Tara's fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, Quarterly West, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Harpur Palate, The Gettysburg Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, and The William and Mary Review. In 2006, she was the recipient of a full writing fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center.
Her story "These Woods" was a finalist for the 2006 John Gardner Fiction Prize, and her story "Negotiations" was a semifinalist for the 2007 Mid-American Review Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award. In 2009, her story "Confessions" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received an honorable mention.
Excerpt from "Confessions," published in Gettysburg Review
1. Breath
I watch the dead, but not in the way you might think: that is, as spirits, as cold-cloud entities hovering in the corners of rooms said to be haunted, or as they appear in horror films—gray-blue zombies hobbling rancidly down abandoned urban streets or in moonlit cornfields. Rather, I watch the ni of my old and sick ones break down and lose its vitality. I watch until the ni cannot keep wrong thoughts away, until they swirl down from the mind to the soul, already hollowed, as if awaiting them. In time I watch the ni, the strong ghost, move on and up and away; sometimes this happens before my eyes—my sweetie in a bed or on a couch or even a wicker chair on some porch. When it’s over, I take the time to watch the body not breathe. The first last breath I saw was that of a man, drawn in deeply, with gusto, and released through the top of his head. This breath was the color of a ripe cherry and I held it in my hand for exactly three seconds.
2. Secrets
I, too, move on—to the next one and the next one. I happen to have had many men, which is different from having had many women, though tissue is tissue, thin blood is thin blood. This is my career: the dead I am often around to watch during the first minute of their deaths are alive with me before that, for any number of months, sleepwalking or getting lost in walk-in pantries or softly praying or mumbling bitterroot under breaths of day-old syrup or potato.
I get my latest sweetheart, Henry, from his kitchen. He has forgotten where he left his tea, but it is on the front porch, shaded by a giant awning. I can see the tea there, half-drunk, getting cold. I guide him by the elbow, his hand dangling and weakened from the cancer, across the living room. I have just put a CD in the stereo and say with a raised voice, “Listen, Henry, it’s Ella.”
Henry stops, looking around for the sound. His eyes brighten. “A real siren,” he says.
I will dwell later on that word, siren. It has vixen in it somewhere, the fox, the sharp wit and the lies, the short gait, the hop. The Greek enchantress and the warning. It has Henry’s age all wrapped up in it, in its allusion to another era. He has also said jaunty and screwball and dapper and gumption, even cut of his jib, which I like and try out—just for fun—on my caretaker friend, Jo, and the girls in my book group.
I sit Henry down on the porch, in his cushioned wicker chair. It’s spring, petals of the earliest daffodils curling inward, already drought-ridden. Sometimes I send him out with a watering can. He says he likes to hear the crackling sound of the dirt taking in the water, which I don’t think is possible without the hearing aid he refuses to get, but here we are looking over the daffodils on his huge front porch, a porch bigger than my first remembered home. His lungs are eaten away, cancer-pocked at the tissue-laden, gas-exchanging surface, and now his spine suffers the spread and warp. What’s left of his hair is yellowed and silky. His voice is hoarse because there is little space for breath.
We live-ins—sequestered, toeing borderlines, squished by family members who hire us but never listen to us (I am the fly on the wall and they swat at me if I rub my magic wings)—have a certain definition of fun, a certain idea about humor, and this is necessary, in my view, to do the job well. Henry is my sixth employer in six years, and even though we are taught about the importance of detachment, I don’t like to say employer. The problem is that although I am the employee, I get possessive with my charges, my sweeties. Seven weeks ago Henry’s daughter Angela made him go to church. I disagreed with that—Christianity, like other diseases, having long since swept through my land—but what can I say? And so I drive him to Saint Michael’s and walk him in and wait in the car for Mass to end.
Angela also made Henry give away his rabbit to a high school kid down the road. I do not understand why Henry allows her to dictate the terms of his final months. Made him. You can talk as high as the clouds about the positive effect animals have on sick people, talk yourself ridiculous about the money you can save on doctor bills and therapy bills, but none of this can change the outlook of a self-described martyr, a daughter with an ax to grind on the subject of pets.
Henry has not been the same since his rabbit was taken away. A week ago, in fact, while getting his walking exercise around the house, he removed all pictures of her from the walls and bookshelves, and stacked them in a corner. We have been together something like a year, and still, Henry won’t tell me certain things, like even the name of this rabbit. Like the reason for his aversion to lemonade. Like the reason for his map collection, extensive enough to fill the upstairs closet, which is as big as an old-fashioned pantry, and spill out into one of the unused bedrooms. Like why it is he thinks he is being punished with lung cancer given that he’s never smoked.
