Hey,
my name is Arielle and I’m a writer, artist, and aspiring wizard. Right now I’m working as an agency assistant at Jabberwocky Literary Agency, after my graduation from Stanford University, where I studied English and Creative Writing. I’m hoping someday to put my juggling, unicycling, and aerial skills to good use by running away to join the circus, but until then I keep myself entertained sewing historical clothing and playing the accordion with my wife and cat, Peppercorn, in Philadelphia.
Short Fiction
tell me how it tastes
Mia’s dead ex-wife turns up in the middle of the night, dripping. She’s soggy with the smell of the lakebed and gets stinking mud all over the mat. Mia doesn’t know what to do with her, but she runs a bath that’s probably too hot and sits with her back against the bathroom door until she hears it start to drain. Then she pulls the bedsheet up over her shoulders and pretends to be asleep. In the morning they leave for a road trip, Mia and her ex-dead wife.
They don’t have an end point in mind. West, Aliya says, let’s go out west. Wherever we end up. So Mia packs for a week: six shirts four shorts eight pairs underwear two bras should be enough. With everything rolled into bundles by outfit it all fits into her smallest duffel bag. Aliya packs like she always does: armsdeep in the closet, talking the whole time. Mia watches her elbows lock and straighten as she stuffs things into a suitcase. They are the same as they’ve always been—not bloated or gray from a year at the bottom of the lake—and the skin is smooth and whole, not fishbitten. Mia stares and stares and pretends to listen. She’s sitting in the driver’s seat by nine.
After the bath Aliya didn’t smell like lake mud anymore, but like something thick and floral. Every year in July all the bushes in front of the neighbor’s house break out in tiny white flowers. At first the sweet smell is nice, but by the fourth day the flowers’ grainy shapes start to swallow up all the leaves, brilliant burning white. You can try to hold your breath when you walk by but eventually you inhale and the air is so thick and stifling that time of year that the smell snakes down your lungs and curls up there, making a home of you.
Prophecy is a Broken Line
My parents weren’t thrilled to have me in the two-bedroom apartment they had downsized to after my brother moved out, but they seemed glad that I wasn’t farming anymore. They put me on the couch in the room that wasn’t the bedroom, which managed to be everything else—storage, guest room, living room, and home office, where my mother worked from home Monday through Wednesday and my father Thursday and Friday. Often I woke up to the half-conversation of a meeting on the phone, my mother’s docile fake laugh.
When I was little, in the first apartment I can remember, above the open doorway to the kitchen were two frightening faces, Venetian masks leering down at me, one long distended nose and one grotesque devil’s smile. When we moved they vanished into a box and never came out again, but often in my dreams they showed up, the faces of shadowed figures that stretched their open hands out for me to take. It was strange to see them in real life again, smaller than I had remembered, with details that I had forgotten. I had thought the red one had its tongue lolling out; but no, it only smiled, and its teeth were blunt, and the mustache was pointed at the ends.
The Robber Girl’s Story
Gerda has gotten thick around the middle, barrel-like, but she still moves with that same grace like she’s floating. Makes my elephantsteps even more obvious. She fills the kettle up in the belly of the sink, an old one, stained graybeige like everything else, & I sit at the table with my hand in my other hand feeling my own skin.
Little Kay is here too, of course, not little any more. When I first got here he greeted me with plenty of kindness, his hands pressed into my shoulders and his unshaved face rough on my cheek as he kissed the air next to my ear, but since we came inside he has been sitting silent in the rocking-chair, still-shod, the small clumps of snow on his boots giving up one by one and soaking into the floor. He is looking at Gerda or perhaps into the empty middle space.
I drag my thumb across my palm & the skin is smoothsoft like a memory of silk ribbon.
Golem
There was nobody who loved me so I built myself a lover. High on mania and drunk on old gin, I stumbled down to the riverbed and began dredging up clay. I built her from sticks and mud and blood and spit. Slapped together under the light of the moon and the buzzy overspill from the streetlight on the bridge. When the frenzy wore off I saw that she was a sad approximation of a woman, misshapen and tumorous. Feeling sober and stupid, I kicked her down and watched the mud dissolve into the river.
Wing-Longing
I once lived with an entomologist who was interested in moths. She was interested in anything that was small and had large wings, but mostly in moths. Large ones with soft antennae and tiny ones that could perch on your thumbnail and white furry ones that hatched in the winter and translucent green ones that used to be fat caterpillars that she would bring home and keep in jars and feed with oak leaves from the backyard.
She lived in my house and we slept together often and I cooked her expansive dinners when she came home from the lab, but when she said she loved me she was lying.