Trespass

Snow was in the air like the stagecraft of another sentience, and I was reminded of the years the boys and I would haul a Christmas tree home from Seattle Area Support Groups. [5][6]

The dusk streets were dappled with brake lights, every car bearing a tree we were supposed to imagine had simply shrugged and fallen in behind its forester. Some were trussed but still tossing, others lay perfectly still inside a hazmat sleeve.

It must have gotten darker even earlier back then. Our tree was always too heavy, but I refused to learn new hand motions to drive a car. One of the boys would end up despairing—he despairs still—while the other was stoic but too small to do more than wait quietly for his luck to change.

When we finally reached home our hands were caught in amber. My social skills were entirely bodily, but it was difficult to stand the tree upright in the hall. Suddenly, the whole house was a forest—hemlocks, pines, and firs.

What is that called, when the hunter falls for the hunted? [20] Wears its branches?

Personal life [edit]__________________________________________

The vision of the artist that most haunts me is Adrian Piper dancing alone in some demolition district in Berlin, a moon crater. Passersby look and look away, unmoved.

I saw her on a white wall in the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2018. She bore herself—

She bore herself with self-sufficient melancholy, as if she were the only one of her kind.

Ideology [edit]_____________________________________________

On reaching reading age, a woman becomes—

Artemis?[33]

What would she say to me? Control is its own excess?

Kirstin Allio won the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 for her new story collection, Sea Change, out in 2024. Previous books are the novels Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa) and Garner (Coffee House Press), and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure (Dzanc). Her awards and honors include fellowships from Brown University’s Howard Foundation and MacDowell. She lives in Providence, RI.