Franigirl.com
Francine Witte, Poet and Fiction Writer
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Stephanie Dickinson
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Stephanie Dickinson has lived in Iowa, Texas, Louisiana and now New York City, a state unto itself. Her fiction appears in the Santa Monica Review, Green Mountains Review, African-American Review, Sub-terrain, Gulf Coast and the Ontario Review, among others. Her story “A Lynching in Stereoscope” was reprinted in BEST AMERICAN 2005 NONREQUIRED READING, edited by Dave Eggers. She won Storyglossia’s 2007 Short Story Prize and Glimmer Train’s 2008 Fiction Open. Her “Lucky 7 & Dalloway” will be reprinted in NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH, THE YEAR’S BEST, 2008. Days she sits before a computer in the belly of the beast inputting numbers and hoping for enlightenment. Along with Rob Cook, edits Skidrow Penthouse, a literary journal celebrating its tenth anniversary and dedicated to zero at the bone poetry, fiction, photography and art. The magazine flourishes in relative obscurity but continues to pack its three hundred some pages with the passion and brilliance of its contributors. Recently, the Skidrow Penthouse editors together with Rosalind Palermo Stevenson formed Rain Mountain Press, a publishing collective and in its showcase years published seven volumes ranging from novella and memoir to sonnet sequences and visionary poetry. In 2008 Rain Mountain Press held its first annual Ronald Wardall Prize for a poetry chapbook. Her novel HALF GIRL was recently released by Spuyten Duyvil and is available on Amazon.com.
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Diner Lovers eye the blackboard specials, lust for tiramisu and chocolate chunk cookie, for turkey loaf and sumptuous poached chicken. Breast or short ribs. I think of the men I’ve slid into booths with, laughed over sips of bitter black coffee. The young boyfriend who was always hungry, gnawing on his napkin as we waited. Tapping fork against knife, I watched the low sky fill with clouds of stale dishrags. He was young enough to be my son. A pretty body builder in Iron Maiden teeshirt. Lynx eyes, tartar-shaped. He hardly left his room from the age of twenty-two to twenty-seven. His girlfriends--fading biker chicks. East Coast Rocker personal ad ladies. “Haven’t you heard? The mayors are all buying refrigerated trucks. Rolling morgues. There’s going to be terrorist anthrax attacks,” he laughed. Leaning back in the salmon-cushion booth that deepened into the Impalas prom-night girls used to get pregnant in, their wombs dizzily blooming, he relaxed. He wouldn’t have to worry about finding work. I had never seen anyone so isolated. In his smile, deer growled, sprinting in angry billion year old light. He stiffened into a wheelbarrow around girls his age. I told him he had beautiful eyes. He picked up his spoon, “Here do you want to eat them?” It was his generation’s humor. Where’s my food?” he demanded. “I need my protein.” The waitress drifted from the kitchen, her gray hair teased, an open face roast beef platter balanced on her wrist. “Is that it?” she sighed, as if waiting for the juke box’s pompadour greasers to croon. We drove off for dessert in the Ford economy car. New Jersey and we were in the garden where tulip and hickory roots snarled over the ground. Maples shed their leaves like dying eagles. He stopped at the far end of a K-Mart parking lot. The engine died in the tinny smack of leftover shopping carts. He pushed the hair away from my face. “I have to look.” In the front seat, no old motel room of Chesterfields and midnight eggs, no whiff of Blue Grass. He unzipped. “Go on lick your lips like you’re hungry for it.” This was an act of a species on the verge of extinction. I didn’t think it mattered. One of us was a hyena luring a saber tooth into the bone-strewn cave. Published in New York Quarterly, reprinted in Corn Goddess, 2007
