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    The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis: A Novella
    The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis: A Novella
    The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis: A Novella
    Ebook78 pages52 minutes

    The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis: A Novella

    By Mark Gluth

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    About this ebook

    “Evocative, emotional . . . Readers looking for something different will appreciate this work.” —Library Journal
     
    During the later days of her life, Margaret Kroftis is a writer, living alone. As she experiences a personal tragedy, the narrative of this novel moves forward in an emotionally coherent manner that exists separately from linear time. Themes of loss and grief cycle and repeat and build upon each other. They affect the text and create a complex structure of crosshatched narratives within narratives. These mirror each other while also telling unique stories of loss that are at the same time separate from Margaret’s and deeply intertwined.
     
    This groundbreaking debut demonstrates an affinity with the work of such contemporary European writers as Ágota Kristóf and Marie Redonnet, while existing in a place and time that is uniquely American. Composed in brief paragraphs and structured as a series of vignettes, pieces of fiction, and autobiography, The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis creates a world in which a woman’s life is refracted through dreamlike logic. Coupled with the spare language in which it is written, this logic distorts and heightens the emotional truths the characters come to terms with, while elevating them beyond the simply literal.
     
    “In The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis, Mark Gluth does something I’ve never seen another author do: he captures perfectly the feel of daydreams. Though everybody in the book daydreams, Gluth doesn’t simply describe their thoughts; instead, he does something better and more brilliant—he infuses his words with the deceptive simplicity and surrealism of the fantasies we dream up for ourselves. Like daydreams, his book is brief but powerful; like daydreams, it is both heartbreakingly hopeful and heart-stoppingly honest. It’s a reverie that’s a revelation. It is great.” —Derek McCormack, author of The Show that Smells
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAkashic Books
    Release dateDec 11, 2009
    ISBN9781936070732
    The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis: A Novella

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      Book preview

      The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis - Mark Gluth

      THE LATE WORK OF

      MARGARET KROFTIS

      This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

      The chapter titled The Emptiest Place in the Circle is named after a line from the song Love Is Stronger Than Witchcraft by Robert Pollard, from the album From a Compound Eye; the epigram that opens the first chapter of this book is one of the five remembrances of Buddhism, it’s from no specific text; the epi- gram that opens the second chapter is from the song Stadiums and Shrines II by Sunset Rubdown, from the album Shut Up I Am Dreaming; the epigram that opens the third chapter is from the story The Theologians by Jorge Luis Borges.

      Published by Akashic Books

      ©2010 Mark Gluth

      ePUB ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07073-2

      ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-94-1

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2009922940

      All rights reserved

      Little House on the Bowery

      c/o Akashic Books

      PO Box 1456

      New York, NY 10009

      info@akashicbooks.com

      www.akashicbooks.com

      Also from Dennis Cooper’s

      Little House on the Bowery Series

      The Show That Smells

      by Derek McCormack

      High Life

      by Matthew Stokoe

      Userlands: New Fiction Writers from the Blogging Underground

      edited by Dennis Cooper

      Artificial Light

      by James Greer

      Wide Eyed

      by Trinie Dalton

      Godlike

      by Richard Hell

      The Fall of Heartless Horse

      by Martha Kinney

      Grab Bag

      by Derek McCormack

      Headless

      by Benjamin Weissman

      Victims

      by Travis Jeppesen

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Copyright Page

      Also from Dennis Cooper’s

      Dedication

      Chapter 1: The Late Work

      Part 1: Rainer

      Part 2: 3 Dreams

      Part 3: Months Later

      Chapter 2: Joyful Thing

      Part 1: Jyfl Thng

      Part 2: The Impossible Perfection

      Part 3: The Enders

      Chapter 3: First Last

      Part 1: The Brightening Shadow

      Part 2: The Photographer

      Part 3: An Ocean Shaped Like Your Mind

      Sincerest thanks to: Barbara and Edward Gluth, Erin Kelly, David Hatch, Dennis Cooper, Johnny Temple, Joel Westendorf, Michelle Zuber, Nicholas Rhodes, Nicky Smith, the Detroit Film Center, and Ellipsis magazine (Wayward Couch Press).

      For Buster and Clarence

      CHAPTER 1

      THE LATE WORK

      All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

      —Buddha

      PART 1

      RAINER

      MARGARET’S SITTING AT HER writing table, then walking downstairs to put a kettle on. A dog walks in the kitchen behind her and yawns. Outside the window the weather’s a film of the seasons changing. Those are geese flying south. Upstairs, she’s no longer cold. It’s the tea. The dog turns three tight circles and lies down on the rug he’s mushed up against the wall. Margaret’s working on a piece of fiction. It’s autobiographical in a sense. She dies in the end.

      She goes into town to buy groceries. The side- walks are covered with fallen leaves. They’re trying to become a forest floor, she thinks. At the store she buys cans of soup and bread instead of ingredients. On the way back to her car she sees the bay. It looks like it goes on forever. For a moment she imagines the world like that: just the ocean and the weather.

      After dinner she writes three sentences. They’re not worth keeping, she thinks. She lets the dog out one last time then dries him off because he’s soaked. She brushes her teeth and gets in bed. He burrows under the sheets and rests his black head on her feet. In her dream he can see ghosts.

      The sun rises. It burns away the mist and the fog. Margaret watches the steam spin through the branches. The world’s closed, the sky’s a roof. Those are her thoughts. She sweeps up the oil seeds and millet from the porch. She sprays her hose at the eaves and the windows. Her hands are freezing from the water. She calls the dog. He runs up. She wraps her arms around his barrel chest and rests her head on his twitching back. She whispers in his ear as she tries to get him to hold still.

      Margaret sticks her hand under the faucet in the kitchen. She slices an apple, drinks from a water glass. The dog eats a cracker, she takes something out of the microwave. Margaret eats and cleans up. She lies down on the couch, a shadow across the ceiling. A bird makes a sound outside. She thinks it’s kids playing. There are no kids near here. She remembers something that she’s holding onto. She tells herself that she will never forget it.

      Margaret goes for a walk down by the water. A plastic bag washes up on the shore and gets caught on a wormy log. She picks it up. It’s tangled with seaweed. She leans on her cane and thinks. The rain’s suspended between the sky and everything else. The fog smudges the horizon.

      Later, back up the path, she smells something. Twenty feet farther she can see in her kitchen window and it’s so horrible.

      Margaret’s in the hotel room insurance put her in. She cries so hard she coughs, lies down on the bed, and makes a fist. She wants to punch herself like a wall.

      They let her walk through what’s left of her house. The fire gutted most of the ground floor. Upstairs, her office was largely untouched, her notebooks and computer.

      Back downstairs, in the kitchen, her fingers are trembling. She’s kneeling in front of the backdoor. She’s memorizing the gouges his claws made in it as he tried to escape.

      PART 2

      3 DREAMS

      1

      WE WERE WALKING ON A TRAIL that I didn’t recognize. You humored me and didn’t pull on your lead. We walked through a field then entered

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