Aimee Bender - Willful Creatures

Acclaim for Aimee Benders
Willful Creatures

Beautifully told, studded with eye-popping details. Bender is funny and astonishingly perceptive, especially when it comes to human emotions.

People

Prose so animated it seems almost capable of writing itself.

The Atlantic Monthly

Think of a width of exquisite lace, fashioned by a master artisan who has thrown away any idea of a previous pattern. Then think of the thread that makes up that lace as being in credibly dense and sturdy and strong. Thats what the stories in this collection resemble.

The Washington Post

Experimental in the best sense, these stories are at once risky and selfassured and bitterly funny.

New York magazine

Benders stories range in length and voice, floating in the ethereal space between naturalism and magic realism. This collection moves along effortlessly, though you will linger in the what it reveals.

San Francisco Chronicle

Sublime studies on sorrow, grief, kindness and love.

Time

Each story is laced with a bit of arsenic that curls the tongue and sharpens the breath. Narrative stormsloneliness, suspicion, torture, and deathsweep in and electrocute the landscape with jagged lightening.

The Believer

Aimee Bender has created a series of glisteningly weird miniatures. Benders vision, with its dark, plucky humor and touches of the bizarre, has the power to make us cringe for our own world.

Esquire

If theres any serious writer going against the stream of realistic short fiction these days its Los Angeles storymaker Aimee Bender. She moves language the way painters move paint.

Chicago Tribune

The absorbing Willful Creatures is full of surprise and dark instruction conveyed with graceful humor. Real and beautiful.

Bookforum

Her imagination packs all the gleaming surreality of a Magritte painting, her wry tone the pokerfaced irony of a Haruki Murakami novel, her furious satire the bite of a Lynda Barry cartoon. The stories in Willful Creatures delight even as they unsettle.

Time Out New York

Few are as good at sociological surveillance as Aimee Bender. Her brilliance isnt just in picking up on the tiny, whispered actions that stand for our big ideas and giant hang-ups, its in artfully and stealthily turning them around and feeding them back to us as matter-of-fact human nature.

Seattle Weekly

Willful Creatures is an essential work that should be required reading for any who delight in deft prose and truly empathetic portraits of the human condition.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Theres strangeness in [Benders] stories, yet the feelings they draw from readers, after some initial discomfort, are timeless and conventional: From oddness she evokes tenderness, and from her characters peculiarities (theyre often very dark) she produces romance.

The Arizona Republic

Theyre entertaining and funny and weird, but theyre idiosyncratic as hell: theyre, well, Benders as much as they are stories, original and probably inimitable, the way Richard Brautigans stories were back in the day.

OC Weekly

Whether in novel or short-story form, her surreal, fractured fairy-tales leave readers shaken and stirred in equal measure.

Elle

Also by

Aimee Bender

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
An Invisible Sign of My Own

Aimee Bender
Willful Creatures

Aimee Bender is the author of the short story collection The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own. Her stories have appeared in Granta, GQ, Harpers, The Paris Review, and other magazines, and have been heard on PRIs This American Life. She lives in Los Angeles.

For
Ardie, Jeanne, and Judith

Contents

I Will Pick Out Your Ribs
(from My Teeth)

Ten men go to ten doctors. All the doctors tell all the men that they only have two weeks left to live. Five men cry. Three men rage. One man smiles. The last man is silent, meditative. Okay, he says. He has no reaction. The raging men, upon meeting in the lobby, dont know what to do with the man of no reaction. They fall upon him and kill him with their bare hands. The doctor comes out of his office and apologizes, to the dead man.

Dang it, he says sheepishly, to his colleagues. Looks like I got the date wrong again.

One cant account for murder or accidents, says another doctor in his bright white coat.

The raging, sad men and the smiling man all leave the office. The smiling man does not know why he is smiling. He just feels relieved. He was suicidal anyway. Now its out of his hands. The others growl at him, their bare hands blood specked, but the smiler is eerie in his relief, and so they let him be, thinking he might somehow speed up their precious two weeks. The raging men tear out the door first; the crying men follow.

On their way they meet up with a field of cows. The cows are chewing quietly and calmly. The sight of the cows fills the crying men with sadness as they only have two weeks left to look at cows. But the sight of the cows fills the raging men with more rage. After all, why are the cows so calm? Why is it that cows get to remain ignorant of their own death? Why is the sky so blue and peaceful? The raging men run to the cows but the cows dont notice; the cows want, more than anything, just to continue chewing. One raging man collapses in the field and drums it with his fists. The others run and run. The five crying men stand at the fence, crying. Look at the sad and large rage of the doomed men, they think. Who knew a cow was so beautiful? Why was I not a farmer? Why not a field hand? Why an office building?

Back at the office building, the doctors check their notebooks and discover an error. Oops. Only two of the five crying men need to be crying. The other three are in perfect health. The doctors, embarrassed, call up their patients who are by then crying into the arms of their crying wives or lovers or pets.

We have some good news! they say. We made a goof. You seem to be in perfect health. Very sorry about that.

One crying man, new lease on life, moves his family to the countryside where they raise goats.

The other two go back to their regular routines. A close call.

The last raging man still is drumming his fists on the field. His lover calls out into the darkness of the night. The lover understands that his angry man is out there raging against the world again, this is to be expected, but he does not understand why the doctor keeps calling.

The suicidal one is another error, but he is impossible to contact. He has flown by now to Greece and is trying finally to have a relationship. With only a couple of weeks left, he thinks that for once he has a good chance of having someone by his bedside when he dies.

The two remaining crying men die. One with tubes, the other in his own bed. One of the raging men dies, roaring in his bathtub. Another, though not a mistake, still drums that field with his fists. The very energy it takes should drain him dry, but no. He is happily drumming. He drums for weeks and sits up and isnt yet dead. It takes him six months, which he uses to make some angry paintings that are beloved by people in galleries who are unaware that they themselves are angry at all.