California writer Michelle Latiolais‘s short story collection Widow has just been published by Bellevue Literary Press. William Kittredge calls it “a splendidly articulated masterpiece.” Here’s an excerpt from the title story:
[pp. 15-16] BIG UNIQUE SOFA!! Three words across the top of a flyer tacked up to a telephone pole on the corner near her house. This has made her laugh out loud. BIG UNIQUE SOFA and a few exclamation marks and a telephone number and maybe there was a price—she does not remember— really she remembers just the words BIG UNIQUE SOFA and the exclamation marks. Was there a band of little slips with the telephone number fluttering in the wind made by the traffic? She cannot remember that, either.
What could such an item promise? she asks herself. What could possibly be unique about a sofa? All the sofas I’ve known, she muses, all the gin joints … and you choose this. But then she is thinking about the sofa, the couch, in the therapist’s office in Brentwood, the chenille throw spread across its seat, to cover stains or to prevent stains, she cannot tell which, but the six or seven times she leaves the office, she straightens it, pulls it taut again, doesn’t like the throw there, doesn’t like that it retains an impression of her. The therapist tells her every time not to worry about it, that she’ll fix it, but she does not want a doctor straightening out a chenille throw after she leaves … something unnervingly domestic, assertively domestic. It bothers her enough that she has left the therapist with notes about her life, like hair or nail clippings left behind in a salon. It’s not rational; she doesn’t insist that it is, or even that it should be. She doesn’t trust this blur of the professional and personal, cannot appreciate this exchange of money for her unguarded thoughts and feelings, doesn’t trust professional ethics over codes of friendship or family—and she feels she has done her duty to her family by “seeing a therapist,” and when the suggestion comes from the doctor, as she knew it ultimately would, that she take antidepressants, she leaves the office and never returns. She is deeply confused by someone studying someone else’s mind and wanting to alter it chemically at the same time. BIG UNIQUE SOFA.
– Michelle Latiolais, “Widow”
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