Pac got shot up in ’96, this time on a famous strip in Las Vegas. In three days he’d rise again like Jesus, a Lazarus in the Bible, outside of his hometown claiming victory over Hades. He’d be back…
Poet, translator, memoirist, fiction writer, and visual artist Jesse Lee Kercheval’s recently released graphic memoir French Girl portrays seventeen episodes from throughout Kercheval’s life, rendered in vibrant color by Kercheval herself. It showcases the powerful immediacy of Kercheval’s twenty…
My mother’s been dead since 1982, two thirds of my life. Today, I am perched on a stool at a table in the Comics Room at the University of Wisconsin–Madison trying to remember what she looked like so I…
A stowaway made the long trip to the United States with my mother, father, and me. Unbidden and unticketed, tucked into the pocket of a gray overcoat, chilled by early fall’s ocean breezes, pushed back by hope—grief nevertheless made…
They are tearing down Women’s Hospital, where I gave birth to my youngest two, a girl against the flame-bright maples of November, a boy in June’s fat sweat. For years, the hospital stands silent, as we drive to the…
When the fish is dead, it lies in the shallow of water that never goes away, in the dirt, the remnants of blood from my forefinger where I pricked myself four times over, maybe some from that pike, too.…
I insist I need a corset for under my dress. A wedding. My cousin’s. A purple strapless with a layer of chiffon. My mother is outside the dressing room. She asks if anything fits. I stare down the mirror.…
The Marine said his name was Dusty. She said hers was Laila, which was the name on the fake ID Kareena presented to the bouncer at the Wave Waikiki. If Crystal hadn’t led the way in a tube top…
Content Warning—sexual assault Along the western shores of Lake Ontario, the water splits the land and pools into a marshy inlet webbed with bike trails and bridges. I walk these paths every day, just wandering about, here and…
It’s an ugly thing to follow a woman along the street but this is what I did. She was a copy of Patti Smith during the early Mapplethorpe years, before Horses and Mineshaft and all the BDSM, when they…
I knew I wanted to write a story about Patti Smith. That impulse had been under the skin of my brain for a while. In December 2023 I came back to Italy after a month in Sydney promoting my first book published in my home country; I hadn’t written a thing in weeks and I was steeped in jet lag, stuck back in the wintry countryside after a stretch of big-city life. So my brain was alternately on a high buzz, or somnambulant. My way through jet lag is to get up at 4 a.m. and write.
To clarify, I didn’t specifically want to write a story about the now well-known Patti Smith, whom I don’t particularly know well except through her Instagram feed, a Horses CD that used to be in my car, and her appearance in a book of Robert Mapplethorpe’s, Polaroids, which I regard as a staple for 1970s counterculture, leading directly into all that became the 1980s. In the ’80s, I was on the cusp of adulthood, and like many, facing everything that decade threw at us – drugs, urban violence, big shoulders, new music, AIDS misinformation, the gay scene – although in my case it meant running away from suburbia to live in Paris in an artists’ enclave, dealing with anorexia and risk, following wafts of my literary heroes, and penning my first stories. Instead, I wanted to write about before someone like Patti S. and Robert M. became big – the out-of-town feeling; the grit and the artifice and the failure; the jobbing and the climbing in and out of beds.
I also have a niece who looks very much like Young Patti Smith, and this resemblance played about in my mind.
Of course, the story I thought I would write was not the story that ensued. I thought I would write something about the way both of these women have eyes that are spaced widely apart, and how the trait is attractively unnerving. Instead, the gay narrator of this story took control and I had to follow. My Mapplethorpe fascination surfaced, plus an affection for fennel bulbs. This is the beauty of 4 a.m., and one of the compulsive delights of the flash fiction journey.
CATHERINE McNAMARA grew up in Sydney, Australia, ran away to Paris, France, to write, and ended up running a bar in Accra, Ghana, while also working in Mogadishu, Somalia, and Milano, Italy, along the way. She is the author of the short fiction collections The Carnal Fugues, The Cartography of Others, Love Stories for Hectic People, and Pelt and Other Stories. She is flash fiction editor and a masterclass tutor for Litro Magazine, and was guest editor for Best Small Fictions 2023. Catherine currently lives in Italy. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @catinitaly.
