City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where a grocers’ warehouse might become a palace, and an antique bank is hidden beneath a department store.
Happy Labor Day! Today is for me the fourth of a four-day weekend, so I feel I’m doing the holiday justice—though I have been engaged more than usual in the work of self-promotion over the course of it, which is in itself laborious. Ah, well. Let’s get to it:
Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.
While I’m writing a story, I am subject to a set of tensions indistinguishable from those that overtake me when I write poems. The distinction is most of all technical, because I find the idea of “poetic stories” more horrifying than yellow fever, and I am always very careful that what happens in my stories suggests to the reader a definite structure, a given reality, as unreal as it might seem to the eyes of a newspaper reader and those beings with-their-feet-on-the-ground. (What are feet? What is the ground?) If I find in your stories a fraternity that excites me and makes me want to be your friend, it is precisely the supreme nerve with which you plant your word trees.
What’s in the bucket, stagnant beneath a drift of freshly frothy bubbles touched with lately golden light, it’s murky, filthily grey, splashing as the sponge is dropped exruptively overwhelming bubbles, light, and warmth. She sits back on her heels, shake of her head, back of her hand the wrist to her one temple, the other, swiping, short hair glossily bleached to a fakely translucent platinum, stripped of any color that might’ve lingered to leave room for all the possible colors to come rushing somehow in. The tub before her and the encompassing surround a fiberglass shell of seafoam green all slicked and smeared with streaks of suds and residual grime, trickled and dripping, popping.
She hoists the bucket with a grunt to tip it, careful of the lolling sponge, spilling filthy water into the bowl of a toilet likewise seafoam green. Her cargo shorts of frayed and ragged khaki, bleach-splotched, the velcro’d running shoes socklessly loose on her feet.
Clunk and rattle the bucket into the tub, tilted under the faucet she levers open, fresh water a whitely foaming gush that thunders at first, modulating as it fills. Her saggy, short-sleeved shirt buttoned all the way up to a collar the same dark green as the palm’s width placket, paneled to either side with a pale green almost but just enough not quite seafoam.
Shuts off the water, turning and twisting the weighty bucket to dump it, hurling water about to rinse away suds and smear but leaving, left behind touches, streaks, stubborn marring dregs. Fishes out the sponge to scrub at one, quickening, roughening, grinding with the heel of her hand to squeeze out greyly dribble and plop, but to no effect on the stain. She sits back, shakes her head, slams the sponge back in the bucket.
“Also there’s some bits that are sexy as hell so like, be prepared for that…”
“The surrealism, the lush detail, and the loving attention to local Portland culture…”
