The geese, the crows, the squirrels, the raccoons, the bats, the ants, the kids: Ruth now went to the firing range with Carla as often as she could. She would stand with her feet apart, both hands grasping the gun, then fire. She concentrated, tried to gather bits of strength in her, crumbs to make a loaf. She had been given way too much to cope with in life. Did God have her mixed up with someone else? Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job. I have never been your true and faithful servant. Then she would pull the trigger. When you told a stupid joke to God and got no response, was it that the joke was too stupid, or not quite stupid enough? She narrowed her eyes. Mostly, she just tried to squint, but then dread closed her eyes entirely. She fired again. Why did she not feel more spirited about this, the way Carla did? Ruth breathed deeply before firing, noting the Amazonian asymmetry of her breath, but in her heart she knew she was a mouse. A mouse bearing firearms, but a mouse nonetheless.

--"Real Estate," Lorrie Moore

"The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."

"Oh, not the raccoon story," groans Cal.

"Yes! The raccoons!" cries Eugene.

I'm sawing at my duck.

"We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.

"Hmmm," I say, not surprised.

"And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped that the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They all are like that."

-- "Dance in America" Birds of America, Lorrie Moore

Monday Required Reading. Once I made it past the Charlie Smith epigraph in Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, I found myself once again swept up in the incredible writing I have come to associate with her work. "Willing" is the first story in this collection, and I immediately fell in love with the protagonist. It's always a little bit surreal when I encounter characters on the page who remind me of myself so violently, but it's almost always the case in Moore's stories. This one is no exception.

How can I live my life without committing 

an act with giant scissors?

-- Joyce Carol Oates

"An Interior Monologue" 

In her last picture, the camera had lingered at the hip, the naked hip, and even though it wasn't her hip, she acquired a reputation for being willing. 

"You have the body," studio heads told her over lunch at Chasen's. 

She looked away. "Habeas corpus," she said, not smiling. 

"Pardon me?" A hip that knew Latin. Christ. 

"Nothing," she said. They smiled at her and dropped names. Scorsese, Brando. Work was all playtime to them, playtime with gel in their hair. At times, she felt bad that it wasn't her hip. I should have been her hip. A mediocre picture, a picture queasy with pornography: these, she knew, eroticized the unavailable. The doctored and false. The stand-in. Unwittingly, she had participated. Let a hip come between. A false, unavailable, anonymous hip. She herself was true as a goddamn dairy product; available as lunch whenever. 

She began to linger in juice bars. Sit for entire afternoons in places called I Love Juicy or Orange-U-Sweet. She drank juice and, outside, smoked a cigarette now and then. She'd been taken seriously - once - she knew that. Projects were discussed: Nina. Portia. Mother Courage with makeup. Now her hands trembled too much, even drinking juice, especially drinking juice, a Vantage wobbling between her fingers like a compass dial. She was sent scripts in which she was supposed to say lines she would never say, not wear clothes she would never not wear. She began to get obscene phone calls, and postcards signed, "Oh yeah, baby." Her boyfriend, a director with a growing reputation for expensive flops, a man who twice a week glowered at her Fancy Sunburst guppy and told it to get a job, became a Catholic and went back to his wife. 

"Just when we were working out the bumps and chops and rocks," she said. Then she wept. 

"I know," he said. "I know." 

And so she left Hollywood. Phoned her agent and apologized. Went home to Chicago, rented a room by the week at the Days Inn, drank sherry, and grew a little plump. She let her life get dull - dull, but with Hostess cakes. There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went "What?" or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, "Wha--?" It had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." She'd stood there for years, blinking and befuddled, brushing the can with the brush. 

[KEEP READING]

Monday Morning Required Reading. I'm not a creative writing student, nor have I ever been, but there is something about this story that resonates with me. So, here it is, Lorrie Moore's "How to Become a Writer":

First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the world.

Fail miserably... [KEEP READING] 

[Credit where credit is due: Although I had read this years ago, I am indebted to Elizabeth for my most recent encounter with it. I am also indebted to her for the idea of weekly readings. I love her Sunday readings, because they introduce me to beautiful stories I haven't read before, and re-introduce me to pieces I had forgotten about. I have adopted this idea both so that I can hopefully bring the same kind of delight to your weeks as she brings to mine, and so that I have a valid excuse for wandering through new stories and poems even when I don't really have the time.]