Hogging the Lady
by Ann Bogle
This is the hardest of the stories. This is the story that belongs in its place. This is the story that takes second place. It is the story that follows its master. It is the story that grows old. It is the story for a season, for fall.
Which door did she slip in, in her torn fishnet stockings and faux leather skirt, brown, her mascara falsely applied, her vacant blouse in need of hitching. She was not the usual member of the band, not the girl nextdoor, not next to any door, not a regular housekeeper or woman. She was a ditch digger, a pied, circular piper, a mouse hugger.
I took her to be the last of her generation. She seemed drunk without eating. She seemed ashamed without sin. She seemed cursed without a family. She seemed as though she had planned a porkchop for the boys and girls of Tallahassee. She seemed to believe that she had roped a strong pony. In the first movement her dance looked lonely and lame. Then she got up on the stage and tried to kiss the front man. He didn't want to kiss her at first, but when he did, something magical happened, something tender.
She got down off the stage and put down her riding crop. She started loving the air. She started singing in her voices. She started dancing. She whistled a bar of Dixie then she sallied north. She swiveled her legs and her arms, looking much like a 44-year-old rodeo worker on the floor at Christopher's, but she was at the Turfside. Everyone wanted to dance with her, a face she well knew, but that did not seem to be the reason to dance for her. She danced, it seemed, so that others would dance, too, and they did.
1999
Love these sentences, the cadence of them, your always interesting voice and diction and music. This is really wonderful to read and ultimately, so moving Ann. Great work, I'm going to read it again. Fave.
The music of the sentences flow into the last image of her dancing, beautiful resolution of both form and content.
The voice dreaws me in - "I took her to be the last of her generation. She seemed drunk without eating. She seemed ashamed without sin. She seemed cursed without a family. She seemed as though she had planned a porkchop for the boys and girls of Tallahassee."
I like this piece. Good work, Ann.
* You only use 'I' once in this and yet the voice of the narrator rings loud here. Moving what can be revealed through a closely watched other.
Love the closing on this, on all that explained her. Nice.
She stopped writing this story. I knew it went on from here, but not where. I'm still looking.
I do love this. It's like a dust devil that picks up the sand of your attention and scatters it everywhere.
fave
full of love, and the comments of others show that i'm not the only one who feels this. and there's the subtle humor that i generally like in your writing.
*
"She seemed as though she had planned a porkchop for the boys and girls of Tallahassee."
Inimitably delicious--the prose, not the prokchop.
Fave.
Porkchop! (though prokchop is an interesting variation!)
A wonderful read!
"Then she got up on the stage and tried to kiss the front man. He didn't want to kiss her at first, but when he did, something magical happened, something tender."
I agree with all of the above comments, but I also love the way this piece turns tenderly on a dime. *
Look at this fine story! And I can't help but notice the "1999" at the bottom. It's clear from that that you've been a rock and roll writer for at least a little over a decade. I was writing in the dark, no doors or windows in sight, in 1999.
Also, love the use of repetition and esp that first graph and how it sets up the authorial voice and puts me at perfect east that I'm in good hands.
I cherish these readings by Kathy, David, Sam, Julie, Susan, JLD, Marcus, Mata, Bill, Kari, Kim, and Sheldon. Notes toward this story might run longer than it does. I wrote it to or for a famous musician, Sheldon, so your rock analogy is also literal. I hesitated to write it because I had wanted to use the title for a book not named for one of its stories. When I succumbed and wrote the story, I tried a different title for the collection, still unpublished. Poetic Inhalation is no longer running, and the archives are down, so it's nice to put the story here at Fictionaut.
Magical. A story set to song. Peace *