Double Jinx. Nancy Reddy

Friendly Letter

       Horses Dream of Horses

       All Good Girls Deserve

       Fervent Missive

       Revisionist Love Story

       Birds Keep Nothing in Their Bones

       Unsent Defense

       Cutting Nature at the Joint

       Come Fetch

       The Secret Nancy

       • Acknowledgements

       • About the Author

      GuideCoverContentsTitle Page

       i ii iii vi vii viii ix x 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

1

Ex Machina

      The chorus girls descend, their wings a wonder

      of feather and zipline. The oboes

      in the orchestra pit yawn

      as if to gulp them whole, but the girls

      are singing and so swallow down

      their fear. The villain shows himself

      too soon and is all wrong for this play—

      not a dashing captain but a pirate

      with a stick shift for an arm and a stopwatch

      in his heart. Where the audience

      should be—the rows of lovely velvet seats

      and numbered placards, donated

      by the dead or named for them—there’s

      only sea. The violinists do a kick turn

      and set out into the waves. What happened

      to the playwright, to the plot? Who will stitch

      the chorus to the theme? Who will,

      when the curtain drops, unhook the beauties

      from their wings and turn them back

      to girls, wrap terrycloth robes around

      their sequined bodysuits? We cannot wait

      for angels. We’ll be our own gods now.

      Watch us swinging from the rafters

      like a lifeboat or a bird of prey.

Divine and Mechanical Bodies

      The year my sister turned into a crow

      I ran the cinder track around the football field for hours. I stayed on

      after practice ended, after coach packed up

      his whistle and his stopwatch, after the other girls changed back

      into sweats and carpooled home. At my house

      my sister gathered all the shiny things. She plucked the buttons

      from our parkas and strung them from the bedposts,

      lined the closet doors with tinfoil and propped the silver-plated serving trays

      along the dressers so that everywhere she looked

      she’d see her own eyes looking back. She wouldn’t speak.

      When our mother called us down to dinner

      she answered with a raucous preening call, she piled mall kiosk pendants

      around her feathered neck. She wouldn’t eat

      the meals our mother cooked and instead slurped juice from cans, clawed

      the soft and flaky centers from the caramels

      in the cut-glass candy dish our mother kept for guests. She grew

      bird-boned and slender, a brittle core inside each inky feather. That year,

      though no one had died, not really,

      my mother filled the basement freezer with casseroles,

      each aluminum dish an archaeological dig of hash browns, beef tips

      browned in butter, cream of something soup. In bio lab

we pinned and bisected earthworms, diagrammed their tiny hearts

      on worksheets. Somewhere a teacher called out kingdom, phylum, family.

      We smeared the cultured cells from petri dishes onto slides and marveled

      at their manufactured one-cell lives. I ran the track each afternoon,

      my mix tape turned up loud. The sun set

      earlier and earlier each day behind the goal posts. At home

      my mother diced and browned the onions. My sister

      made herself a feather bed. The first snow fell around us as we slept,

      flakes soft as down, clotting the trees whose leaves had not yet

      turned and fallen, turning the lawn

      bright as a spotlight.

The Case of the Double Jinx

      THE SCARLET SLIPPER MYSTERY

      You’re Nancy Drew and you drive a blue coupe.

      You drive fast. Your mother is dead.

      She’s the new-hired help and