Must I know these things? When the last breath leaves him, I want to have a vision to focus on—I want to see all his elements flow away from him in a foamy, gaseous release. It’s the rippling away I throw my own rock into, so I can’t say my watching is selfless; I always take my ill with me, I always choose theft. I want the secrets he would tell grandchildren in that way they wouldn’t recognize: confession disguised as a morality tale or as a casual observation or even as the early babblings that mark the onset of senility.
Excerpt from "Walking on Water," published in TriQuarterly
In fall the earth closes down but the bodies of children shoot up. These children run naked into the early morning chill screaming with delight. They find things that crawl, things that have fallen into their laps, and sculpt little bowls out of mud on the picnic table. They collect maple leaves for school projects. They rip open chrysanthemum buds, smell the mint leaves they grind up between rocks. They swing from tires hanging from thick oak branches. They marvel at dusk, at anything that is potentially containable, anything that interrupts.
The body of the girl who lives in the gray farmhouse is shooting up, is badly in need of school clothes, but the mother hasn’t a sense for or the money to buy them, and so the girl goes without. Seams are split, threads trail. The mother cuts these off—no sense letting the girl go ratty—but they come back again, appear again like dust. And dust, resented for its ubiquity, becomes an analogy in the mother’s mind for the existence of the girl. This feeling creeps up on the mother; she is surprised and afraid of it and ignores it when possible.
When November eats away at the ends of daylight, the father decides that life should be offering him more tantalizing opportunities. The mother thinks there is no telling what the fantasy of this insolent and intrinsically lazy man could be. But there it is. He and the mother bicker well into an unusually warm evening, right in front of the girl, as if every nuance and inflection is not being absorbed by her, and then he is gone.
The girl gets on with her active but clumsy existence. Her uncontrollable limbs get away from her. She shuffles through the leaves that have gathered along the road’s edges and finally reaches the end of them, which is where she will catch the school bus. By afternoon the wind will have blown the leaves about, and she’ll kick through them again on the way home.
The girl has no siblings, few friends. On the weekends when the mother is quiet, so is the girl, who eats licorice in front of the fireplace and puts together jigsaw puzzles that would stump most children her age. Spatial relationships come easy for her, but the talent goes unnoticed.
The inside of the house looks either halfway decorated or overdecorated. The hairy man, the mother’s boyfriend, brings swatches of carpets from the store where he works as a salesman. Rectangles of every style lie in every room in the house, though there is no padding beneath them and the size is never right. When they’re really awkward the mother cuts them down with razor blades and uses them for throw rugs, or piles them up and kneels on them when she’s scrubbing the floors. The girl, always with bare feet, likes to hop from one rug to the other. She travels the house this way, leaping from the bedroom to the hallway, from hallway to bathroom, in a color-coded hopscotch. Sometimes the rugs are islands and she is a giant, able to walk a great archipelago in seconds, smashing with her jumps and thuds the homes and heads of the people who live in it. Sometimes she rolls up swatches for Hanna the Babysitter, who rolls her eyes but takes them home anyway.
In the backyard the girl assembles piles of dead leaves, faces away from them, and then lets herself fall. The crackle fills her ears. Then she lies still and examines the leaves that have fallen on her, the dead orange ones and the dried-up brown ones that are the color of rot.
The hairy man moves into the farmhouse. He clomps around the kitchen, his heavy boots waking the girl in the morning. He wears a green hat with earflaps and when he comes in after shoveling, snow is clotted in his beard and bushy eyebrows. When it begins to melt, which is instantly, water runs down his face and neck. He doesn’t bother to wipe it away. One day he jokes that he is melting. Help me, I’m melting, he says, his hands clutching his head, his eyes rolled back and wide. Melting! The girl knows he is joking, he’s doing this because they watched the Wizard of Oz, but still, to her he is a red-faced monster and she is frightened.
The mother has been more tired than usual the last two years. She sleeps on the weekends and doesn’t stop in the girl’s room and forgets to remind her of chores left unfinished or never started. From her bedroom, the girl sees flashes of her mother’s red hair as she turns the corner to the bathroom. The mother doesn’t bother shutting the door. Sometimes she’s paralyzed on the toilet, her almond-shaped body slumped forward, eyes the color of ink staring blankly at the shower curtain. Mostly she looks confused, as if someone has just sworn at her. Her stiff fingers, worn from years of entering numerical data into an office computer, twitch like dead-spider legs.
