Love is a Thing on Sale for More Money Than There Exists

The first story in my story-collection Bed (2007).

Bed is the first prose book I wrote. I wrote eight of its nine stories in college. It’s out-of-print but my agent Julie Flanagan is going to try to get a publisher to reprint it and Eeeee Eee Eeee (2007) and Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009) soon.

Out of the stories in Bed, I had the most fun writing this one, I think. I wrote it in my junior year maybe. It’s 4729 words. I submitted it to many print journals. It was published in Other Voices and anthologized in New American Stories (2015).

I love this cover. It references this story

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Love is a Thing on Sale for More Money Than There Exists

This was the month that people began to suspect that terrorists had infiltrated Middle America, set up underground tunnels in the rural areas, like gophers. During any moment, it was feared, a terrorist might tunnel up into your house and replace your dog with something that resembled your dog but was actually a bomb. This was a new era in terrorism. The terrorists were now quicker, wittier, and more streetwise. They spoke the vernacular, and claimed to be philosophically sound. They would whisper into the wind something mordant and culturally damning about McDonald’s, Jesus, and America—and then, if they wanted to, if the situation eschatologically called for it, they would slice your face off with a KFC Spork.

People began to quit their jobs. They saw that their lives were small and threatened, and so they tried to cherish more, to calm down and appreciate things for once. But in the end, bored in their homes, they just became depressed and susceptible to head colds. They filled their apartments with pets, but then neglected to name them. They became nauseated and unbelieving. They did not believe that they themselves were nauseated, but that it was someone else who was nauseous—that it was all, somehow, a trick. A fun joke. “Ha,” they thought. Then they went and took a nap. Sometimes, late at night and in Tylenol-cold hazes, crouched and blanket-hooded on their beds, they dared to squint out into their lives, and what they saw was a grass of bad things, miasmic and low to the ground, depraved, scratching, and furry—and squinting back! It was all their pets, and they wanted names. They just wanted to be named!

Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake. It was something else. A get-together on Easter Island. You, the botched clone of you, the Miami Dolphins; Coco-Puffs, paper plates, a dwindling supply of clam juice. That was life.