aekellogg

[aekellogg]

I'm still fond of this story I wrote forever ago

Cobwebs and Silks

Once upon a time, there was a woman who wished she could do something wonderful, like spin straw into gold. She visited the neighborhood witch and offered her firstborn child in exchange for the talent. Grimfeasance agreed. (She was an ugly old woman whom not many people liked, so she thought a child would be nice to have around.)

Once upon approximately the same time, there was a man who broke into a witch’s garden to steal her golden roses. When she caught him, he offered his firstborn child in exchange for escape from her wrath. Maloire agreed. (She didn’t want a child, and would have sold the roses for a few pennies, but something told her this man would have been a terrible father.)

One year later, the man with the golden roses met the woman with the golden straw. One year after that, they realized they were in love. And one year after that, they got married.

All of this was very unsurprising. Stories have a way of working themselves out, especially in the fairy-tale lands which witches tend to populate. It’s improbable that this man and this woman could have ever lived out their lives without meeting and falling in love with each other.

One year after that, they had a baby daughter.

Grimfeasance and Maloire appeared in the baby’s nursery at the same time. They were not happy to see each other.

“That little girl is mine!” shouted Grimfeasance.

“That little girl is mine!” screeched Maloire.

There was no winning side to the argument. They both had equal claim to the firstborn child of the man and the woman. Splitting her in half would have been impractical, because that would very shortly leave them with zero living child. There was only one other option.

They had to compromise and carry her off together.

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[aekellogg]

Over the Rainbow

by Anastacia Kellogg graphics by Harmonie Phan

In the civilized countries there are no witches left, nor wizards, nor sorceresses, nor magicians. In the civilized countries there are no towns delicate as china, nor cities made of jewels. In the civilized countries there are no armies of pretty faces and knitting needles, nor wild beasts with grace and manners, nor boys who turn into princesses wearing flowers and gauze.

But, you see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized.

On a warm, pleasant day, which had been spent half attending to important affairs of ruling and half doing nothing at all, Ozma suggested to Dorothy that they should go on a journey together to a corner of her kingdom that they had not yet visited. “After all,” she said, “it has been a curiously long time since our last adventure, and I am not used to so much quiet!”

Ozma was the Ruler of Oz, and though she looked like a young girl she was widely considered to be the fairest and the kindest Ruler the country had ever had. Dorothy Gale had once been a little Kansas girl, but was now a Princess of Oz and Ozma’s constant companion.

“We shall make it a whole procession,” said Ozma decidedly, “and we’ll invite anyone who wants to come along. And you must bring your aunt, for she has seen so little of the beautiful country for all her time here.”

“I’m sure she’d be glad of the trip,” agreed Dorothy.

“You know, my dear, it’s very strange, but she continues to be a mystery to me. That is, I always find her a touch odd when we speak, and I never know why. Perhaps it is because she isn’t from Oz to begin with—but then, neither are you. You must tell me more about your Kansas!”

“There isn’t much to say ‘bout it,” replied Dorothy. “Least, not that I haven’t already told you.”

“But you’ve told me so little,” said Ozma. “I know of your farm, and your fields, and your cyclone cellar. But here in Oz you have travelled from one side to another, and you have brought back so many stories that you must know my own kingdom better than I do!”

“That’s dif’rent,” said Dorothy. “Oz is very new and queer to me. You know I grew up on the prairie, where everything was gray. You could travel for miles across that country and still see everything looking the same, but you can’t go more than ten feet in Oz without meeting someone stranger an’ stranger.”

Dorothy was ten years old, sitting on the broad Kansas prairie, and had just found Aunt Em softly crying while Uncle Henry tried to comfort her. Then Dorothy asked them to tell her what was the matter. They had not told their niece the sad news for several days, not wishing to make her unhappy, but now they told her how desperately poor they were, how they were about to lose the farm and the house, how uncertain they were of food. The girl listened quite seriously.

“Do you suppose you could manage to return to your fairyland, my dear?” asked Aunt Em.

Uncle Henry shook his gray head doubtfully. “These things all seem real to Dorothy, I know; but I’m afraid our little girl won’t find her fairyland just what she had dreamed it to be.”

They were uneasy, for this is a practical humdrum world.

Every morning, they stopped for Bill, the Yellow Hen, to lay her daily egg. Aunt Em waited impatiently to collect it, an old habit of hers from living on a farm

“I can’t und’rstand why she won’t let me put the ‘eena’ on the end” declared Dorothy earnestly to her friend as they stood to the side. “Surely ‘Billina’ is a prettier name than ‘Bill’ anyway.”

“Oh, it isn’t any concern of yours,” said Ozma carelessly. “And if it’s such an easy name to change, perhaps there’s really no difference between them.”

