She surrendered completely to the river’s whim, formless and spinning as if a tangled knot of rootless weed. Only her heels, the blades of her shoulders, and the bloodless mounds of her buttocks broke through the water’s surface. A thin cotton gown, near invisible against her sallow skin, floated about her waist like the translucent flesh of a jelly fish. I will never finish this story.
Yesterday I sat in Norman Mailer’s recliner while I edited my novel. To a recliner one ass is as good as another.
I have never been so long without seeing my children.
The most beautiful woman in Provincetown works at a souvenir shop on Bradford Street. I now possess more souvenirs of my stay here than I shall ever want or need.
No writer of fiction will ever attain his goals.
I would rather be a whale than a sailor, despite the loss of legs and access to television.
Never do people add more frivolous detail than when describing the time they met someone famous.
I briefly considered getting a tattoo of a giant squid, until a kind young woman warned me from a distance it might look like a penis.
I have met more bearded ladies here in Provincetown (four) than I ever encountered in all the Tri-County Fairs of my youth.
Each Monday I mailed my son a piece of candy.
I fell in love three times on the ferry ride over from Boston.
Norman dreamed of a woman with bright red hair floating in the seagrass. The smooth, white underbelly of a fattened fish.
Over an eight day period I got poison ivy, a shin bone contusion, an attack of pancreatitis, and lost the filling from my incisor tooth. Only one of these can I blame on eating Red Hots.
From the wealth of glances I receive downtown, I believe I would have made a magnificent bear.
Lighthouses lose their luster when you realize they are automated.
The Celtics will break your heart.
At 2:18pm on June 4th, 2012, I saw the ghost of Norman Mailer arguing with his own reflection in the bathroom mirror.
When you are alone this long you write to people you should not write, and you say things you should not say.
The cemetery on Winthrop Street is too beautiful and haunting to overlook the Shop & Save. Its edges should dissolve into clouds, or the sea.
Often life doesn’t even seem worth killing oneself over.
I dream of my baby daughter’s big, warm head nuzzled next to mine.
I fear this ocean is bottomless and that Lucifer lurks in its bowels.
There is something charming about seeing a copy of Old Yeller nestled among the many books of Mailer’s personal library.
Tell a woman you’re a logger, and she’s all kinds of impressed. Clarify you said blogger, and not so much.
I pray there is no Heaven. This is enough. More than enough.
Cape Cod is a dull and discordant name. Truro is worse. But Provincetown and Plymouth are as lyrical as they come.
A young woman arrives at the preacher’s door in the driving rain. She holds an infant. A boy. His bastard son. The preacher’s wife suspects. Months later the child’s mother will watch from the shore as the preacher carries their son into the river to be baptized. The preacher drowns the child. His petite empire is preserved. This story is like pennies in my pocket, waiting to be lost in the wash.
Grant Jones is a Fiction Fellow at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. He has recently completed his first novel, Annabelle, and is hard at work on his second, Blind Tigers, on the subject of moonshine and baseball in the early decades of the 20th century.
Karen Martin is a writer of short fiction and an editor. She originates from South Africa, where she has lived in the countryside outside Johannesburg for the past fifteen years. She is presently a Cornelia Carhart Ward Fellow in the creative writing MFA programme at Syracuse University. She is using her fellowship at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony this summer to complete her first collection of short fiction.
The Mailer Fellowship Blog 