Flings by Justin Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

twentieth-century Southern fiction, i.e., post Faulkner and O’Connor. He’s writing about Barry Hannah’s obsession with J. E. B. Stuart in Airships , and Padgett Powell’s with Nathan Bedford Forrest in Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men . Also “Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason, where the woman leaves the trucker after they visit the hallowed grounds, etc.—though the way things have been going these past few months, it’s not clear Zachary’s writing anything about anybody. He’s been completely blocked.
    We live together in a third-floor apartment near campus and are both ABD. We’ve been dating for about three years, and engaged for exactly seven weeks. It’s Friday night. We’re getting home—late—from a reception at the school followed by a few nightcaps with some of our fellow grad students. Both of us are drunk, and I’ve got this idea in my head that we should do our own version of the truth session from “Water Liars,” that Barry Hannah story where the husband and the wife tell each other about their sexual pasts.
    At first Zachary doesn’t want to, but I kind of stick it to him so he says, Okay, sure. So I get another set of nightcaps going and we start. But the thing of it is, even though we’re about the same age as the people in the story, that couple had been married for ten years already. What I mean is that they had plenty of—how to put this?—distance from what they were talking about. And of course the point of “Water Liars” is how the wife’s news sends the husband for a brutal loop anyway—distance nothing. Distance be damned.
    Zachary proposed to me in Locust Grove, Virginia, about four hours down from Philly. We were on a kind of vision quest for his project (the truth session hardly our first experiment with voodoo academia), visiting the grave of Stonewall Jackson’s arm at Ellwood Manor—Jackson himself of course lying in Lexington in a cemetery that bears his name.
    I’d looked online and found a couple of wineries nearby in Spotsylvania and a place in town to stay. Not exactly two weeks in Paris, or even a long weekend in the Poconos, but it was something: what we could swing.
    The funny thing—well, one funny thing—about the grave of Stonewall Jackson’s arm is that it is not, technically, a grave anymore, and indeed it may never have been. Nobody’s sure. We’d read online that in 1998 the park service dug up the plot to install a piece of concrete to keep looters out, and when they did this they discovered that the legendary metal box containing the arm, the very thing they meant to protect, wasn’t there to be protected. But Zachary said this didn’t change his desire to see the site. If it was a fraud, he said, that was interesting, too, albeit in a different way.
    Forgive me one last digression, but my inner second-wave feminist thinks it’s obscene that I’ve spent this much time discussing my boyfriend’s—ahem, fiancé’s—work without mentioning my own. And who am I to say she’s wrong? So. My work concerns the appropriation of mythological and folk motifs for use in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. I buy high-level characters from burnt-out gamers, and these allow me access to the most remote realms of the virtual worlds without my having to spend thousands of hours building up experience points in a half dozen different games.
    Zachary played Spells of Evermore 3 with me once. I had a barbarian warrior and a wood elf druid, and I needed him to play the druid, backing me up while I fought this one particular dragon. His job was to alternately cast ensnaring vines on the monster and healing spells on me. So basically he had to press two buttons. But the dragon had these minions and one of them was a necromancer and things got out of hand, and I admit I may have overreacted when we both got killed, but