“But it’s all wrong, you know.”

Ozma looked sternly at the Kansas girl. “Really, Dorothy, that’s a rude thing to say about anyone’s name.”

Dorothy, as even her friends had to admit, had one notable deficiency in speaking, which was that she did not often think before she did it. She felt rightly embarrassed by that now, however, and tried to mend matters by explaining, “It’s just that all the Bills I know have been b—”

“—have lived in Kansas, not in Oz. Perhaps you find her name unusual, Dorothy, but everything in life is unusual until you get accustomed to it.”

“I s’pose so,” replied Dorothy with her pride a little bruised, for she did not like arguing with her friend.

“After all,” said Ozma, “is Billina a girl?”

“No-o-o,” said Dorothy, “she’s a yellow hen.”

“Then perhaps it is best left to a yellow hen to decide what name is right for a yellow hen.”

Read more…

[aekellogg]

DisIdentifications is a collection of queer interpretations of fairy tales, folk tales, and mythology. From a group of UCLA students known as OutWrite, this is our first collection of creative writing. 

My story, “Over the Rainbow,” begins on pg 6. 

[aekellogg]

My print-only article “Dual” can be found on pgs 22-23 of OutWrite’s Winter 2018 print edition.

[aekellogg]

Dual

The air is so cold it feels like it’s going to take my nose right off my face and shatter my skin like the surface of a frozen puddle. I’m taking photos of charred-black rafters, burnt linoleum floor, book pages scattered in the snow and crumbling darkly like a scene from Fahrenheit 451. There’s something almost artistic about it that I want to capture, but my phone, at half charge when I began, dies before I get through the front room. Technology is no better at handling the cold than is my California-freckled nose. An orange cat darts across one of the few roof supports left. This used to be a perfectly serviceable home.

My mother is clinging to this plot of land with the tenacity of a winter frost: it's passed through the hands of my evil witch of a great grandmother and my hurricane of a great aunt, and someday it or the profits from it will go to me and my four siblings. Our other plot of land holds a very lovely house whose temporary renters seem to grow worryingly more attached by the week. Down the street is an elementary school where my middle three siblings spent seven months, a bit beyond it is the evening school for high school dropouts which was the only place that would accept me at 18, and around the corner is the kindergarten where my baby brother was finally convinced to speak fluently. My mother wants us to have a foothold here. She wants us to have a place to live, a place to educate ourselves, a place to build a business.

I have trouble expressing to my mother exactly why I don't want to uproot my entire life and settle in Russia. Usually I  spread my hands and say some variation of "isn't it obvious?" Her responses reflect the same flabbergasted tone back at me -- “why wouldn’t you?” -- as she lists all the benefits of not staying in the capitalist dystopia that is the United States. I stutter and respond, “I just can’t live in a place that’s so antagonistic to me,” which is always the wrong thing to say to an immigrant who’s done exactly that.

The seven months that made up my last stay in Russia were in 2014, the year of the Winter Olympics that so many athletes boycotted to protest recent anti “gay propaganda” laws. The way my mother explained it to me, my siblings and I were in danger of saying something too liberal and being hated at school. The way my father explained it, “propaganda” could mean anything that sent the message “gay people exist.” For those seven months, I attended evening classes for the students who were too troublesome to keep in high school -- druggies, delinquents, and one too-cool-for-this-town girl who seemed to have decided to be my friend. Most of them were too old for their grade, but at 18, I was one or two years older than any of them. On my first day there, I was bombarded with questions: most laughably, “Do you have smoking in America?” -- most charmingly, “Do palms really just grow there? On the streets?” -- and most dauntingly, “Are there lots of gays in America?” My cool-girl friend clarified the last question with the follow-up, “You know, pederasts?” I didn’t know how to respond. I was 18, they were 17; if I answered “yes,” I would be an adult spreading gay propaganda to minors. They asked me the question a few times, never once suspecting that I was one of the gays myself. I didn’t know how I could tell anyone, even my cool-girl friend, even the boy who told me in English that he’d “once been like that” but was “all natural now,” that I had tentatively applied the label bisexual to myself in the backseat of a van speeding through palm trees to LAX only weeks before.

(I literally wouldn’t know how to tell them. I typed bisexual into Google Translate later that day, and it gave me dvupol’nyy, a literal translation meaning “two gendered,” which is less than accurate.)

The thing is, I don't know what level of responsibility I have. I feel like my inability to speak up makes me a bad social activist. But I also feel like if I did speak up, I would be trying to change a culture that I'm barely a part of and thus have no right to change. What right have I to tell Russians how to be Russian? My two red pasporta don't mean a thing once I open my mouth and let out the awkward accent. I passed the ninth grade standardized writing exam because my teachers corrected my scantron after hours. Who’s going to correct my grammar as I try to conjugate the Russian transliteration of the word bisexual?

