Summer Song (Part I of IV) | short fiction by Anna Reeser
"It was a comfort to know I would be preserved the way he saw me then—an artist, not a mother yet."
Welcome to Khôra, a dynamic online arts space produced in collaboration with Lidia Yuknavitch’s Corporeal Writing. Visit our Archive to read previous issues. Scroll down if you want your work to be considered for future issues.
Over the past two weeks we’ve been introducing you to the members of KHÔRA’s new curated team. This brilliant group of writers and artists is collaborating with us to bring you four gorgeous issues between now and June 2023. Today’s essay is by writer Anna Reeser, with artwork by Liz Asch.
Anna Reeser’s short fiction is published in The Best American Short Stories 2020, The Masters Review, Fourteen Hills, and CutBank. She has lived throughout the West Coast and is now based in her hometown of Ojai, California. She recently completed a story collection and is working on a novel.
Liz Asch is an author, artist, and acupuncturist based in Portland, Oregon. Her book, Your Salt on My Lips (Cleis Press, 2021), is an ode to eros in queer bodies of the global majority. Her podcast, Body Land Metaphor Medicine, is a free archive of somatic visualizations. Her stop-motion animation film, The Love Seat, played in LGBT film festivals in the US and Canada. Liz holds a BA from Vassar, a Masters in Chinese Medicine, and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Eastern Oregon University. Liz has published essays, poems, interviews, stories, book reviews, and artwork in a variety of journals and anthologies, earning her a Pushcart nomination, a RACC grant, and several essay prizes. Liz teaches embodied surrealism and salutary storytelling, with an emphasis on earth activism, creative expression, and public health.
Summer Song (Part I of IV) by Anna Reeser | Artwork by Liz Asch
Summer began like it always had—dewy and green with mild weather. I noticed sprouts in the dirt, wondering what they’d grow to be. Standing behind our new house in Portland, I waited for Aaron to get home from work. Thirty-one, shirt tucked into high-waisted jeans, I looked like my mom in the late 80s. Our yard sloped to a patch of rocks and dandelions the last owner left to chaos. I stood there, balancing on bare feet. Five weeks pregnant, scrawny and tender. Two magenta lines. The plastic test was in the back pocket of my jeans.
“Catherine! Look at you, a mountain goat on the rocks.” Aaron pushed open the screen door, raised his camera to his eye.
It was a comfort to know I would be preserved the way he saw me then—an artist, not a mother yet. We hadn’t been trying. Not seriously—I wasn’t taking the vitamins. But I had gone off birth control the week we closed on the house. And the day we moved, in the spare room, high on the smell of new paint, I told him, don’t pull out this time. Or maybe—don’t pull out anymore. We knew what we were doing, but weren’t we also play-acting adulthood on some level? Hadn’t the white-dress, black-suit wedding been slightly ironic, and the house, with its yellow siding, been almost a commentary on houses with yellow siding?
Read Summer Song.
Artists and Writers
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With galactic gratitude,
Leigh Hopkins
and the Corporeal/Khôra squad