slides the razor again, and the brown, irritating hair is gone for a short time longer. It grows back thicker and darker still. The hair covers and curls around her flesh. She slides the razor a third time, and when the hair grows back, she suffocates in the protein filaments.
In which the boy tugs on himself. He seeks pleasure. The world becomes dimmer as his hand moves quicker. His palms begin to itch. Shapes become less distinct and corners lose their sharpness. Thick black hairs push through his palms. His vision becomes cloudy and words become formless. The hairs scratch and irritate the folds of his fingers. They cut across his life line. Shadows spread. As the darkness becomes complete, he climaxes. He places his palms to his eyelids and cannot tell whether or not they are blocking his vision.
In which the girl sitting on the tree branch picks and splits an apple, wondering how many children she will have. She counts the seeds in the fruit’s center. The number is too large. Her stomach begins to swell. The first fetus is formed. The third child is birthed moments after splitting the apple. Her pregnancies are followed by more pregnancies. The seeds inside the apple become smaller and misshapen. The children become the same way. The children are bright and red and crisp-skinned, falling from the branch onto the grass below.
In which the boy feels the sensation in the bridge of his nose but chooses not to close his eyes. The television program emits a laugh track as he sneezes. He feels each optic nerve snap free at the visual cortex. He expects to hear a pop but doesn’t. He expects to feel pain but doesn’t. He expects to see the television glow but doesn’t. He reaches for a tissue but the world has gone dark. Two ejected eyeballs stare upward. He hears, from another room, gesundheit.
In which the girl crosses her eyes and and lifts her nose upward. She bares her teeth and presents her tongue. The boy laughs at the face she makes. She hears the clicking of mechanisms within her skull. She attempts to correct her vision and relax her face. She fails and the bridge of her nose remains wrinkled and ugly. Her heart beats faster. Her tongue becomes dry, and her vision blurs. The boy continues to laugh. Tears flow from her crossed eyes.
In which the boy sees his father sip from a mug. He drinks a pot of coffee and the length of his shins decrease by a centimeter. He drinks another and asks, it’s fair trade, isn’t it? The length of his thighs each shrink by two inches. He drinks a third cup and he no longer has ankles or a midriff. His collar bones touch his hip bones and his hip bones touch his patellae and his patellae touch his metatarsals. He can walk on tip-toe beneath coffee tables and not risk hitting his head, not even when he jumps. He smiles up at his father, towering above him.
In which the girl eats two cheeseburgers and two helpings of potato-salad. She jumps from the hot concrete into the deep end. She backstrokes and butterflies. Blood flows toward her stomach in search of nutrients. The muscles in her arms and legs contract. Pain shoots up her neck. She can no longer tread water. She can no longer move her cramped body. She sinks to the pool’s bottom, and only her eyelids flutter.
In which the girl does not chew, but swallows the chewing gum. She feels the gum’s pink elasticity, feels it sticking to her body’s digestive system. Over time, she forgets about the chewing gum. Seven years pass and she gets married. She feels a swelling in her womb. Her stomach turns pink and elastic. She becomes rubbery and sweet. Her husband chews on her skin. Labor begins. The bubble expands. She pops.
In his prefatory note to the story “Premium Harmony” (The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: Stories), Stephen King talks a bit about stylistic copying in writers. He says, “In the end, no one sounds like Elmore Leonard but Leonard, and no one sounds like Mark Twain but Twain. Yet every now and then stylistic copying recurs, always when the writer encounters some new and wonderful mode of expression that shows him a new way of seeing and saying.” Like most of what King says about the craft, I find this true in my own writing.
I wrote “Old Wives Tales” in grad school, at a time where I was largely reading fabulist writers whose work evoked the fairy tale—Kelly Link, Aimee Bender, Ben Loory, Matt Bell—and a lot of my work at this time was trying to capture that same sensibility, while also exploring other literary interests, like form. Old wives tales feel like an adjacent genre to fairy tales, and often seem to function in a similar way: listen to your parents, lest some disaster occur. I wanted to see those disasters. What came out was this flash story.
At the University of Missouri, where I completed my Masters in Creative Writing and Literature, we had incredible opportunities to work with and meet established working authors. One such author was Alissa Nutting. After reading her debut collection, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls, in our workshop class, Nutting became another author whose writing I greatly admired and wanted to stylistic mimic. When I was told I’d have the opportunity to workshop a story with Nutting, “Old Wives Tales” felt like the perfect fit. And I’d like to think it was, and that the conversation was, great and that I learned so much, not just about the piece we were talking about, but also about writing and what it IS to be a writer. Alissa’s comments on “Old Wives Tales” almost certainly helped it reach publication in Cleveland State University’s Whiskey Island not long after.
Time passes, as it does. I finished school and stopped writing for many years. When I returned to the writing world in 2022, I sadly found that Whiskey Island seems to be shuttered, at least for the time being, from the Literary Cleveland organization. This bummed me out for a few reasons— first, it’s always sad to see another venue for short fiction (any genre) close, especially when it’s no big secret that in academia the arts get the financial shaft. Second, I was born in Cleveland and lived there for half of my life, so to have placed a story at a mag with that regional connection felt kismet. And finally, I dug the story, and wanted to continue sharing it, and I’m not sure there’s any real way to order that very specific back issue, so here we are! I printed my proofs of “Old Wives Tales” as it appeared in Whiskey Island, grabbed a pen, and, like any writer, started making changes to a story that was already deemed publishable. But alas, Dan at 33 is a different person and different writer than Dan at 25, and I’d like to think that the piece is better for those changes.
I’m not really sure what “Dad Bod Writes” is yet. I have, from those grad school days, a handful of stories that either never landed anywhere, or were published and are no longer easily accessible. Meanwhile, I have two fractures in my ankle, two jobs, and two kids, and a very cool speculative lit mag that I help edit. So more intensive writing isn’t really happening right now, but I still wanted to be engaged and thinking about writing and MY writing specifically, and thus this niche little newsletter/archive thing. I don’t want to set hard and fast rules for myself with this thing. I’m planning to have something new up every other Friday. Usually this will be these old unpublished or out of publication stories, but also a place for me to write a bit about the video games I’m playing, the movies I’m watching, and the texts I’m reading. It’s gonna be free indefinitely, but maybe I’ll set up a tip jar or something if you’d like to fund my next pre-roll.
In other news, hex, the aforementioned very cool speculative lit mag is now back open to submissions of fiction and prose poetry under 1,000 words, and you can find those guidelines here. I’m always so excited to see what we get, and hope that if you are a writer that falls within our stylistic range, you’ll give us a shot. We are open until September, 30th, or until we hit a cap of 200 subs.
I think that’s all for now. I look forward to this little project—one which has already provided me hours of distraction at work.
See you in a few—
Daniel