The morons threw themselves on each other and moshed in the street until a car came along. Then they split for the park. The cops arrived minutes later. They were useless.
There’s no super. There’s no one to complain to. There’s everything to protest because she wanted everything, and she wanted more, and everything was wrong, and everything demonstrated, like a stupid protest march against herself, that she needed money, sex, respect, and her sleep, more of it all the time, so it meant she was getting old and cranky, and would die, because all good and bad things and people come to an end, and everything probably would before she did anything like buy a crossbow and arrow.
It made her sick.
The cops didn’t see what the commotion was all about, there were no unruly kids on the church steps, they didn’t see the eggs, they drove over some of them and crushed them into the street, they didn’t look up, they didn’t see her, they drove away.
The ancient black woman fed her Chihuahua and wheeled herself to bed.
The man in the third-floor window was frustrated. He couldn’t go back to sleep. It didn’t matter. It was Saturday. He didn’t have to go to work.
Elizabeth hesitated. The street was dead. Then she climbed through the window into the apartment. Fatboy followed her obediently. She’d maintain a low profile, buy a white-noise machine, keep it next to the bed. Maybe nothing would happen. She slid next to Roy and poked him in his calf with her toenail. He was dead to the world, alive in another.
No one deserved to sleep. She wondered if she could. Elizabeth pulled the sheet over her head and waited.
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Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank C. Carr for encouraging me to do a book set in New York; Tom Keenan for our discussions, his enthusiasm and acuity; the MacDowell Colony for giving me a wonderful place to write, and all the people who contributed jokes: David Hofstra, Joe Wood, Paul Shapiro, Bob DiBellis, Eiliot Sharp, Mark Wethli, Jane Gillooly, Rick Lyon, James Welling, John Divola. Marc Ribot, Dennis Cooper, Larry Gross, Charlotte Carter, Andrea Blum, Osvaldo Golijov, Martha Wilson, Michael Smith, Dick Connette, Charles Karubian, and many others whose jokes have become mine. I’d like especially to thank Richard Kupchinsksas, Debbie Negron, and Ginette Schenk for talking with me for this project.
About the Author
Lynne Tillman (New York, NY) is the author of five novels, three collections of short stories, one collection of essays and two other nonfiction books. She collaborates often with artists and writes regularly on culture, and her fiction is anthologized widely. Her novels include American Genius, A Comedy (2006), No Lease on Life (1998) which was a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Cast in Doubt (1992), Motion Sickness (1991), and Haunted Houses (1987). The Broad Picture (1997) collected Tillman’s essays, which were published in literary and art periodicals. She is the Fiction Editor at Fence Magazine, Professor and Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany, and a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
About the book, and a letter from the publisher
This is a Red Lemonade book, also available in all reasonably possible formats: in limited artisan-produced editions, in trade paperback editions, and in all current digital editions, as well as online at the Red Lemonade publishing community.
A word about this community. Over my years in publishing, I learned that a publisher is the sum of all its constituent parts: above all the writers, of course, and yes, the staff, but also all the people who read our books, talk about our books, support our authors, and those who want to be one of our authors themselves.
So I started a company called Cursor, designed to make these constituent parts fit better together, into a proper community where, finally, we could be greater than the sum of the parts. The Red Lemonade publishing community is the first of these and there will be more to come — for the current roster of communities, see the Cursor website.
For more on how to participate in the Red Lemonade publishing community, including the opportunity to share your thoughts about this book, read what others have to say about it, and share your own manuscripts with fellow writers, readers, and the Red Lemonade editors, go to the Red Lemonade website.
Also, we want you to know that these sites aren’t just for you to find out more about what we do, they’re places where you can tell us what you do, what you want, and to tell us how we can help you. Only then can we really have a publishing community be greater than the sum of its parts.
All the best,
Richard Nash