by Nell Zink
“Can I take up the carpeting?”
He sighed again. “Here is my final offer, Tiffany. Stop following orders. Do what you want. Work selfishly. Without the experience of control, you will never have the experience of creativity. Stop giving yourself away, and you will have more to offer than your body and soul. Keep them and cultivate them. Learn, learn, and once again learn!” He said that last bit in Russian, quoting Lenin: Uchit se, uchit se, uchit se. I said I would take it under advisement.
After a while, I decided he might be on to something. I had been treating myself as resources to be mined. Now I know I am the soil where I grow. In between wallpapering, I wrote The Wallcreeper. Then I started on the floors. Then I took up playing the piano. I went back to school in Jena and graduated in hydrogeology. I worked for a while at the Federal Environmental Office (it was moved from Berlin to Dessau in 2005, presumably to decrease its influence), and quit to found an ecological planning bureau. I am proud to say that my environmental impact statements have helped make dredging the Elbe prohibitively expensive. It is now silting up and winds lazily among shifting sandbars, very good for canoeing. Children wade out to the islands. The house just keeps getting nicer and nicer. I pack it with furniture to keep Gernot from bouncing around. The movie version ends with a montage of Stephen in bed with different club kids (almost all girls) in Berne. Soundtrack: “Oh Very Young.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nell Zink was born in 1964 in southern California and grew up in rural Virginia. She attended Stuart Hall School and the College of William and Mary, where she majored in philosophy. Rather late in life she got a doctorate in Media Studies from the University of Tubingen, Germany. She works as a translator for Zeitenspiegel Reportagen and lives in Bad Belzig, south of Berlin. Her fiction has appeared in n+1. This is her first book.
DOROTHY, A PUBLISHING PROJECT
1. Renee Gladman Event Factory
2. Barbara Comyns Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead
3. Renee Gladman The Ravickians
4. Manuela Draeger In the Time of the Blue Ball
5. Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi Fra Keeler
6. Suzanne Scanlon Promising Young Women
7. Renee Gladman Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge
8. Amina Cain Creature
9. Joanna Ruocco Dan
10. Nell Zink The Wallcreeper
DOROTHYPROJECT.COM