Black Light

Kimberly King Parsons

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781838951290
• eBook ISBN: 9781838951306
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

'The stories in Black Light are grimy and weird, surprising, utterly lush... I loved every moment of this book.' Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
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A black light illuminates that which the eye doesn't see, uncovering what is hidden in plain sight.

In this raw, compassionate, debut collection Kimberly King Parsons casts light onto the weird, the intimate, the eerie and the sublimely beautiful with unflinching gaze and ferocious eloquence. Over twelve crackling stories, each a glorious escape hatch, she captures the bright ache of first love, the claustrophobic shadows of desire, the obsessive nature of friendship and the rapturous pull of taboo. Filled with a frenetic longing for connection, her reckless yet resilient heroines exhilarate and charm as they pursue the promise of elsewhere.

With psychedelic energy and deep humanity, Black Light chews over the messiness of being alive, the unsteadiness of hope and the ecstasies of coming of age.

STARLITE

THERE’S ANOTHER WORLD UNDERNEATH THIS one, easy enough to get to. “It’s like we’re lifting the—what is it?” Jill said. “Is ‘scrim’ a word?” You could slip right out of your life.

It had been a while since she’d done this much. Things had gotten to the point where every statement she made seemed to clamor for a corresponding movement. She snatched frantic little handfuls of nothing from the air. Rick sat on the bed watching. She was in her bra and underwear, a matching set she’d picked out for the occasion, and though she was very high, she was still aware of Rick’s eyes on her body. She bent over in front of him, at the waist, of course, the way every girl in the history of sex has been taught to bend. With both hands, she pulled something invisible off the revolting carpet, lifted it up and over her head. Maybe the motions were stupid, but she couldn’t keep herself from making them. She hoped she was coming across as an erotic mime, a sexy interpreter for the deaf.

“Scrim’s a word,” he said. He was smiling, staring at her ass.

“Well,” Jill said, her hands made into claws. “This is us, ripping through it.”

Rick was bigger than Jill’s husband. This difference was crucial to her, and she had imagined him with a furry chest, something she might rub with lotion, work up into a good froth. At work, in his button-down shirts and corduroy jackets, everything about Rick suggested he was burly. The beard, for example, and the knuckles sprouted with red hair. She was disappointed, after he’d tossed off his shirt, to see such creamy smoothness, such even tone. Still, he had the barrel chest, the thick arms that made her feel tiny and perfect. Her husband was wiry and fit, meticulously groomed.

Jill had insisted on something seedy, so they were in a place off Westheimer you could rent by the hour. She’d driven past it a thousand times and had always felt a tug—the garish lavender stucco was a pathetic attempt at tropical, the word “Vacancy” was trapped in a blinking white star. It was hard to believe their office building was so close—the zoning laws in Houston were batshit—they could have walked over, not that they would have. She’d parked her new Infiniti next to Rick’s older Infiniti, and they’d both double-beeped their car alarms. Not far from the parking lot was a plasma donation center, but also the galleria and a string of glass-fronted boutiques. One shop sold only home theater equipment, another specialized in bespoke chinos—luxuries not meant for the guests who usually stayed here. Even the word “guests” felt wrong to Jill. Customers, maybe. Frequenters. This place was rock bottom for anybody, a good spot for bad decisions.

“There are only two things people do in places like this,” Rick said. “And we’ve already done all the drugs.”

“Funny,” Jill said. She wasn’t going to let him fuck her. Probably not.

She riffed through a series of calisthenics, ridiculous leg lifts and lunges. Speeding.

Rick was only kidding—of course there were more drugs. There were the two baggies he knew she had seen, plus the one she knew he was keeping to surprise her with later. Plus there was the one he thought she didn’t know about.

“You be the executor,” she’d told him. She didn’t like to hold on to it.

They didn’t smoke in real life, but in this room they did. Rick brought fancy clove cigarettes that sizzled and snapped and tasted like Christmas. They lit them one after the other, waved them around like sparklers. He’d brought cupcakes with sprinkles, the jumbo kind, and fast food, too, warm burgers in a greasy paper bag. Two large cups of orange soda, a mess of fries. Who could eat under such circumstances?

Rick could. He sat on the bed in his boxer shorts, fries falling into his lap, smiling at her. He always seemed so sober. “I do this a lot more than you do” was his excuse.

The music she’d chosen was playing over the little speakers he had brought. She’d spent weeks planning the soundtrack, mapping out the pace, timing the transitions just so. Like any good mix, it started with familiar and then ramped up to the weird. She’d worked in B-sides and bizarre covers and the truly absurd—there were throat singers and a band that used a dot matrix printer as a drum machine—gems she was certain Rick hadn’t heard before. A playlist is always an act of exhibition, but more important, Jill wanted to orchestrate her high. She’d anchored the day with artful repetitions and themes, refrains that would energize for hours and then, she hoped, bring her down easy. She wanted songs she could listen to later, back in the real world, that would trigger a feeling like something in her bloodstream.

