In the House - Softcover

Kilpatrick, Lynn K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573661546 ISBN 13: 9781573661546

Verlag: F2C, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

In Lynn K. Kilpatrick's ""In the House"", anything can happen. A collection of shorts - lists, character sketches, directions, scripts, and instructions - ""In the House"" reveals the often conspicuous, yet frequently overlooked, dangers of relationships gone awry. In a home suffused with fragility or in a kitchen surrounded by knives, Kilpatrick's men and women navigate around one another's eccentricities with caution, highlighting the unspoken desires and veiled needs of domestic routine. In these stories those desires collide, illuminating the dangers that can lurk in seemingly insignificant places such as the pantry, a basement, the Miss America pageant, dioramas, or in the mind of the one you love.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lynn K. Kilpatrick earned an MA in poetry from WesternWashingtonUniversity and a PhD in fiction from the University of Utah. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Tin House, Hotel Amerika, Ninth Letter, and Creative Nonfiction. She lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and son.

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In The House

By Lynn K. Kilpatrick

FC2

Copyright © 2010 Lynn K. Kilpatrick
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-154-6

Contents

In The House......................................................13My Neighbors......................................................21The Guy Who Planted Those Flowers.................................35Dioramas Of The Domestic Landscape Window #1.....................37Women In Confined Spaces..........................................39Dioramas Of The Domestic Landscape Window #2.....................47On Understanding..................................................49Dioramas Of The Domestic Landscape Window #3.....................63How Things End....................................................65The Infinite Cages................................................69Dioramas Of The Domestic Landscape Window #4.....................79Bitter On The Tongue..............................................81Dioramas Of The Domestic Landscape Window #5.....................87After: Crime Scene................................................89Knives In The Kitchen.............................................91The Third Suspect.................................................97Miss America: A Story In Sestinas.................................99Dioramas Of The Domestic Landscape Window #6.....................113Temptations.......................................................115Dioramas Of The Domestic Landscape Window #7.....................119Domestic Drama....................................................121

Chapter One

In The House

front porch: second person

The story begins here.

As she stands poised, about to enter, our heroine is on the verge of transformation. Once she opens the door, events will be put in motion, actions will begin to occur. Once she opens the door, she will begin the inevitable change that will lead to her conclusion. Once she enters the house, she becomes a different person.

We know something about our heroine already: how she seems like you, the reader; how you'll slowly begin to see the world through her eyes. Even when she's she, she's me.

You know what's about to happen because you've been here before. But she hasn't. She's only just beginning: carefully walking up the front steps, placing her hand on the doorknob, pausing a moment to think.

We can observe her now. See? She's about to push the door open and begin. As the door creaks open, it's already too late.

split-level entry: choices

Up is the kitchen, with its assortment of motives, the dining room, a long hallway, all the bedrooms and their unmade beds. Downstairs is dirty: the laundry, the garage, the unfinished basement with its carpet remnants and castoff couches. Down is the realm of children, cement floors scattered with half-loved toys, cardboard houses, incomplete puzzles.

Upstairs belongs to her.

foyer: pause

Sooner or later, she'll have to choose. She bites her lip and appears to consider. Surrounded by doors and stairs and windows, she bides her time and breathes.

stairs: rising action

She hates the gold shag carpet.

kitchen: conflict

There's a secret he's keeping. On the counter, a butcher block with a chef 's knife, a bread knife, sharpener. In the refrigerator, three kinds of beer and half a dozen mustards. In the spice cabinet: cinnamon, cloves, cayenne. He knows how to make a coffee cake from scratch and what to use to inspire sneezing, coughing, burning eyes, an ailment that looks like the flu, how to induce a miscarriage, how to seduce and tease.

She's making dinner. She possesses secrets of her own, different from his. She lets him stand behind her as she uses a knife on the meat, cutting through the muscle, avoiding bone. She doesn't worry about the names, only: sharp, sharper. Only the way her finger bleeds when she slices through skin, and the blood spreads and she can't tell her own blood from the ooze of the meat. She doesn't yell or call out. It's only an accident, as so many things are.

hallway: a preposition

against a textured wall away from the kitchen around the corner behind a door beside the light switch close to down the empty hallway into the darkened corridor next to the bathroom out of the bedroom away from

master bedroom: plot

He's holding her down against the bed. What is she saying? Listen closely. You need to know what she wants, what she calls out as he presses his mouth over hers. Something is happening. Everyone is waiting, watching: him, her, you. Observing the ways in which they manipulate each other's bodies and then wait for a response, another event to follow the first.

Think of what happened in the kitchen. He has secrets, things he's not telling, the ways he moves her into the bedroom in the first place, with recipes and lies. The way she's supposed to want it and not want it. The secrets she has, what's beneath her pillow, what's under her shirt, between the sheets, inside her top drawer between her socks.

This is what brings events to where they are: he's holding her down and she's struggling, but struggling is so often interpreted as surrender.

closet: dramatic questions

Who is he? What happens and what is simply imagined? Did the woman scream or moan? How will she get out of the bedroom? What is she doing in the closet? Will the children think to look in the closet? What children?

children's room: subplot

The beds are much smaller, but aside from that it's like any other bedroom, any other room, with its books on the floor: Your A to Z Guide to The Opposite Sex, or Where the Wild Things Are.

There are seemingly abandoned stuffed animals still clutched in darkness. The worn spot in the carpet where the dog sleeps every night and where he turns his ritual circles before lying down and fixing his eyes on the young girl asleep beside him. He barks in his sleep and when she awakens he is always watching so that she begins to wonder if he sleeps at all, but that's his job, to watch and guard and to ensure that no one disappears, that there are no unexplained events, that each and every event has a beginning and a clear, discernible resolution.

bathroom: first person

This is the site of concealment, where the door locks and the layers are shed: clothing, makeup, jewelry, barrettes. She becomes an I again, or I become her, who knows really? But there she is, in the mirror, stripped down to the barest secret of skin taut over bones, where nothing can be concealed from the mirror and the harsh lighting, the cruel gaze of the cotton swab and tweezers.

The scale is pushed back beneath the counter, under the sink, no need for weighing and measuring when everything is so revealed. I have only to look in order to see the purple rising on her arms, the places where skin has been rubbed raw, the nicks and cuts, the abrasions, the curves where she should have stopped, and the hollows where she should have kept going.

How there is always too much and not enough and how in this light the reasons are so obvious, but when I flip the switch, there she is, I can't see anything and this nothing fills the whole room.

front room: clues

There are large brass candlesticks on the mantle. Some scraps of paper and ash in the fireplace....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: F2C
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1573661546
• ISBN 13: 9781573661546
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 136
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Mare Nostrum Group B.V.; gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk; ; Doelen 72; Breda; 4831 GR; Niederlande