As soon as the dog hears me stir, she comes into my room and wants to get in bed with me. I’m not ready so I stick a hand out for her to lick. When I move over, she jumps up. She’ll let me pet her for as long as my hand keeps moving, but she only likes to cuddle in the morning. If I try to get her on the bed later in the day, she will do so begrudgingly and act uncomfortable about it the whole time.

After coffee, after updating my online classes for the week, I put her in the car and drive a mile to the beach. The beach isn’t dog friendly so either we walk the sidewalk a couple of miles before turning back, or if I’m feeling lazy, we walk around the parking lot and up and down the pier.

It is a parking lot day.

She finds a bunch of spilled crab claws, so red and pretty, and gobbles them up as fast as she can. She was a street dog before I took her in so I like to give her a few seconds to eat as much delicious parking lot trash as possible. She’s simply flexing her muscles of self-preservation. Also, I have her on diet food and feel guilty about it.

Once she found a T-bone and was so thrilled that I sat on the curb and waited.

With no one in sight, I let her off the leash, but a man with a fishing pole appears and she trots over to say hello. He gives me a look like he wants me to die. The angry and homeless are out today. As usual, there are a number of people who park their cars and trucks and then don’t get out of them. What are they doing in there? I avoid eye contact, which would be horrible, like looking at someone through the slats of a bathroom stall.

I leave her in the car with the windows rolled down while I run into Rouses to pick up milk and coffee. I consider buying a King Cake because they’re seasonal, and I like seasonal things. The smell fills the store. I feel preemptively sad that it won’t be here the next time I come in. I remember other things I need and wander the aisles all the while thinking about people who leave their children in the car and how they’re prosecuted and go to prison even though it’s only sixty degrees out and it’s only for a few minutes.

Back in the car, I record a video of the dog hanging out the window as Chamillionaire’s “Ridin Dirty” plays. I record a number of these videos, and they make me ridiculously happy. I’ll watch them over and over again throughout the day, and each time I’ll be as happy as I was the first.

I do some editing and consider what time I want to go to the gym. It’s tricky because I like to get it over with by two o’clock, but there’s the issue of cable TV to consider. Do I want to watch Sean Spicer on three televisions at once and be confronted with the horror that is this administration? Will something good be on the Food Network? I hate The Pioneer Woman and Tricia Yearwood, both of whom are aggressively cheerful yet dull.

The hot gym guy: not here. The hot gym guy: I am certain he also loves me but can’t approach me, and so we will forever love each other from afar.

Spicer is infuriating, an overgrown child, but there are little bursts of joy whenever he stumbles over his words and mispronounces things.

As I get off the elliptical to use the bathroom at two miles in, I manage to snap one of the earbuds clean off the set, the little wire visible. I touch the pieces together as if they might fuse before throwing them away.

Back at home, I fix a sandwich and turn on American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson, which has taught me many things. Malcolm-Jamal Warner is a terrible actor, the worst. David Schwimmer does an excellent job of looking stunned, which is basically all that he is capable of. It is hard to be a woman, particularly one with power, particularly one with power working in a male-dominated field. But these are the things I have accepted, the things I already know. It is harder to confront the fact of how easily people are swayed by a catchphrase, especially if it rhymes or they can wear it on a hat, and how they always prefer a good story to the truth.

More editing. A phone call with my mother. Texts to and from a man. A text from my mother with a picture of an envelope: Is this important? Thumbs up, smiley face.

While I check in on my students and answer emails, a boy in the complex plays basketball in the parking lot by himself.

At five o’clock, he’s been playing for two hours. There’s not a court so he dribbles and shoots the ball into an imaginary hoop. He’s practicing to make the team or he’s terribly lonely or both, and I don’t want to begrudge him his bouncing. Apparently no one else does either, as he’s been doing it every day for weeks.

Hours later, I’m still editing, faster and faster, my hands tired. I stop to watch my dog’s paws dig into the carpet, her breath coming in spurts. She is running in a dream. Maybe she’ll do that wonderful yipping thing that I love so much. But then she’s quiet and her paws stop moving; one eye opens.

Rain is coming. I watch it approach on my phone, lightning strikes fifteen miles to the north. I put on my jeans and flip flops, take her out one last time.

~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• I loved Ottessa Moshfegh’s story collection, Homesick for Another World, which came out a week after mine. I saw her read in Austin the night before my own reading, which was sort of a mistake, because she had a large and enthusiastic crowd and the booksellers were falling all over themselves to flatter her—they even gave away a copy! Her collection is excellent, though—morbid and inventive, the prose simple yet revelatory. Simple yet revelatory is my aesthetic, if I had to pin it down.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Write. That’s it. What writers struggle with most is not writing. We love to talk about it, though, how hard it is and how we don’t know what we’re doing or where a story is going, how this one guy got a million dollar advance and bought a nice house, how unfair it all is, etc., etc.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I do most everything from bed. Is this strange?

