Severance: Stories
Robert Olen Butler
Language: English
Pages: 264
ISBN: 0811856143
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes after decapitation. In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. Inspired by the intersection of these two seemingly unrelated concepts, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler wrote sixty-two stories, each exactly 240 words in length, capturing the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person's mind after their head has been severed. The characters are both real and imagined Medusa (beheaded by Perseus, 2000 BC), Anne Boleyn (beheaded at the behest of Henry VIII, 1536), a chicken (beheaded for Sunday dinner, Alabama, 1958), and the author (decapitated, on the job, 2008). Told with the intensity of a poet and the wit of a great storyteller, these final thoughts illuminate and crystallize more about the characters' own lives and the worlds they inhabit than many writers manage to convey in full-length biographies or novels. The stories, which have appeared in literary magazines across the country, are a delightful and intriguing creative feat from one of today's most inventive writers.
lily-of-the-valley and if you wait I am amber and patchouli and vanilla and he puts his face in my hair and he breathes in and he says how sweet LE VAN KY Hue city official, beheaded by North Vietnamese troops, 1968 blossoms floating on the Perfume River plumeria and mango and lychee the water itself smelling of mountain flowers even after the blossoms have eddied away I drag my hand in the river my father pulling at the oar and he says my name sharply Ky and I take up my own oar again and
let the men turn their own eyes away for my sake, but behind us are the nine mosques that have risen from the earth and their veined walls are beneath our feet, the desiccated road, for father takes us east to a purer love of Allah, and his back is to me—no—he has turned round, in Nigeria, I am nearly a woman, the veil drops upon my face, he whispers that I live now where the road has ended on the cliff’s edge and if I lift this thing between me and the world I will lose my balance and fall to my
the hollow of her ankle her sacral dimples each holding a tiny shadow as she sleeps in the morning light that slides beneath the shade, unawares she has sloughed off the toga of bedclothes the long indent of her spine bared and those dimples I put the tip of my tongue in one and she stirs, my wife, her shoulders her tall knuckles the lift of her arm the hollow beneath I put my face there and she bats at my ear I’m not fresh she says, it’s you I say, kissing this hidden place, the round forward
hair a fiery crown I am your king he says, and it is dark again and I lift my eyes to a body torn Jesu Christi the bread on my tongue I eat my king ANNE BOLEYN Queen of England, beheaded after the displeasure of her husband, King Henry VIII, 1536 tiny and gray is the boy and I am undone, him being no living boy and no heir to my husband, though I hold his body close and I am breathless with love for him, and the next is merely a lump of blood between my legs and he was my last chance to
beheaded by Queen Elizabeth 1, 1587 dark abrupt the bite at my neck gone, sweet Jesus I say the bite fierce upon me, my breath snarled somewhere in my chest I wait silent, my sweet Geddon inside my petticoat lays his furry throat into the bend behind my knee, the cold of the stone rises to me, hands pressing my shoulders, a veil of Corpus Christi cloth descends before my eyes, words appear about forgiveness and innocence and they are from my mouth though they might as well be from a separated