We watched the Olympic opening ceremony live that year, and my mother stood behind my chair with a sour look on her face. “It’s like makeup on a corpse,” she said. “It’s all a fake cover for the turmoil going on in this country.” Seven months later, I saw makeup on a corpse for the first time in real life. I kissed my grandfather’s forehead and told him I loved him in broken Russian, silently raging against my hurricane of a great-aunt for shouting him into the grave. I wore heels to the funeral, shoes that I had packed but been too shy to wear even once. My only black dress ended mid-thigh and that morning I noticed, with a quiet sense of guilt, that my legs looked really good.

My coming  out story is far less brutal than it could  have been. Last summer, my mother wakes up and is running  around the house by 4am, and she sees me and my friend who slept  over sharing the pull-out couch bed. I can't account the thoughts that  ran through her head -- I've always shared beds at sleepovers -- but her suspicions were right I suppose. "I'm not  mad," she told me later, "I just wish you were dating a boy, because I want grandchildren." The joke's on her -- my longtime gal pal-turned-partner is a (trans nonbinary) boy after all -- but we are unavoidably and visibly a queer couple.

When this week is over, my mother and I will head home to greet Christmas with the rest of the family. But I won't be home until a few days later, when I'm back in LA in the roach-filled apartment with the roommates who forbid whispering after 9pm and call me and my partner "very good friends." We’ll do propagandic gay things like hold hands and tell each other how much we love and value each other as human beings. We’ll dress up cute to go places together, and somewhere in the back of my mind I’ll remember snippets I’ve read about queer fashion being an act of resistance.

It feels like a massive leap to compare the people who struggled on the front lines of social movements to me admiring how my own boobs look in a crop top or how shapely my legs are in a funeral dress. No one would call Narcissus a world-changer.

Today, the snow crunches softly under the combat boots I bought at a yard sale and stuck a dozen safety pins through. Hair frizzes around my face in dyed-green strands under a beanie that sits lopsided thanks to my undercut. I have found a thousand small ways to present a queer image, to be in control of the ugly that the world will see in me no matter what. My phone is dead, but I keep looking at these charred pages in the snow like an artist, a tourist, the disconnected outsider that I am. I still navigate the language in a series of surreal Google Translate errors (though thankfully, we’ve both gotten better: bisexual now translates to biseksual, the proper word). Behind me, the house that my great-aunt set on fire threatens to crash down. When I fly home, I’ll pass through the airport flashing the bright red passport that lays out my name in familiar Cyrillic letters, but once back in LA I’ll sink into the comfort of a 65° winter chill.

I think that all I can do, for now, is try to understand myself through palm trees and shoes.

[aekellogg]

My article “Ship Happens” can be found on pgs 28-30 in OutWrite’s Winter 2017 print edition. 

[aekellogg]

Peppermint Tea

smells of           candy cane Christmas trees           and the warmest kind of clean

and tastes of           bitter tears           and water.

[aekellogg]

starts at 4:57

Stories My Grandfather Has Told Me

Dizzinesses

Simile 130

[aekellogg]

Trying

(ugly girls) we keep our smiles pulled back over crooked teeth, our eyelids patterned red and white, foreheads lumpy and noses spotted, our eyebrows heavy and dark, cheeks picked and pitted and mined. (ugly girls) we cross our arms on tables that rub our elbow skin raw, we touch our wrists to remember our bones, laugh practiced laughs if we're lucky, stretch our necks out like giraffes, tap our fingers in echoes of your voice. (ugly girls) we lean into the lamplight, drag it harshly over our cheekbones dungeon it in bags under our eyes, snarl our way into your sight. (ugly girls) we never got to choose to command your notice or be ignored (ugly girls) we push through with what we have, which is (what is) (ugly girls)

[aekellogg]

starts at 2:15 

Perfume

[aekellogg]

A guide to spotting fair folk at rest stops

and other liminal spaces:

Real humans will not wear high heels on road trips. Watch for shoes that should not be able to make their way over desert sand, over dried up pet area grass, across puddley restroom floors.

If a woman sits down with her child and a bag full of watermelon and they don’t say a word to you, they’re probably safe. If you don’t recognize the fruit in the ziploc bag, it is time to run. Do not let them offer you a piece.

The little plump girl with her two too-friendly dogs is trying to distract you from the strangeness of her eyes.

He is the seventh person you asked for jump cables after your battery died. Help is hard to find at 3 a.m. You spill your entire story to him — where you were, why you fell asleep with your headlights on, the names of your children sleeping in the backseat — and he nods and listens with a smile that you trust. He’s tall and thin and clutches a box in his long fingers. His voice is kind. He doesn’t ask for payment. He doesn’t have to. 

