by Maud Casey
“We’ll do that,” she says.
Bernadette mimes putting on a seat belt. “Click,” she says. For now, everyone is willing to believe I was sleepwalking, though when I sleep, I’m the stillest sleeper in the family.
Lizzie comes in and wraps a blanket around me, though I’m practically dry and it’s unbearably hot.
“Well,” George says.
“I’ve got to go back to sleep,” Carl says. “I’m exhausted.” He stands to take his coffee cup into the kitchen.
“Right,” my father says.
Just then Lanie comes down the stairs, her nightgown fluttering around her.
“Where were you?” she asks me, but doesn’t stop moving for an answer. She walks out the front door, lifting her arms like wings as she walks down the front steps in a way that says she will banish Jack. She floats lightly, bouncing on bare toes.
We follow her out, riveted, waiting for her to tell us what to do next. She spins at the end of the driveway, a ghostly twirl in the night.
“It’s time we all went home,” she says. Watch this small thing, says the arch of each of her feet stepping; watch this because it means everything. This foot making gentle contact with the earth, this is how we will survive.
About the Author
MAUD CASEY’s stories have been published in The Threepenny Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, The Georgia Review, Confrontation, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, and Prairie Schooner. She received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention for her story “Dirt.” Casey’s debut novel, The Shape of Things to Come, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Casey’s new novel, Genealogy, will be published in 2005. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Praise for MAUD CASEY
Drastic
“Casey is a sensitive and courageous chronicler…. [These] absolutely soar with illuminating little details that crack everything open and reach for hope.”
—Hartford Courant
“Writing in spare prose with macabre humor and an unerring eye for detail, Casey strips souls bare for our enjoyment, laying neurosis and despair in full view.”
—Planet magazine
“Edgy, thought-provoking, and charged with raw emotion, Drastic is an impressive collection from a rich and wonderfully unpredictable talent.”
—JOHN SEARLES, author of Boy Still Missing
“Sad and funny both, Maud Casey’s warmhearted, fine stories reach like a pair of outstretched arms for comfort and truth.”
—LILY TUCK, author of Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived: Short Stories
“Like Eudora Welty, Maud Casey aims her considerable art at such nearly unsayable recognitions and has crafted a book that is a treasure trove of jewels to live for—stories beautiful, multifaceted, and fierce with light.”
—STUART DYBEK, author of The Coast of Chicago
“The lives in Maud Casey’s perfectly titled new book have attained a drastic shape. Propelled by the hard hungers of love and need and desire, her characters reach out, run away, embrace—and are transformed. Writing with power, beauty, and a searing vision, Maud Casey creates stories that change the world before our eyes.”
—ERIN MCGRAW, author of Lies of the Saints
“The characters in Drastic struggle to understand their lives in ways we can’t help but recognize, in prose that is both quiet and illuminating.”
—JASON BROWN, author of Driving the Heart: And Other Stories
“In Drastic, despair is everywhere, but there is hope, too, in unlikely places—Casey tells these stories with a compassionate voice that would give any one of these people a reason to live.”
—MARY KAY ZURAVLEFF, author of The Frequency of Souls
“The women [and men] in Maud Casey’s sharp, daring stories are too smart to be seduced by consumerism, too wild to be sensible, and just wise enough to escape despair. They find their solace in the broken space between the rules, in the moments love cracks the rock face of the ordinary and rescues them.”
—ANN DARBY, author of The Orphan Game
“Maud Casey snakes beneath our consciousness, one deft sentence at a time, until she’s pried from daily life all that concealed its yearnings. Drastic is a wholehearted work of art.”
—NICHOLAS WEINSTOCK, author of As Long As She Needs Me
The Shape of Things to Come
A New York Times Notable Book
“Casey is a stand-up philosopher posing the most vexing questions about human existence while satirizing the materialistic ways we find to hold our despair at a distance…. Casey shows off her strengths: she’s funny and inventive…and she empathizes with the least of her characters…taking a dazzling narrative dare.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Maud Casey has written a complex, mature, and compelling novel.”
—Chicago Tribune
“The Shape of Things to Come, Maud Casey’s accomplished first novel, takes up with the endearingly subversive Isabelle.”
—Elle
“Isabelle…is like that crazy, charismatic friend you had in high school: You never know what she’ll do next, but it’s sure to be exciting—and you definitely want to stick around for the ride…. Isabelle is so vivacious that even though she’s utterly confused about her future, we know it’ll turn out just fine.”
—Redbook
“A startling debut. [Casey’s] fresh voice emerges like a song that’s bound to be a hit.”
—Virginia Quarterly Review
“Maud Casey is very good at creating characters who are torn between the strong emotions they experience as members of a family and the internal conflicts they struggle with as they try to break away in order to establish independent identities.”
—ANNE BEATTIE, author of The Doctor’s House
“In The Shape of Things to Come, Maud Casey examines the danger inherent in reinvention. [She] deftly writes about the struggle out of the tomb, the restoration of sanity, and the search for small peace.”
—MARK RICHARD, author of The Ice at the Bottom of the World
“Maud Casey’s Shape of Things to Come is full of lovely sentences and empathetic characters. Her story is as engaging and scintillating as a story told to you by a best friend.”
—DARCEY STEINKE, author of Jesus Saves
“Isabelle is a millennial treasure. The journey from child to woman, no matter at what age, is poignant and often funny; Isabelle’s is both, in spades.”
—ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS, author of Nora, Nora
“Maud Casey has the rare ability to continually take her fiction one step further than the reader thought possible—into a region where sentences deliver gifts of wit and wisdom. We should all be grateful she has arrived to cheer and charm us.”
—ELIZABETH EVANS, author of Suicide’s Girlfriend
“Maud Casey’s characters may be living in Standardsville, Illinois, but there’s nothing standard about their story. The Shape of Things to Come is a wonderful account of our need to both invent and reinvent ourselves. A deft and generous book.”
—MARGOT LIVESEY, author of Eva Moves the Furniture
“A woman on the cusp of becoming is the narrator of Maud Casey’s finely observed and moving first novel. The pleasures of The Shape of Things to Come are many: the myriad delicacies of Casey’s prose, her keen intelligence, and her portrait of an unconventional mother and an adult daughter trying out an intimacy whose boundaries they have never tested.”
—ELIZABETH BENEDICT, author of Almost
“In this rising wave of new fiction in America, it is, as in the new industries that are its future, young women who are riding the currents to shores that are yet distant and unexplored. Maud Casey is floating at the top, and her novel The Shape of Things to Come has hit the beach, shiny and curious.”
—DAGOBERTO GILB, author of Woodcuts of Women
Also by Maud Casey
The
Shape of Things to Come
Copyright
DRASTIC. Copyright © 2002 by Maud Casey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2007 ISBN: 9780061873614
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