Slavin - The woman who cut off her leg at the maidstone club and other stories

Praise for The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club and Other Stories

This is the most singular and arresting collection of short fiction Ive read in years. Based on the reading experience, which is two-thirds delight and one-third windowpane LSD, youd think Slavin injected DNA from Bruno Schulzs moldering skeleton, but I think the even more amazing and inspiring truth is that she came up with these stunning pages on her own. Who knows how these things happen? Just read it.

Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm

It is a collection of short stories that are, individually and together, improbable, outrageous, fanciful, captivating, and somehow for all their horrific touches of surrealism very, very cheerful. The success of Slavins prose seems to me to ride on its unrelenting naturalness. She is an extraordinarily attentive and selectiveand subtle reporter. Details are lean, precise, uncluttered, fine-edged tapestry weaving.

The Baltimore Sun

Id have sworn I could hear John Cheever laughing. Julia Slavin is astonishing.

Susan Dodd, author of The Mourners Bench

The writing in this collection of twelve stories sparkles. Slavin is a truly gifted writer. Shes funny and precise and has a very dry wit. This book had me enraptured all the way through and dreading its final page: a rare response to a collection of American short fiction these days.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

[These stories] bubble up out of a quietly desperate, normalized insanity that has a brave tradition in literature and that I believe will be good fuel for the rocket ship that will take us to the new planet.

Susan Salter Reynolds, Newsday

These stories move from the mundane to the surreal, sometimes abruptly, sometimes gradually, but always with intelligence, wiliness, and wit.

The Boston Globe

Slavin takes her perceptions beyond the natural worlds limits; shes wildly inventive and drolly post-ironic.

Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer

Punky, hilarious, [and] provocative. New York Observer

Sparkling surreal The bittersweet irony of these stories lies in the revelation that love, reduced to a simple physical state, is just as complicated, painful, and difficult as love in its evanescent form.

Judy Budnitz, The Village Voice

Slavin is a gutsy writer, unafraid to make dreamlike leaps of logic or to exploit potent psychosexual imagery.

Time Out New York

Slavins talent is close to perfection. Arizona Daily Star

Slavins style is simple, clean, reminiscent in tone of fairy tales, yet her characters are quite well developed, and her insights into the complexities of the human heart are thought provoking. True love, adultery, incest, marriage, jealousy, the joys of parenthoodall figure here, larger than life and skillfully portrayed. This is one must-read collection of short stories.

Booklist, starred review

There is nothing predictable about Slavins work; by turns charming and eerie, her stories are sure to engage and stimulate. Highly recommended.

Library Journal, starred review

The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg at the Maidstone Club

And Other Stories

Julia Slavin

For Jack More, Jesse Thomas,

and John Christopher Arnholz

Contents

Swallowed Whole

Theres a way young skin looks that no amount of plastic surgery can recapture. It has an unmarred translucence, as though the flesh were stretched under a fluorescent street-lamp. But I think it was the little red baseball cap he wore backward, like a catcher, that sent me off my feet.

His name was Chris. He mowed our lawn.

As he worked, I moved window to window watching him cut our grass in horizontal rows. His edges were uneven, but I didnt give a damn, they were his, and after he was gone I lay outside, patted the bristly blades like a new haircut, and said, You are my lawn. Today a beautiful boy cut you and edged you.

It was a late July afternoon. The sky was blue and cloudless. The sun was just dipping behind the maple in the McNaultys yard. He leaned against the back doorframe with his thumbs in the pockets of his long shorts, his shirt tied through a belt loop, MONTANA written across his belt in blue and white beads.

Would you like to come out and see?

No, I trust you. I was relieved I could still talk.

Are you sure? He leaned into the kitchen. Customer satisfaction is our number-one concern.

Everything I was thinking was wrong and dangerous. I paid him for the lawn and scooted him out the back. This is like being sick, I thought, holding a bottle of San Pellegrino to my forehead. Ive contracted a lawn virus named Chris. I didnt know how I was going to wait ten days for our lawn to grow.

I put up a pot of decaf and called the drugstore for another prescription of Clomid, the fertility drug I was taking. Then I put on Sibelius and sat down to dress my loom. I threw the heddle under the weft and was gliding along smoothly when the smell of dirt and grass came over me like a soft blanket. I raced out of the house. Maybe I could sweat him out of me. I heard the sound of mowers everywhere and ran to them, praying one would be Chriss. I was the mercury from a broken thermometer, bouncing off the sidewalks, zigzagging the neighborhood, mower to mower.

Chris looked up from the Leonards lawn where he was crouching, pulling the mower cord to get the engine started. Hello, Mrs. Carter, he said.

Chris, I said. I was wondering

He stood up, took a pack of Camels out of his pocket, and shook one out. He offered me a cigarette and I took one. He struck a match, cupped grass-stained hands around it, and held it for me. I hadnt smoked in eight years.

Yes? he said. You were wondering?

I was wondering if you did other thingsyou know, besides mowing, like weeding and clipping.

I have, he said. Done those things. In the past.

Would you then? I said. For me?

I could give you an estimate. He put his hands on my ass.

Not here.

Why not?

He stuck his tongue in my mouth. I sucked on it. I didnt care who saw. I sucked his tongue and he started to moan because I was hurting him, but that just made me suck harder. He tried to push me away. I sucked harder. He started to scream. His mouth was wide open, his eyes looked like they were going to bug out of his head, his tongue hit my uvula, and I sucked him down my throat. All of him. As I watched his feet lift off the ground and follow the rest of him down my gullet I thought it was kind of funny, but once he was in, I felt my rib cage expand and numbing pain all over my body. I was certain my chest was going to explode and I couldnt breathe. I collapsed on the grass and lay on my back waiting to die. Help, help, I could only whisper.

Look what youve done, Chris screamed inside me.

Help, help, I whispered.

Help, help, Chris mimicked. He rearranged himself to take the pressure out of my chest, but when he moved, his elbow jabbed into my pancreas and I screamed. Then he settled farther down in me, and though I still couldnt move, it wasnt quite as painful anymore. I managed to roll onto my knees and pull myself up with the handle of the mower. Once I was standing I thought I was going to sink into the ground. I couldnt remember how to walk.