Aimee Bender - The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories

Benders taut prose works its wise melodies throughout this first collection Each short story packs a heavy punch, and each should be savored. From cleverly comic to starkly surreal, Benders audacious characters surprise and delight. Sometimes, they even make you weep.

Boston Globe

Benders world is strange and fabulous, an ultravivid, matter-of-fact presentation of extraordinary circumstances and bizarre fulfillments Declarative and telegraphic, Benders stories read like modern fableswith a healthy sense of twisted humor thrown in for good measure.

Village Voice Literary Supplement

A wild imagination, full of bikini-bold sexiness and brute deformity, shaped into art by the sure hand of a fabulist.

Philadelphia Inquirer, Best Fiction of 1998

You dont know weird until youve read this original, at times borderline-absurd short story collection.

Mademoiselle

These stories plumb and expose deep tensions hidden in the mundane.

Washington Post

Aimee Bender

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

Aimee Bender lives in Los Angeles. Her stories have appeared in Granta, GQ, Story, Harpers, The Antioch Review, and several other publications. She is the author of An Invisible Sign of My Own.

F IRST A NCHOR B OOKS E DITION , S EPTEMBER 1999

Copyright1998 by Aimee Bender

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1998.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The following stories appeared previously and are reprinted by permission of the author: The Rememberer in the Missouri Review (Fall 1997); Call My Name in the North American Review (Spring 1998); What You Left in the Ditch in The Antioch Review (Fall 1997); Quiet Please in GQ (May 1998); Skinless (under the title Erasing) in the Colorado Review (Spring 1996); Fugue in Absolute Disaster/Santa Monica Review (Spring 1997); Fell This Girl in Faultline (Fall 1997); The Healer in Story (Winter 1998); Loser in Granta (Winter 1998); Legacy in Cream City Review (Spring 1997); Dreaming in Polish in Threepenny Review (Spring 1995); The Ring in the Massachusetts Review (Fall 1997).

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this work as follows:
Bender, Aimee.
The girl in the flammable skirt: stories / by Aimee Bender. 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. United StatesSocial life and customs20th centuryFiction.
I. Title.
PS3552.E538447G57 1998
813.54dc21 97-44485

eISBN: 978-0-307-80446-4

Author photograph Jerry Bauer

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

FOR MY MOTHER AND FATHER

My lover is experiencing reverse evolution. I tell no one. I dont know how it happened, only that one day he was my lover and the next he was some kind of ape. Its been a month and now hes a sea turtle.

I keep him on the counter, in a glass baking pan filled with salt water.

Ben, I say to his small protruding head, can you understand me? and he stares with eyes like little droplets of tar and I drip tears into the pan, a sea of me.

He is shedding a million years a day. I am no scientist, but this is roughly what I figured out. I went to the old biology teacher at the community college and asked him for an approximate time line of our evolution. He was irritated at firsthe wanted money. I told him Id be happy to pay and then he cheered up quite a bit. I can hardly read his time linehe shouldve typed itand it turns out to be wrong. According to him, the whole process should take about a year, but from the way things are going, I think we have less than a month left.

At first, people called on the phone and asked me where was Ben. Why wasnt he at work? Why did he miss his lunch date with those clients? His out-of-print special-ordered book on civilization had arrived at the bookstore, would he please pick it up? I told them he was sick, a strange sickness, and to please stop calling. The stranger thing was, they did. They stopped calling. After a week, the phone was silent and Ben, the baboon, sat in a corner by the window, wrapped up in drapery, chattering to himself.

Last day I saw him human, he was sad about the world.

This was not unusual. He was always sad about the world. It was a large reason why I loved him. Wed sit together and be sad and think about being sad and sometimes discuss sadness.

On his last human day, he said, Annie, dont you see? Were all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when theres too much thought and not enough heart.

He looked at me pointedly, blue eyes unwavering. Like us, Annie, he said. We think far too much.

I sat down. I remembered how the first time we had sex, I left the lights on, kept my eyes wide open, and concentrated really hard on letting go; then I noticed that his eyes were open too and in the middle of everything we sat down on the floor and had an hour-long conversation about poetry. It was all very peculiar. It was all very familiar.

Another time he woke me up in the middle of the night, lifted me off the pale blue sheets, led me outside to the stars and whispered: Look, Annie, lookthere is no space for anything but dreaming. I listened, sleepily, wandered back to bed and found myself wide awake, staring at the ceiling, unable to dream at all. Ben fell asleep right away, but I crept back outside. I tried to dream up to the stars, but I didnt know how to do that. I tried to find a star no one in all of history had ever wished on before, and wondered what would happen if I did.

On his last human day, he put his head in his hands and sighed and I stood up and kissed the entire back of his neck, covered that flesh, made wishes there because I knew no woman had ever been so thorough, had ever kissed his every inch of skin. I coated him. What did I wish for? I wished for good. Thats all. Just good. My wishes became generalized long ago, in childhood; I learned quick the consequence of wishing specific.

I took him in my arms and made love to him, my sad man. See, were not thinking, I whispered into his ear while he kissed my neck, were not thinking at all and he pressed his head into my shoulder and held me tighter. Afterward, we went outside again; there was no moon and the night was dark. He said he hated talking and just wanted to look into my eyes and tell me things that way. I let him and it made my skin lift, the things in his look. Then he told me he wanted to sleep outside for some reason and in the morning when I woke up in bed, I looked out to the patio and there was an ape sprawled on the cement, great furry arms covering his head to block out the glare of the sun.