“Do you think so? I thought it was the truth.”

“Babies die.”

“Yes.”

“We all die.”

“It’s not the death, it’s the pain.”

“Pork fat.”

“Have some toast.”

“I’m going to send you down Greek honey.”

“If you’re finished with the bacon pass it over here.”

“Why don’t you do something about these poor damned fish?”

I’ve just been out to the kitchen for my day’s supplies. I fed the fish. I have the cookie jar and a quart of milk. Two detective novels. The bed is still warm from my night’s sleep. I shall have a rich sluttish day and tomorrow I’ll clean house and ask at the pound about cats. Or there’s that white brute at the butcher’s. They always drown her litters anyway. If I took one of her next batch it wouldn’t do any harm. We could play out a cartoon tableau, the cat and the fish and I. Still, I don’t know if I’m ready for a warm-blooded creature yet. Would a cat eat a toad?

EDITOR’S NOTE

Naomi Huffman

For years I’ve kept multiple copies of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love around; right now three editions sit on my bookshelf, and one in the seat pocket of my car. Each time I read it, I am stunned by Dunn’s singularly depraved imagination and her don’t-give-a-fuck swagger, how her sentences strut across the page.

After her death from lung cancer in 2016, my interest in Dunn became insatiable. I read everything I could about her. I’d initially assumed Geek Love was her only book, the single pearl of a dark and brilliant imagination, but then I learned about Attic and Truck, the novels she published twenty years before Geek Love. I devoured them and still wanted more. In the online catalog of Dunn’s archive, at the Aubrey R. Watzek Library at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where Dunn once taught creative writing, I found a list of several short stories I’d never read. Most of them were published in the 1990s in small, now-defunct journals, which explains why they’d eluded my initial search. Editions of these journals were nearly impossible to find online, so I wrote to the staff at Lewis & Clark College and crossed my fingers. Within a few days, I received an email from Zach Selley, the associate head of special collections at the Watzek Library. He sent me images of the original handwritten and typewritten pages. Reading them, I was reminded what it is like to sit in the magnetic field of Dunn’s imagination, to be jolted by her voice.