Excerpt from "Woman Walks into a Bar," published in Confrontation
Woman walks into a bar. Woman walks into a bar, removes gloves, reveals slender fingers, healthy cuticles, strong tendons. Woman walks into a bar, removes gloves, walks along the bar, leather bag hits her hip, wool coat brushes her ankles, woman sits by a fake fireplace. Woman removes coat and scarf, drapes them over a chair. Woman walks into a bar, looks around as if she hasn't been here before. Looks around, glances at the bartender, turns away, looks at him again, freezes, lays a hand on her coat and scarf, moves for her bag, freezes, woman walks into a bar, bartender comes over, gray at the temples, crow's feet at the eye-edges, too heavy for his height. Bartender moves toward woman, frozen woman, bartender asks what will you have, woman says scotch and water. Bartender finds the booze, an oversized ring clinking against the bottle, against the glass when he brings the drink to her. Woman walks into a bar, orders a drink, lays down cash, starts a tab. Woman watches bartender pour her drink, imagines him re-married to a woman not her mother, imagines his new children, imagines his weariness. Woman considers her own weariness, her imagination's funk, its insolence, how it makes her itch. Woman walks into a bar, gets a drink, becomes cross. Woman fishes around in her bag for a cigarette, woman hasn't smoked in years but bought a pack this morning, just for today, for this bar, this bartender. Woman's slender fingers tremble holding the delicate thing, woman searches again, realizes she has no lighter, knocks the cigarette away, woman's cigarette rolls away from her, rolls down the shiny bar, rolls down to a shiny man. Man catches the cigarette, walks it back to her. Shiny man, kind demeanor, unobtrusive sitter, sits next to her. Shiny man, flannel scarf around his shoulders, gives her the cigarette, offers her a light, burns briefly for her, flame goes out. Shiny man notes slender fingers, slender torso, slender nose, slender cigarette, woman walks into a bar, slender, reed-like, sashaying along, looks at the bartender, looks away, smokes a cigarette, lets a shiny man light her up. Bartender comes over, says need a refill, woman freezes, imagines a small home and a girlfriend, not a wife. Imagines no children, imagines strife and discontent. Imagines bartender recognizing a young woman, grown up now, seeking connection. Woman says no thanks, disconnects. Woman lays her hand on her draped coat. Woman smokes, shiny man says my name is Terry, woman says I'm Ariadne. Shiny man, already perplexed, woman walks into a bar, removes coat, orders drink, ponders men, says again Ar-ee-AHD-nee, man comprehends. Ariadne's thread, the woman says, runs you out of the labyrinth. Man says I didn't know Ariadne was a name, man eyes slender Ariadne and forgets his mind. Shiny man watches her mouth pull on the cigarette, draw his flame, thinks of a spool of thread unraveling. Man removes scarf from his neck, lays it over his knees. Woman walks into a bar, woman in a tunic, a pair of jeans, slenderized, smoking a man's flame, watches bartender, says I've seen this bartender before. Man looks at her, looks at the bartender shining hot glasses. Once before, the woman says, I don't remember where I grew up. Man says how can you not know that, he laughs a little, he thinks he is being toyed with by a slender crazy woman. Woman walks into a bar, orders a drink, says I have no memory and I'm glad of it. Woman looks at bartender, gets lost in bartender. No pictures? the shiny man says, wanting to be helpful, wanting to make sense. Woman smokes, says there was a fire and then I lost my memory. Bartender moves for the miniature refrigerator, woman freezes, turns to clay, stops breathing. Clay woman liquid inner, a container for the slosh of her, no breath left. Shiny man says can I buy you another, you've stopped drinking, gestures toward the empty glass, says what don't you remember?
Excerpt from "These Woods," published in Harpur Palate
Hibernation
In these woods, trees sway in the wind like tentacles. They are new growth, they know how to begin from nothing. In time their roots reach far down into the claylike layers of the earth, unfurling stringlike roothairs that grope the raw dirt, hold on tightly for life.
Nadja stands amid the highbrush cranberry growing at the base of a young oak, its highest branch thrusting crookedly into the dawn. The wet leaves below her feet are inches thick, cushioning her step. In this season of transition, she feels her shape shift: she is bulkier in her heavy clothes, and her sluggish body craves breads and grains, the starch her cells will need throughout the winter.
Sister Sky, Nadja’s older half-sister, is here too. All the way from the New Mexico side of the reservation. She is bulky all the time. She pushes through these North Dakota windchills like a snowplow clearing drifts. In the middle of a rock-weathering January, her hands are warm and pulsing. She eats fresh root vegetables as long as they are available, and red meat for breakfast. Sometimes she fixes a batch of sopaipilla, but she eats it with raw garlic, not honey. She says that garlic is a charm. Nadja, who knows that the caseworker would not approve of charms, adds, also an antioxidant.
Arrivals
How long had Nadja been in these woods? She and her husband purchased the drafty yellow farmhouse something like eight autumns ago, in 1979. They hadn’t discussed having children, but when, on the way back from Chief Looking’s Village, Nadja found an abandoned baby girl in the Bismarck bus station, they believed they had received a sign.
