on “The Letters,” first published in Best American Erotica in 1996

“The Letters” is the first story I ever wrote. I was thirty-seven, I’d signed up for an erotic writing workshop; I needed something to show.

Had I known the piece would eventually be published, anthologized, audiotaped, and, and reanthologized…I would have done things just the same, but with less anxiety.

I say this, because it was at that time that I inaugurated my tradition of painful, slow production, and insanely perfectionistic revision that my editors find so, uh, endearing.

Reading “The Letters” now, I’m pleased to find that many phrases, even whole sentences, still resonate. I’m not sure I could jerk off to it (my main criterion for erotica), but others have. Megan feels real. There’s humor and heat; it’s got a plot: I’m satisfied.

The Desires of Houses

Haddayr Copley-Woods

The woman’s step on the stair is labored, and the cord hanging at the bottom trembles with excitement.

Her hands are busy carrying laundry. She will have to turn on the light with her mouth.

In the dark, to find the cord correctly, she must caress it with the tip of her pink tongue briefly, and the wicked, wicked pleasure of it more than makes up for the bite and the sharp jerk that turns on the bulb.

The cord over the washing machine, the braided one, is waiting joyously for the teeth.

The floor is sulking. She almost always wears shoes in the basement, and the cement lies all day in agony listening to the first floor’s boards sighing loudly in ecstasy at the touch of her bare heels.

All it can hope for in its slow, cold way is that the woman will scoop the cat boxes, squatting on her heels, after she starts a load of laundry. Today, oh joy oh joy, she does. The floor is practically writhing at the smell of her (she always showers after the scooping, so her scent is thick)—the tangy rich odor. The cement feels (or maybe it’s just wishful thinking) just a bit of her damp warmth.

But then she is sweeping the floor, oblivious as always to the swooning house around her, ruining the floor’s pleasure with the horrible scented litter she sweeps up and tosses back in the box.

She yanks open the dryer, who feels violated and then guilty for enjoying it, dumps the hot, panting shirts and shorts into a basket, and heads back upstairs, carefully turning off the lights to avoid the lecture about electricity the man will give her later if she doesn’t. Even minutes later, the cords are still shaking in the darkness.

She folds the clothes neatly and quickly, then smooths each piece with her hand. It’s hard to say who enjoys this the most—the shirts or the table she presses them upon—and then the man is knocking on the kitchen door.