After he climbs back up into his mountain of a truck, you find a frog hopping across the parking lot. You are nowhere near a lake.

[aekellogg]

Mermaid Tears

Trying

Net

episode starts at 2:30

[aekellogg]

Dizzinesses

i. You walk me from trash can to trash can, pull me the last few feet when my eyes close and I can't make it any more. You hold me in a restroom stall, run your hand over my shivering skin as I grumble about unfairness and having plans. You envelop me on a Sears display couch and love my sickness away and love me through the waves of nausea and love me at my worst. ii. You hold me in a changing room, pull me against you as voices sound too-loud outside, play with my breathing in the quiet, you search out every little gasp. You crush me against you as I fall sideways, you hold me fast with smiles and kind words as my feet lift off the ground. iii. You worry about me at one a m, but I tell you I'm busy writing poetry. This is an eyes-falling-shut poem, this is a worth-the-headache poem, this is a poem composed on borrowed time. I'm wobbling into you and your words and making promises I'll collapse before I keep. 

[aekellogg]

This is the summer of no rain.

This is the summer of thunder in the air and humidity seeping from the trees. This is the summer of desert sand crunching underfoot. This is the summer of burning sun and shivering clouds.

We were promised rain. We were promised a constant, a deal made in the currency of bated breaths and shielded faces. A summerlength of eyes raised to the sky despite its blinding brightness, three solid months of sweat on our upper arms and streets getting steeper and steeper with each step and sunburned skin crinkling at the base of our necks. Three solid months of a forest dryer than firewood holding its breath. A summerlength in exchange for one day.

But this is the summer of one day a summerlength long. This is the summer of clouds in the air when we rise and burned off by the time we finish breakfast and broiling hot when we decide we need a swim and cloudy and cold the moment we touch the water and sweaty sticky heat again by dinner.

It snowed one year on the first day of June, but that was normal. This is not.

A summerlength in exchange for one day, that has always been the unspoken bargain carried in every heart and wallet and mind and eye and purse. One day of the sky ripping itself to shreds behind a cumulonimbus modesty curtain. The ground liquefying and pouring in rivers of soil across the street. The highway flooding, stones and boulders flinging themselves under rubber wheels to the sound of fireworks. Raindrops thick and heavy on faces, on shoulders, on braided hair. Nobody uses an umbrella, and everybody breathes in, just once, and holds that breath until October.

But this is the summer of the broken promise. This is the summer of the false modesty. This is the summer of the soil too dry to bleed. This is the summer of humidity so thick, so near, I can’t breathe.

This is the summer of no rain.

[original post]

[aekellogg]

A Guide to Spotting Fair Folk at Rest Stops (and Other Liminal Spaces)

starts at 14:42

[aekellogg]

These are the stories my grandfather has told me

more than three times each so far:

i. When I moved to Cedar Rapids, I got a job right away, which was fortunate, because I had a wife and kids on the way (my grandmother interjects: I was out to here with Pam) and that job was at Square D. We did electrical testing. They taught me everything I needed to know on that job, and I got forty five years there, and I eventually I became lab manager. And once in a while I got to make fireballs, and one time one blew out the side of the wall, but that one wasn’t my fault. The building’s still there. It’s by the side of the interstate. I forgot which one.

ii. What state are you from? Do you know Pam? (Pam is my aunt. We stopped at her house on the way up here.) Oh yes yes, I asked you that already.

iii. See this watch? It’s a cheap watch but it tells good time. I angle it to face California each night, but I don’t think it can reach the signals from way out there. Here’s the hook I hang it up on.

iv. You had a long drive to get here. Once I flew from here to Florida (I think). I was the copilot, but the pilot was so busy playing with the instruments that I flew the plane. It was all the way from here to Florida. And when we got there, I said, “okay, now you land,” because I wasn’t authorized to land the plane. But I got us there, all right. I got us there.

v. What state are you from? You don’t have much testing out in California, do you? There’s a nuclear plant just down the road a little here, and I have an arrangement with a girl -- I should say a lady -- and I do testing and I inject little problems into their drills, make believe problems, shake up their routine. All make believe, of course. I volunteer.

vi. He has only told me once so far about the house floating down the river with people on the roof while he took a photo from above. (He was in Civil Air Patrol. Somehow I never knew.)

vii. What state are you all from, again?

[aekellogg]

Going Green

My first attempt at visual storytelling/graphic novelling. Collaborative project for class; first page (c) Pauline Ordonez, second page (c) A E Kellogg.

More info about melting permafrost and the greening of the Arctic biome due to climate change: Washington Post, NASA, National Geographic.