The baby was carried off by security personnel—Nadja couldn’t get the image out of her mind—and one night she breathed the name “Zola” into the bedroom air and wanted it to be the baby’s name. But when, a week after her training had ended, Nadja called the department inquiring about the child, she discovered that the baby’s heart, like that of her husband, was a pulsing flesh grenade quickly counting down to zero. In time, both failed.
The mourning chipped away at Nadja’s bones, carved out in the sticky marrow a deep nesting place. She had to remember to move her body forward, preferably into physical labor of some kind, and so directed all her energy into unnecessary home-improvement projects, beginning with the interior of the creaky farmhouse. She drove to the hardware store for cans of paint, rollers, angled nylon brushes, sandpaper, Spackle. After a breakfast of banana and oatmeal, she would sand and wipe the walls, carefully paint the trim, roll on slabs of color—teal, magenta, gold. While the walls dried she went outside to weed or mulch or prune the rose bushes that hung over the stone wall.
But even the freshly painted walls held the energy of grief; they spoke in the night of their emptiness, and when Nadja pushed against them, she decided to believe in ghosts.
One day the department called Nadja with a possible placement: a young girl waiting, it seemed, especially for her. This stringy-haired girl with post-traumatic stress disorder arrived as planned, but Nadja barely had time to get to know her when another arrival came knocking. Nadja had not seen Sky in nine years. Her hair was still long and straight and raven-colored, her bangs still choppy—she must still use the kitchen knife to cut them, Nadja thought—her expression like an ink blob, her knotty fingers proof of her adolescent training as a potter. “Father said you did not sound so good on the phone,” Sky said, and then pushed past Nadja to the stove to set a pot to boil.
Sky found a job at the grocery store in the older part of town, but her blood was that of a healer. The night she arrived at the farmhouse, she sat in front of the fire, her face glowing like melted amber. She closed her eyes and said, I remove myself from my flesh boundary and travel with the animal guardians to the otherworld. I fight among the supernatural in order to see into past and future.
When Sky opened her eyes, Nadja said, “You still practice.”
“I have no choice in the matter,” Sky said.
In time Nadja would see that those who believed in Sky came from miles, in rusted trucks with no windshield wipers or hubcaps. They came from as far away as the desert because they knew she’d give them what they needed, that she could sense their energies and their magnetic pulls and resistances, and give them advice they could use.
Nadja had grown up with pharmaceuticals and indoor plumbing and a different mother. She was not going to argue with Sky. She remembered how Sky healed the dying and convulsing snakebite boy, on that windless summer day in 1971, and held her tongue.
Inquiries
In these woods, saplings spring up strong and fast. They reach upward and downward, opposites stretching. Nadja breathes deeply in her garden. She can hear Sky banging around in the kitchen, setting out tea and fruit and oatmeal flavored with cinnamon and cream. In a few minutes Sky will emerge in her embroidered denim skirt and the quilt coat with the fuzzy trim along the edges, go to the end of the wrap-around porch, the side facing east, and pay homage to the morning light, to hayíílka. She will stand so still she could be a stamen reaching out from a sweet-liquid desert bloom.
Nadja bends to gather chamomile, thyme, rosemary. The light in this northern backcountry is lilac-colored. Lilac comes before pink, pink before yellow. The herbs, which Nadja puts in her basket, will dry over the fireplace and then be put into clay jars. Nadja needs many plants, because she cooks for the millions. That is how she says it. At the moment she might need to cook only for two, but she will cook for anyone, for strangers and the estranged, for Sky’s goddesses and visitors, for the delirious and the rabid.
Nadja’s children, they come from all over. The women in the support group, which Nadja attends every other week, nod when she says that these kids are raindrops, they are pollen. They smile when she says she calls her latest girl Honey-Wheat because all she ate for two days was clover honey on slices of toasted wheat bread. Honey-Wheat’s birth name is Julia, but Nadja likes to let the child believe that her new name is a special gift.
When Nadja goes inside, Sky is at the cutting board, silent, preparing the ingredients for chili, and Honey-Wheat is squirming up into her chair, which is pulled too close to the table. She is six years old and on four medications, which Sky glares at when Nadja sets them, in a multicolored pile, in front of the girl, so she can swallow them with some water crackers and juice.
Honey-Wheat is asking about where babies come from, and Nadja jumps in to say, motioning skyward, my little girl, babies come from above—that is why the clouds have many colors in them. She gets this out quickly because the truth will open the floodgate and then there will be questions she can never answer.
The Boy
About a year later, these woods do an amazing thing. It is a glazed, humid week, tornado warnings in all the counties. The sky is yellow-gray and the air so still your ears echo.
On the edge of the tree line appears a boy of about five. He is wild looking, with deep-set eyes, and he crouches in the brush. Nadja is putting down a fresh layer of mulch in the garden, and turns for the wheelbarrow when she spots him. She watches for movement, but he is as still as a boulder.