~

By Mary Miller:

O

—Other Writers in the Series—

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

March 1, 2017: Mary Miller

Mary Miller likes to take naps and loves to highlight passages in her Kindle. She’s a fellow Southerner–she grew up in Jackson, MS, and she currently lives on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This year will be a big birthday for her, but nowhere near as big as mine.

Her third book, Always Happy Hour, was published in January. When I read the dedication–for my exes–I knew I would love it. The collection includes sixteen stories, and all are delightful. Not just a few–all. To make my point, instead of writing about my favorites, I’m going to give you a passage from each of the first ten stories. And just like the dedication, you’ll be able to tell how much you want to read each one.

From story #1: “Instructions”

Other than the cats, the only other thing under the bed is a gun. Her boyfriend said it was loaded and the safety was off, that she shouldn’t touch it unless she was prepared to use it. He showed her how to open the barrel and take the bullets out, but she forgot as soon as he put it away. It’s like CPR class, no matter how many times she’s certified, she wouldn’t be able to save anyone’s life.

Here’s that connection fiction gives us–That yes, oh my gosh, that is so true.

From story #2: “The House on Main Street”

All of my exes have been reduced to two words, three at most, and this one, though still current, still in play, I think of as The Doctor.

Who doesn’t want to reduce their exes in some way? And also, look at how much this short but complex sentence does. AND we emerge from it with a visual shorthand for a character, a useful fiction tool.

From story #3: “Proper Order”

He said that we should do things in the proper order. But since my divorce, eight years ago, there is no order, proper or otherwise. I think I love someone and they love me and then something comes along and ruins it. They let me believe that I am that something.

Voice, character development, indirect exposition… and we feel something. We’re on this character’s side against the world.

From story #4: “At One Time This Was the Longest Covered Walkway in the World”

My boyfriend’s eyes are blue. I want to ask my boyfriend what color his ex-wife’s eyes are because if they’re blue then the boy isn’t his and we could be spending our nights alone.

Romantic and strange all at once.  And notice the lack of genetics explanation, the way the writer assumes we’re as smart as she is.

From story #5: “Big Bad Love”

The woman next to me, a blonde in spandex, asks if she’s mine and I tell her no. She’s the kind of woman who comes on Wednesday nights to bring movies and popcorn. These women smile too much and won’t use the bathroom, and it makes me want to steal their husbands so they can see how quickly life can rearrange itself into unfamiliar and unpleasant patterns.

Another great fiction technique–allow the narrator to describe another person and see how much we learn about the narrator.

From story #6 “Uphill”

I haven’t been to Biloxi since I broke up with Richard. I have so many old boyfriends now, spread out all over, and so many things remind me of them. I’ll pass a Wendy’s and remember the one who would only eat plain hamburgers.

We live in the same world as Mary’s characters–a world that includes Biloxi, old boyfriends, a Wendy’s, and plain hamburgers. But this world is so much more interesting in the head of this character. We’ll have what she’s having.

From story #7: “Dirty”

I fill a plate and set it at the table, my Sprite already there. I go back for an egg roll, cream cheese fried wontons, slices of cantaloupe, a bowl of ice cream. I nod at the Chinese girls as I pass. There are real Chinese people here, not like at the other place in the old Shoney’s.

Without the last sentence, the list of food just sits there. With the last sentence, the reader is drawn in to the scene, thinking about the difference between this place and the other place. And again, that connection–Shoney’s are all something else now.

From story #8: “He Says I’m a Little Oven”

I close my eyes and think about the boat on the ocean, black waves and black sky and a sliver of moon, and I like the idea of it— how lonely it looks— but next time I’ll just fly wherever I want to go. I’ll step out of the airplane onto solid ground.

Beautiful passage. How many things do we love the idea of but the actuality, not so much.

From story #9: “Where All of the Beautiful People Go”

Maybe if you get a husband and a house and kids you automatically want a nice set of matching furniture so badly you’re willing to steal for it.

Again, adding that last clause, that unexpected modifier, makes this sentence one we’ve never read before.

From story #10: “Love Apples”

The post office is empty, the bald guy reading the newspaper. “Nice and quiet in here,” you say, because even though you are getting a divorce and starting a new life with a man who wants your dirty panties it is no reason to be impolite.

Another everyday scene that goes from simple and interesting to worth remembering–all because of an extra detail, the unexpected modifier, the dirty panties.

Vincent Scarpa at Electric Lit wrote, “What I love most about Miller’s stories, then, is how disinterested they are in presenting a reader with the sense that something has been solved, or is even solvable.” And I agree–these are our lives Mary’s writing about, not math problems. 

Come back on MARCH 1st to read how MARY MILLER spends her days.