by Lucy Ives
7
A woman frequents a certain store. It is a repetitive action and therefore non-narrative. However, inside the repetition, something has changed.
I used to think that what disrupts repetitive living is fate. Now I think that what disrupts living is other people.
Maybe Panda was sitting outside her store, contemplating the seductive greenness of an overturned Heineken bottle. Maybe this contemplation was interrupted by the seductive approach of some eligible cat. Maybe Panda, vacating her post for love, sent out word via local cat networks and a viable replacement (a needy case) was found.
But this doesn’t account for that “someone.” It also depends on forms of agency that make no sense, regarding cats. There’s a whole body of literature, not just children’s literature, by the way, about this. Cats make concerted choices; they go adventuring; they know how to read; they return; they give themselves complex names pertaining to their ancestors; they enjoy dancing; they sniff flowers; they cross-country ski; they live forever. The weirdest thing is that while we know many of the above activities aren’t possible, it doesn’t seem entirely true —i.e., faithful to reality—to say that they are, conversely, impossible.
By the same token, every explanation I can give of why “someone” would replace an adorable cat with a weird, obviously abused cat with similar markings is pretty bizarre. In most of these scenarios, this happens because “someone” for some reason wants either to abuse the adorable cat in turn or to threaten the adorable cat’s owners. Maybe it is a combination of the two. But we don’t really have access to these motives. They’re lost to us and to livable time, and now the world we do have access to contains only Ersatz Panda, along with KC and Garbage Cat, all of whom are merely tangential, alas.
Someday I’ll pet Ersatz Panda. Or, given the parasites known to dwell in cat feces, parasites allegedly capable of migrating into the human brain, maybe not. Someday I’ll take a smartphone photo of Ersatz Panda. And I will send it to my friend. And he’ll reply.
Notes
Some of these stories first appeared in BOMB (“A Throw of the Dice,” “Trust”), Conjunctions (“Cosmogony”), Granta (“Bitter Tennis,” “Ersatz Panda”), and at New York Tyrant (“Louise Nevelson”). “Ersatz Panda” was included in Hingston & Olsen’s 2020 Short Story Advent Calendar. Thanks to the editors of these publications.
Warm thanks also go out to Katie Boland, Wah-Ming Chang, Chris Clemans, Yuka Igarashi, Lena Moses-Schmitt, and Michael Salu, among others, without whom this book would not exist. Nick Mauss and Ed Park (separately—yet somehow jointly) provided the original spur for “Ersatz Panda” in the summer of 2017. Thanks to Eliot House and the Millay Colony for hosting me. To Claire Lehmann: for her patience. To Elana Schlenker: for her invaluable advice. And to Peter: for listening.
Lastly, a citation and clarification:
The title “Recognition of This World Is Not the Invention of It” is taken from Susan Meiselas’s introduction to her photobook, Carnival Strippers, first published in 1976. Meiselas’s seminal documentary project, for which she interviewed and made images of women who performed striptease for fairs in rural New England, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina from 1972 to 1975, has, in theory, little to do with the story included here. However, for the writer, there was something alert and chilling in the phrase that invited elaboration.
The painting by Frida Kahlo mentioned in “The Care Bears Find and Kill God” is, contrary to the story’s depiction, in the permanent collection of the Phoenix Art Museum.
© Andrew Brucker
LUCY IVES is the author of the novels Impossible Views of the World and Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World, as well as the editor of The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader. Ives’s writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Believer, frieze, Granta, and Vogue, among other publications. She received a 2018 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2021 by Lucy Ives
All rights reserved
First Soft Skull edition: 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ives, Lucy, 1980– author.
Title: Cosmogony : stories / Lucy Ives.
Description: First Soft Skull edition. | New York : Soft Skull, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020031591 | ISBN 9781593765996 (paperback) | ISBN 9781593766047 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3609.V48 A6 2021 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031591
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Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
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