Table of Contents
More praise forThe Odditoriumand Melissa Pritchard
Melissa PritchardsThe Odditoriumis as strange, wonderful, and (most important) as much fun as anything good old Robert LeRoy Ripley could ever have envisioned. Passionate, bold imaginings that illuminate the darkest, most precious reaches of our lives. Believe it: these stories are a gift.
Pinckney Benedict, author of Miracle Boy
Melissa Pritchard has her GPS set to find thehow it isout there and in the heartand she makes her way forward with her language on high alert. The prose is rhythmically astute, finely pitched, serving both imagination and witness.
Sven Birkerts, Editor of AGNI, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
In this thrillingly protean collection of stories, Melissa Pritchard has done something profound. By imagining her way into historical moments and illuminating their shadows, she amplifies the music of history so we hear beautifully strange, wondrous notes we never knew were there. These stories resound with a fierce yet playful intelligence and a rare, magnificent generosity.
Maud Casey, author of Genealogy
Fueled by roofless imagination and fearless curiosityThe Odditoriumis a case study in how one writers wisdom and empathy transforms known facts of existence into something more than magic. Pritchard draws from the cold, deep well of myth, legend, and history to redefine what narrative can do. Each story is a lesson in compassion. Each story is nothing short of genius. Each story was written for you.
Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight
No one is quite so brilliant at voicing the all-but-impossible-to-track interior lives of the most complex human beings as is Melissa Pritchard... there is so much energy and inventiveness! Her linguistic flexibility is stunning, comic and gravely substantial. At its heart is always the troubled, often confused but courageous and tenacious human heart.
Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives and The Heaven of Mercury
Vivid, bold, and wickedly witty.
Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Abundance and Adam & Eve
Like Flannery OConnor, Melissa Pritchard treats odd, cruel dilemmas with dispassion as if by some fictional law the absence of overt charity toward deprived or crippled characters produces in the reader a sense of their memorably unmediated presence upon the page.
New York Times Book Review
Pritchard has a sure touch. She knows just how much to tell, and how much readers should intuit.... Its risky to compare any other author to Steinbeck,... but, just possibly, the potential is there.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Supple, intense and genuine.... Pritchard makes her characters come alive.
Providence Journal
Wildly imaginative... Endearingly quirky.
Glamour
Delightfully odd.
Entertainment Weekly
Pritchard possesses a gift for depicting diverse characters, times, and locales.
Ms. magazine
[Pritchards] writing... is beautiful, graphic, aggressiveand always smart.
Bloomsbury Review
Dreamy and delightful.
Alan Cheuse, NPRs All Things Considered Summer Reading List (on Disappearing Ingenue)
Pritchard, thanks to the complex life of her charactersand to her sparing but effective use of period diction and detailmanages to make it all seem new.
Kirkus Reviews
Pritchard holds the readers interest as she strives to evoke the complexities of the ineffable
Publishers Weekly
ALSO BY MELISSA PRITCHARD
Spirit Seizures
Phoenix
The Instinct for Bliss
Selene of the Spirits
Disappearing Ingenue
Late Bloomer
For Joy Harris
It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of
every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like
Sophocles Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning
his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable enquiry, even when
he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer.
But most of us carry in our heart the Jocasta who begs Oedipus
for Gods sake not to inquire further...
from a letter of Schopenhauer to Goethe November 1815
Odds Nipperkins! cried Mother Bunch on her broomstick, heres a to-do!
from Forgotten Childrens Books, Andrew Tuer,
Leadenhall Press, 1898
PELAGIA, HOLY FOOL
... we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men.We are fools, for Christs sake.
I Corinthians 4:910
Part the First: Spin, Beat, Spin
Listen, wicked children! When une jeune slut-fille dirties her own halo, simple folk cast stones, and it takes the baroque and obstinate solemnity of God to bring them to their knees before a creature of such dire humility. Pelagia, born during the pre-revolutionary era of Tsar Alexander I, was a scoundrel-saint, a staretz who flipped a convent full of pent-up, quarrelsome women on its head and put up with having her vile, unwashed feet kissed by a failing empire of wonder-struck pilgrims.
In 1809, little Pelagia Ivanovna Surin Serebrenikova slipped like a worm from her mothers fleshy cabbage-cunt in the village of Arzamas, two hundred and fifty miles miles east of Moscow, that medieval Byzantine city abandoned by Peter the Great in favor of a new capital built atop drained swamps and islands by the sea, an imperial opulence of palaces known poetically as the Palmyra of the North, and more prosaically, as Saint Petersburg.
Better looking than average, with strong teeth and an exceptional mind, the child Pelagia Ivanovna Surin Serebrenikova fell ill one day and lay senseless as a stone upon her pallet of straw. Upon arising, little Pela was quite gone, and in her place stood a lazy good-for-nothing who planted herself in the back of the family vegetable garden, twirling this way and that, hoisting her skirts shamelessly high above her head. Disgrace! wept the mother, seeing her childs fine looks and future fortune squandered by this abdication of wits. No longer the apple of her mothers eye, but an Idiota! Saloi! Yurodivye! Go ahead, she wailed, beat the girl, hammer at her with fists or switches, pelt her with stewed turnips, fire away at her with macerated apples. She will only whirl on, a brainless top, dervish sport for her six slovenly stepbrothers and drunken stepfather.
Pelagia spun upward into a blond giantess, bewitching all of Arzamas with her vertiginous beauty. Suitors lined up like cannon, like muskrats, like grave-borne communicants. Sick to death of her nitwit daughter, Pelas mother spun her toward the very first muskrat, an Arzamasian upstart with buck teeth and a russet rind of bristly mustache, eager to take Pelagia into his own hands. Sergei Vasileivich was a peculiar fellow, slightly consumptive, a military reject who puttered away, constructing miniature earthen fortresses patrolled by motionless battalions of toy soldiers made of wax. Disciplinary lapses in this tiny army were severely punished.
