Read Online Geek Love by Katherine Dunn - Free Book Online
Authors: Katherine Dunn
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Sagas, Family, Domestic Fiction, Monsters, Families, Carnival Owners, Circus Performers, Freak Shows
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rings and then stops. Lil's voice comes, shrill up the staircase, “Forty Wuunnn,” and from far away a door slams and the redheaded defrocked Benedictine begins his desperate avalanche down the stairs. The pipes gurgle. The heat is coming on.
I drag the big old costume trunk out of the closet and open it. The Miranda Box I call it, though there is little enough of her in it. The shallow tray in the top of the trunk holds it all. School photos. The stack of report cards. The bundled letters from Sister T. that came four times a year for sixteen years. Progress reports: “Miranda is reading two years beyond her grade level. Her disposition is cheerful but marred by stubbornness and a disruptive tendency.” The test scores. The list of inoculations. The chicken pox report. An indignant letter folded around a printed form crawling with the results of a medical examination.
She was fifteen that year and had run away and hooked up with an occult guitarist moonlighting as a United Parcel delivery driver who hid her in his “bohemian” -- as the report called it -- apartment for three weeks until she got bored and strolled back to the school. She was indifferent to repentance, according to the nun, and far from a virgin, according to the doctor. Heavenly Mary had prevented her from getting pregnant or diseased. They threatened to throw her out or to turn her over to the juvenile authorities. In the end my monthly payments increased by 50 percent and she stayed.
Fingering the blistering letter, I remember precisely the hoops my heart went through over the incident. I was terrified for her, but strangely delighted, as though her wildness were a triumph of her genes over indoctrination. I lay the thin sheaf of drawings she gave me on top of the rest, and then lift the tray out and set it aside.
The body of the trunk is crammed with clipping books, thick stacks of paper wrapped in black plastic. Photographs. Sound tapes. A tight roll of posters held by dry and brittle rubber bands.
This fragile, flammable heap is all that's left of my life. It is the history of Miranda's source. She soars and stomps and burns through her days with no notion of the causes that formed her. She imagines herself isolated and unique. She is unaware that she is part of, and the product of, forces assembled before she was born.
She can be flip about her tail. Or she can try. She is ignorant of its meaning and oblivious to its value. But something in her blood aches, warning her.
I slip the topmost poster from the roll. The paper is stiff, wanting to break rather than tear. Carefully spreading it, uncoiling it, sliding plastic-wrapped bundles onto the corners to hold it down, I open it on the musty carpet.
The Binewskis are revealed, dressed in glittering white, enchanted against sea greens and blues, smiling, together still on wide paper. The poster has a fountain format with the whole family spewing upward from Chick, during his brief “Fortunato -- The Strongest Child in the World” period. Papa killed this poster, along with Chicks act, before the public saw either of them. But it is my favorite family portrait. Chick, six years old and golden, is smiling at the bottom, his arms straight up with his parents standing on his hands. The beauteous “Crystal Lily” in an openly amorous pose, one leg kicking high out of her dance skirt, wrapped in the arms of the handsome “Ring Master Al,” our Papa, Aloysius, in high boots and chalk jodhpurs-their smiles leaping upward in yellow light toward our stars, our treasures -- “Arturo the Amazing Aqua Boy,” afloat with his flippers spread angelically in hinted liquid in the upper right corner, his bare skull gleaming and haloed. In the left corner, at a cunningly suggested keyboard swirling out of the blue, “The Magnificent Musical Siamese Twins, Electra and Iphigenia!” Elly and Iphy with their long hair smoothed into black buns, slim white arms entwined, pale faces beaming out in shafts from
I drag the big old costume trunk out of the closet and open it. The Miranda Box I call it, though there is little enough of her in it. The shallow tray in the top of the trunk holds it all. School photos. The stack of report cards. The bundled letters from Sister T. that came four times a year for sixteen years. Progress reports: “Miranda is reading two years beyond her grade level. Her disposition is cheerful but marred by stubbornness and a disruptive tendency.” The test scores. The list of inoculations. The chicken pox report. An indignant letter folded around a printed form crawling with the results of a medical examination.
She was fifteen that year and had run away and hooked up with an occult guitarist moonlighting as a United Parcel delivery driver who hid her in his “bohemian” -- as the report called it -- apartment for three weeks until she got bored and strolled back to the school. She was indifferent to repentance, according to the nun, and far from a virgin, according to the doctor. Heavenly Mary had prevented her from getting pregnant or diseased. They threatened to throw her out or to turn her over to the juvenile authorities. In the end my monthly payments increased by 50 percent and she stayed.
Fingering the blistering letter, I remember precisely the hoops my heart went through over the incident. I was terrified for her, but strangely delighted, as though her wildness were a triumph of her genes over indoctrination. I lay the thin sheaf of drawings she gave me on top of the rest, and then lift the tray out and set it aside.
The body of the trunk is crammed with clipping books, thick stacks of paper wrapped in black plastic. Photographs. Sound tapes. A tight roll of posters held by dry and brittle rubber bands.
This fragile, flammable heap is all that's left of my life. It is the history of Miranda's source. She soars and stomps and burns through her days with no notion of the causes that formed her. She imagines herself isolated and unique. She is unaware that she is part of, and the product of, forces assembled before she was born.
She can be flip about her tail. Or she can try. She is ignorant of its meaning and oblivious to its value. But something in her blood aches, warning her.
I slip the topmost poster from the roll. The paper is stiff, wanting to break rather than tear. Carefully spreading it, uncoiling it, sliding plastic-wrapped bundles onto the corners to hold it down, I open it on the musty carpet.
The Binewskis are revealed, dressed in glittering white, enchanted against sea greens and blues, smiling, together still on wide paper. The poster has a fountain format with the whole family spewing upward from Chick, during his brief “Fortunato -- The Strongest Child in the World” period. Papa killed this poster, along with Chicks act, before the public saw either of them. But it is my favorite family portrait. Chick, six years old and golden, is smiling at the bottom, his arms straight up with his parents standing on his hands. The beauteous “Crystal Lily” in an openly amorous pose, one leg kicking high out of her dance skirt, wrapped in the arms of the handsome “Ring Master Al,” our Papa, Aloysius, in high boots and chalk jodhpurs-their smiles leaping upward in yellow light toward our stars, our treasures -- “Arturo the Amazing Aqua Boy,” afloat with his flippers spread angelically in hinted liquid in the upper right corner, his bare skull gleaming and haloed. In the left corner, at a cunningly suggested keyboard swirling out of the blue, “The Magnificent Musical Siamese Twins, Electra and Iphigenia!” Elly and Iphy with their long hair smoothed into black buns, slim white arms entwined, pale faces beaming out in shafts from
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