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Bogeyman The streetlights were far apart and the trees bunched together in the dark and looked made out of gauze. A lone car was coming. How did I appear in the headlights, like the animals do, the civet cats? They stared into the light with all of their eyes, waiting for the huge beautiful thing to bear down. Music must be coming from the car. The voice quivered up through the pines. Them that’s got. Deer grunts and mourning doves. shall get. Them that’s... Billie again. Broken by men and gin, dead, but forever. Hearing Billie out here sent a fingernail down my back. The car light passed through me. At the bottom of the viaduct, a long stretch ahead. Being alone in the darkness doesn’t frighten me, I thought, I’ve been there most of my life. Mama may have… I looked for the song. Just trees, smell of dogwood citrus mixing with pines. Papa may have…There must be kids out in the trees with a transistor. My fingers gripped the strap of my bag. A railroad track lay below the viaduct, the streetlight dropped far enough so I could see the fuzzy girders and weeds sprouting. But God bless the child… Footsteps clobbered the sidewalk behind me. Feet striking and hitting. Was it Easton? His high top basketball shoes bashing the asphalt trying to catch up? I glanced back. A man too far behind to make out but his footsteps were coming on fast. The headlights of an oncoming car appeared. His footsteps dropped away. Mom taught me to stand still when a snapping dog got off his chain. Don’t let them smell your fear. Stay still or they’ll go for your throat. His footsteps again. Show no fear. For once I was glad that I wasn’t pretty enough, and then I breathed a sigh of relief. It was only the bouncer from the Player’s Retreat taking off his blue work shirt as his boots ate up the sidewalk. It’s just that Jimbo. God bless …The song so close. He was passing me and soon he’d be gone. I got way over. …the child that’s got his own. A transistor radio, the old kind Maynard listened to when he sat in the orchard with a quart of Budweiser, was tied to his belt loop. The music was springing out from him. He started to run. I knew he was coming for me. Get into the street, do your running in the middle of the street. He threw the blue shirt jerkily over my head. I inhaled sweet baby powder. He crooked his elbow around my neck. Them that gots… The song half lifted me, unbelievably strong. His body against mine. "Keep walking. Don't scream or I'll cut your throat," he hissed, carrying me off the sidewalk. The air rasped in his nostrils. He knew where he was going. I dragged my right foot. I stretched out my arms. He cursed under his breath, fumbling with the transistor radio, turning it off. We were on cinder; I heard it crunching under his feet. "I can't breathe." My voice spurted from my lips. I wanted him to hear me. A car splashed over the viaduct, the sound of the tires crashing, going somewhere, but I was going where the headlights couldn’t reach. “Can’t breathe.” He was pushing and shoving me along. "Shut up.” He tightened the shirt, jerked me to the left. I imagined him squeezing my neck between the sleeves of the blue shirt, leaving me where Mom would never find me. I would haunt their sleep like the ewe that died bleating in the orchard. And Easton wouldn’t know I hitchhiked five states to see him. I couldn’t die without him knowing about those states. There wasn’t anyone to cry for help to. This place was no place, as far from love as you could come. an excerpt from HALF GIRL, available on Amazon.com
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Dragonflies At the edge of town, we trudged through slime into dragonflies, teenage tornadoes, breathless to capture them flying upside down, sideways, iridescent-blue purple plums, racing-pulsed Persian rugs, and then in the shade of cattails, we waited, crouched, mud sucking our toes, for the male to take her between her hind quarters, unseeing eyes, kohl-blown like Nefertiti, the beautiful one. Holly and I had come to this trench of old rain for the breeding, larvae leaving the water crawling on their three belly feet, lamellas pale with surfacing, wings stretching and spewing themselves into the sky. Two dark haired girls, one a bowl-cut brunette and the other a tiny Lady Godiva with radiant white teeth, crazy to sift from our skins and become fully grown nymphs. This quickness we craved, and all the caught gaudiness, lightning metamorphosis, sure we’d fly far from this town, the crackerjack houses, escape the slowness of Snyder’s Blue Ribbon, its meat freezer where the cows hung in beheaded trances of tallow and nakedness. Beaten by years of office work, I slouch before a monitor, mouse my way back to green summer. I spit Holly’s death from my mouth, her silky hair, a coarse mane in her casket. Twenty years old, she drove a vehicle that sped straight through Sunday morning, colliding head on with a concrete divider. Her mother never recovered, her sister left her kids for an ex-husband to raise. Listen it couldn’t be quieter here typing my life away, finger strokes fall like snow over girlhood’s minute.
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