Happy Happy

Thank you for the birthday wishes. I'm older but not old. Josh is thrilled by my grey hairs, so I'm thrilled by my grey hairs. My grandfather has white hair and lots of it. Josh taps the table in patience. I'm only 28.

I almost shared a birthday with my sister-in-not-legal-in-Missouri's newest son. A day apart, but he's still a Taurus. Even if you didn't know that, you'd know he's going to be a good one. He was passed around to all arms but mine and never cried. I have a personal code where I don't hold babies. I've had nightmares I drop them. The closest thing to a baby in my house is a small plastic newborn I found in a cake. Aside from that, I have a preserved tadpole in a jar. It's almost a frog, but it retains a tail. One of my friends thought it was a chicken leg.

Necessary Fiction asked me some questions about writing. I learned answering questions about writing makes me nervous. I'm still at the stage where I'm waiting for someone to knock on my door and take it all away. Sometimes my mail delivery person will be loud on her headset out on the front porch, and I'll think it's "the authorities." Also, there are no authorities. No one is going to take my writing away (I keep chanting to myself).

Well, I ran yesterday. Not much, but. I was in the grocery after, and a woman hurried up to me and demanded to know what cologne I was wearing. I wasn't wearing anything but sweat and shorts. Pheromones, I imagine. This makes the second time this spring. People are insistent I smell like spices.

There was a brown recluse in a sink last night where Josh and I were staying. Spiders scare me more in sinks. It's the shape of the sink, the bowl of it, and the suggestion that the spider crawled up and out of the drain. Josh says he found a snake in a sink once. The same principle but larger. The snake slipped over the lip of the sink, down the base, onto the floor, and into a hole in the wall.

Josh told me to do something about the brown recluse. I did something.

Good Days

People came to watch me read stories in an art gallery on Saturday. The gallery was empty but for a little step stool and a dog toy in the shape of a football. People sat on the floor. I brought two pies, and people actually ate them. The reading went well except for when my mouth dried out during my third story. I had to walk across the gallery and fill a wine glass with water. The residue of the wine in the glass turned the water blue. It looked like I was drinking cleaning supplies. Everyone was so nice about it.

There are pictures of me reading, but I won't post them here. My chin disappeared into my neck when I looked down at my book. I've heard words for people with weak chins. "Thumb" gets passed around. 

I've been tall, and now I'm skinny like I used to be when I was short enough for gymnastics. I can't hide anymore. I try. I have prescription glasses that turn into sunglasses when I'm outdoors. But I couldn't hide at the reading. My book is too small to cover my face. People call my book a baby. Publishers Weekly calls it a star. There are reviews, then there's THAT review. Josh made me read it out loud to him before we went to sleep last night. It was a celebration night. Those nights are like undiluted vinegar. Be careful.

After the reading, we all went to a bar and drank two beers each. I talked to poets. One of them was wearing a hat to protect from sunburn. It was after dark. I guess the sun is always out for poets. I developed a crush. Those are easy to develop. I develop them whenever I leave the house. Mostly, I don't leave the house.

Josh, his mother, and I were at an Indian restaurant on Sunday. Josh's mother told a story about her father as a boy. Every summer, a man would come to live in a hut by the rock quarry in her father's town. The quarry was filled with water. The man would take a large jar and dive down where the water was coldest, and he'd bottle the cold water and bring it back up with him to share. The way she told it made it seem like a simple miracle. We were eating dry cooked okra. The dry cooking kills the slime. Another little miracle. 

I can imagine diving down deep enough for something precious. There was this time I was in the ocean, and I tried going under for a shell, but the shell was too far down, and my ears began to hurt. When I came up someone warned me about reaching for strange shells. That sometimes the creatures living inside are toxic. OK. That's fine. But sometimes they're not.

New York and Now

Josh and I are on the bus. I don't know what state we're in, but it's grey and wet. We're curling up to Boston from New York. I think that's the direction. A northerly curl around some serious water. Bays? I'm unsure. I've seen a lot of seabirds. One of these states beckons to the Atlantic like a witch's finger.

I looked it up. It's Massachusetts. It has a tail sticking out in the ocean.

At least one other person on this bus is going to AWP. The woman standing between us in line tried to play matchmaker. "Oh! He's going to the writing conference, too!" The other person looked at me and said, "Great."