At work, Jill and Rick spoke in code, acted like children. They called Rick’s wife Eyelash and Jill’s husband Kneecap, the genesis of the names long forgotten, a product of some drunken happy hour. Rick drew eyes on a staple remover and they named it Sharkey. Passed back and forth between their cubicles, it was a running gag, where the little guy would turn up—jammed into Jill’s box of tissues, once submerged in Rick’s cup of coffee.

“I knew you’d get nekkid today,” Rick said, and bit into a burger.

“I’m not!” she said, but naked might be on the table. It wasn’t even nine a.m.

Rick had taken a vacation day, and Jill called out sick. He was her supervisor, so it was his voicemail that she called. She left the message from the motel room, right in front of him, breathless and giggling while he watched. They wondered if people at work would raise their eyebrows at the two of them missing. They hoped so.

He licked salt from his fingers and watched her. “How do you like this?” Jill said. She was fanning her arms out, bending at the elbows.

“It’s a little air traffic control–y,” Rick said.

She should have eaten something, but now it was too late. Food was ruined.

She sat on the floor, scissored her legs. “Pay attention,” Jill said. “These are moves from the future.”

EVERYWHERE JILL LOOKED, THINGS were interesting. In the strange, scrimless world of the motel room, each object had a fascinating, dingy significance: the obscure fire escape map mounted to the inside of the door, the golden light slicing beneath it. The plastic alarm clock by the bed flashed midnight, the snooze bar covered in whorled fingerprints.

“That time’s wrong, you know,” Jill said.

Rick said, “Thanks, Einstein.”

She flipped him off and smiled, checked her watch again. It was an antique, a dead person’s accessory ticking on. It was a recent gift from her husband, ornate but delicate, surprisingly light on the wrist. Good Kneecap, she thought. He’d had her initials engraved on the back, that last letter another thing he’d given her. She conjured time backward, an ancestral stream of Kneecaps: men who looked like her husband but with weird hats or wild hair, one guy sitting on a throne, some sullen kid at the edge of the wilderness, frowning at a fresh kill.

She went into a deep lunge and came up. She looked at her pretty watch again, picked up her phone. No calls, no texts—good, nothing to pull at her. Everything she looked at was framed, fringed by her human self. Why didn’t she always notice this? She admired her hand, how it held her phone in the air, then the lovely arm leading up to the hand that held the phone. She took so much for granted every day. The hinge in her elbow was a wonderful thing—her entire body was conveniently covered with skin. Around the edges of her vision hung the lace of her hair, and just beyond that, Rick was at her side, adorable and breathing, also covered in skin.

They smoked and ashed, smoked and ashed. Jill showed Rick the time on her wrist, and they marveled at how early it was, their coworkers just getting to the office, pouring their coffee and starting their day. She felt her human thigh against Rick’s human thigh, and it was so nice to be in this place, warm and alive, away from her computer and her paper shredder, the multi-line telephone and crushing boredom. Sitting still was impossible, though, meaningful thigh connection or not. She jolted up and did another set of jumping jacks, put her hand over her racing heart. She checked her watch. “Still early,” she said, and Rick laughed.

“Still midnight,” he said.

“It’s fun now,” Jill said, “but it’s gonna get so bad.”

A song they loved came from the little speakers, and they swooned, singing along. Rick had a sweet voice, high and pure, a deep Southern lilt. Jill had worked hard to get rid of her own accent, mimicking anchorwomen and soap stars since she was small. Rick was from a little town in Arklatexhoma—maybe the quadruple influence of all those slow vowels was too much for him to get out from under. Anyway, Jill liked the way they sounded coming from him.

She danced, looking at herself in the mirror. Rick could dance, too, very well, as she recalled from the holiday party, though now he stayed moored to the bed, smoking, watching her.

“This playlist is a masterpiece,” he said. “Your taste is—” He brought his fingers to his mouth and kissed them.

“I know,” she said.

“Seriously,” he said. “I keep waiting for it to suck.”

“It won’t,” Jill said. “It makes me fall in love with myself.”

They’d determined long ago that Eyelash and Kneecap had similar, terrible taste in music.

“More?” she said. They were using a key, trying to make it last. They took turns, and another song came on. They swooned again. It was a British band, a group who toyed with dissonance and celestial chords.

“See?” he said. “I can’t believe you know th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Guts
• In our circle
• Glow hunter
• The animal part
• Foxes
• The soft no
• We don’t come natural to it
• The light will pour in
• Into the fold
• Black light
• Fiddlebacks
• Starlite
• Acknowledgments