My last novel, All In (2005), centers on a character killed at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The book is told from three different voices (his brother, niece and wife) months and years after the events. The most powerful voice is, of course, that of his wife, Cheryl. 
We argued. That’s how I left him. I walked away because I wasn’t listening. It was ridiculous. It wasn’t even an argument. And then I was on the elevator. There was a stout woman across from me; she had folds in her arms, bulging layers at her elbows and shoulders. It was ridiculous how I never said what I wanted. I was angry at him, and I didn’t know why. It was all so ridiculous. I waited in the sky lobby. There was an attendant there from the restaurant; the express wasn’t working. Her fingernails were red. I wasn’t going to call him. He would call me. And then I heard it; it was a vibration and then much louder than that. I stopped and was going to turn to see what it was. I knew it was somewhere else, this sound coming in. I held myself there, twisted against the ground. I couldn’t move. There was only the light on the floor and my hand out in front of me. 
I was on my side. I couldn’t hear anything and then it was sharp and bright, knocking me flat again so that I was holding against myself, thinking of what I must have broken and where my purse had gone. I was looking across, how the light was orange and grey, and there was the woman, the attendant with red nails, hunched and then standing. I wasn’t going to move. And then I was sitting and trying to think. I smelt gas. It was something they would have to fix. I could see out the window, and there was smoke or fog, something that made it so I couldn’t look out without my hand on my eyes. I couldn’t understand why no one was here. And then my phone was ringing. “Hello?”
Monthly Archives: March 2013
Fashion for the Apocalypse
I have to admit that my second book, Fashion for the Apocalypse (1990), is weighed down by excessively elocuted elocrubrations: To describe the beauty of the lake in winter was to strangle the infinite.
Ahmic Lake, Canada
True, the woods did whisper, the ice did blind, the moon did blaze, but these words did not suffice, could not transfer the moment to existence, would never contain the wonder of the silence of sliding feet, the crackle of skimming blades, the scream of a straining engine.
Ahmic Lake, Canada
The writing in Fashion for the Apocalypse is not all bad…or at least as bad:
“The Fear” first hit me was when I was six, watching “The Wizard of Oz” on a Sunday night. Everything seemed normal. My family had finished dinner and were just watching a movie. This was the third time I had seen the film. I loved it.
But this time, when the witch appeared in a cloud of orange smoke, a horrible feeling descended on me. I wasn’t afraid of the witch; it wasn’t anything like that. It was much more general. Everything seemed wrong, bad. I couldn’t sit still. I had to stand. I walked across the room – nobody in my family seemed to take any notice – and sat in a chair in the corner. I figured that if I didn’t watch the movie, the feeling would go away. It didn’t. I left the room and went down the hall and found a hard wooden chair in the dark. I waited there. I moved my legs and looked from one dark place to another, like I was trying to shake being drunk.
New York City
I waited. It eventually faded. I never directly associated the feeling with anything, but the movie certainly did seem to have brought it on and did not watch any more of the film that night. For the next few years I had two consistent nightmares. One where a witch lived in the basement and another where I would be sucked in between the walls and into the pipes by some sort of foreboding evil. I saw “The Wizard of Oz” again 15 years later. It was incredible; no horrible feelings. I laughed all the way through. It is, in my mind, one of the best films ever made.