We just passed an IKEA. I made the sign of the cross for all those poor horses in the meatballs. No, I didn't. I admit curiosity about horse meat. Odds are strong I've already eaten it in something somewhere. I'm being blasphemous. I'm from Kentucky. Horses are chestnut gods.

I've used context clues to figure out we're in Connecticut. It's like when someone asks if you feel older on your birthday. I'm in Connecticut, but I don't feel any different. I felt different in New York.

Josh is asleep. His mouth is wide open.

We were in New York for a week. We stayed with friends. Their dog licked me awake from a nap. She licked my arm tattoos. Other people have licked my arm tattoos. Some of them only kissed. I don't get the allure. My tattoos have been a part of me for so long. I want more. I have ideas. You don't care, I know.

When I say I felt different in New York, I mean I felt like no other place in the world existed. That's dangerous. We saw five plays. The ticker in Times Square was delivering news, and it seemed like fiction. People are right. New York is a bubble. It should be no surprise I want to move there.

I had a hard time taking in all I saw. There were so many beautiful men. I've been overstimulated all week. A flawless young man was onstage last night in his underwear. Sigourney Weaver climbed him like a pole. She tongued a wall sconce in failed seduction. I got to see that on Broadway.

I get to see you soon.

Looker

I used to like math. Then I slipped on a wet restroom floor and hit my head on a urinal trough. After that, I stopped liking math. I wanted to draw and write stories. I don't have any of those stories, but I do have this:

My favorite toy for a while was a plastic mouse. I made a house for her out of a shoe box. My mother taught me how to whip stitch. I made a skirt for the plastic mouse. I preferred the toys I had to alter. I once begged my father to smuggle a naked Barbie over from my grandmother's house so I'd have a model for a superhero costume I was making out of felt squares. I have always been obsessive. It was important I have that Barbie. While I was writing my book, it seemed important I smoke, but I didn't want to become a smoker. I bought a hollow plastic cigarette. It sat beside me in an ash tray. I never picked it up.

My brain has been inconsistent trouble. Epilepsy runs in my family. It runs across generations. My first seizure came the morning after Christmas when I was 10. My family couldn't wake me. A doctor was adamant it wasn't epilepsy. He thought I'd had an extreme nightmare. My parents weren't convinced. I was more than willing to accept the less severe diagnosis. I did have extreme nightmares. One involved a hairy monster tying me to a chair and tickling me until I died. As I got older, the hairy monster became a man. Obviously.

For the rest of the year after that first seizure, I was allowed to set my own pace in school. The pace I set was I did the homework in my head, but I never wrote it down.

I had my next seizure when I was 18. I'd been sewing the denim from old jeans into a small bag. Into a purse, yes. Someone gave me grief about it, and I maintained that Chewbacca carried a small bag. He never took anything out of it. It was just a piece of fashion. I was wearing the bag when I crouched down to put the sewing machine back in the closet. I felt tired, so I went to sleep. "Sleep" was a seizure. I woke up, and the EMTs were trying to remove the bag. I remember someone suggesting it contained drugs. It did not.

It's been a few years since my last seizure, which involved me waking up on the hardwood. Josh was sitting on the edge of the bed. He said, "Can you imagine how terrifying it was to come home and find you lying unconscious on the floor?"

It turns out I'm the lucky one in these situations. I black out. I go somewhere else. When I get back, everyone is scared.

There's a paper in Kansas City called The Pitch. They have a crush on me. We have seen each other from a distance. Everyone looks good from far away.

Playtime

Josh and I are very into theater right now/always and forever. We went to see a production of Death of a Salesman here in Kansas City. At intermission, a woman sitting behind us said she didn't know the play would be so heavy. Ha ha. The title's no joke. That play's heavy as cream sauce. Later, during the last act, the woman sitting behind us leaned over to her companion and whispered, "I don't know what's going on." I do love admissions of defeat. More than once during the play I was defeated by a performer's wonderful ass. Another patron was defeated navigating the stairs in the dark. I heard a tumble, then, "Whoops!" Everybody hurts sometimes.

In March, Josh and I are going to a writing conference in Boston. We're excited. I have to be honest, though. We're mostly excited because we got tickets to see this production of The Glass Menagerie in Cambridge, Mass. with Zachary Quinto, Cherry Jones, Celia Keenan-Bolger, and Brian J. Smith. I'll give you a moment to drink the milkshake of that cast list. If it had a flavor it would probably be raw and eggy like cookie dough.

The weather's been warm enough this weekend for night walks. Josh and I were passing a dark porch the other night, and a woman's voice shot from the shadows (offstage). "There's a full moon tonight," she said. Her little dog barked at us through the chain-link fence. We looked up, and duh, the full moon. I saw a UPS guy drop off a package on that woman's porch once. A man came out of the house and yelled, "What is this?! I didn't order anything! What is in this box?!" He looked at the box. "Oh," he said. "Her."

I have a new story at wigleaf.

Dennis Cooper has me all day at his blog. He has me at all ages. He has me at a family pie recipe. He has me with an old sample of my handwriting. He has me through my book, Mother Ghost. You'll have me soon, too, I swear.

Animale Cruelty

                                                                        (Casey Hannan, 1990-something)

I had a pet snapping turtle. That was a long time ago. It was a baby snapping turtle. It looked like a rock with eyes. I kept the snapping turtle in a shallow fish bowl on the back porch. The gravel shifted in the turtle's bowl during a thunderstorm, and the turtle became trapped and drowned. I was bad with animals, but I loved them. There was the one time I squeezed a wild lizard, and its stomach popped out of its body and onto my fingers. There was the dog we fed too much microwaved popcorn. The vet said the dog's body was "riddled with cancer," like the dog was posed a question it couldn't answer. There were all the times grasshoppers peed in my hands and vibrated their wings apart. All of that was unfortunate discovery. I'm very careful now. I keep a snake alive.

My friend was in town. She stayed with us a hair over a week. We rang in the New Year by drinking tequila and talking about I don't remember. The rest of the week we learned about Tennessee Williams and the choices people make when adapting his work for the movies. I watched Marlon Brando and Paul Newman take off their shirts, and it was like seeing men for the very first time.

One of my teachers called me a cartoon once. I'm trying a mustache.

It snowed while my friend was here. We went walking the day after. A woman on the street told us to be careful. She yelled about a storm coming. No storm came. I hope that woman is OK. She seemed not OK. I told her we would be careful. I promised her. She made me promise.

A man walked by the house the other day. He was singing like he'd been trained in it. I'd seen him before, but I'd never heard him sing. It was a good moment. It was dark and windy, and my friend had left earlier that morning to catch her train. I needed a man to walk by my house and sing. Sometimes a nurse walks by on his way to the hospital. When the weather is warm, he walks on the balls of his feet. When it's cold, he's flat-footed. I wonder if he knows he's doing it. Josh tells me when I'm talking, I look into the distance and my eyes move side to side like I'm reading a teleprompter. Now I notice it every time.

My book officially releases this coming week. If you pre-ordered a copy, you'll receive it soon. If you didn't pre-order a copy, I will never know. Your conscience is dirty, but your hands are clean. You've committed the perfect crime.

After Ghost Hunting

I don't need a parade or anything, but I successfully roasted my first turkey last night. Josh gets a turkey from his boss every year (Merry Christmas!), so we have to use it or lose it. We don't prepare meat in our home very often, and the reason for that is meat is gross. Still, I got a sick thrill cutting out the turkey's backbone. I've always wondered about surgeons, but now I wonder less.

I'll tell you how I went ghost hunting. I was with my friends and two attractive brothers. One is a young Santa Claus. The other is muscles on muscles, and then on those muscles, tattoos. You might say I'm easy to please, and you might be right. We got in a truck that was bigger than a dragon. We went down gravel roads. The truck was very loud. It was important we were quiet when we got out of the truck. Ghost hunting was like fishing that way. We probably didn't see any ghosts. Maybe we felt them? There was a chilly spot in one of the cemeteries, but the night was already cold, and who knows.

The creepiest part of ghost hunting was when we drove past the house where two women had been raped and murdered over the summer. Maybe that house was a ghost. Yes, that house was a ghost for sure.

There were a few times we stood over a grave and passed around a tape recorder and asked questions of no one in particular. Mostly, "Do you have anything to say?" We used our kindest voices. The last time we did it there was an urgency, a polite demand for some sort of sign. Every dog for five miles started barking. A cow stood on a stick, and the stick snapped. Someone used the night vision to watch out for bobcats and coyotes. One of the oldest graves had an early form of photography to identify the deceased. Another grave had just been filled. Our shoes sunk in the dirt there.

My copies of my book have arrived. I signed some and sold them. People are saying it's pretty. Also, small. It's smaller than a sandwich. I read three stories from it yesterday. It was like looking at a picture I couldn't remember posing for. I wrote those stories, once.