Brian Allen Carr lives with his wife and daughter in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
An excerpt from his novel Edie & the Low-Hung Hands appears in Issue Forty Two of The Collagist.
Here, Brian Allen Carr answers interview questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Edie & and the Low-Hung Hands. Enjoy!
1. What is writing like?
I shrugged and picked up the cup and threw it back in a swift swallow, and as soon as it was down my throat my whole body seemed to glow inside. My arms went warm and my tongue went soft, and I felt like a child in a blanket, or like a bit of sap softened by sunshine, and my mind became a rattle, and the light became loose.
“What do you think?” the man from the road asked, but his voice seemed stretched in several directions, or spun on an axis, or dripped from a blue cloud and then caught in a wind. And when I opened my mouth, in attempt to answer, all that came out was breath not nearly baked right, because it couldn’t push the air from the world in front of me enough to become voice, and then many colors seemed to fold down on me, mostly through my eyes. I tried to move my arms, but they seemed to be across a river from me, and then I tried to stand, but the world seemed hung from me, the dirt floor an appendage that I couldn’t lift. Then there was laughter, slow and sugary and slathered with dull colored bird feathers, that lifted the edge of everything out of the corner of my eyes. Ah. There a blackness ensued. A desert of night. Perhaps I’d been fit into a shell.
2. What isn’t writing like?
But in my dreams those moments often cease to be. There is music gently somewhere. Perhaps there is a party. It’s for me, and there is cake. Light, soft as lullabies, bleeds in from a window. Balloons hover. Candles are lit. People sing my name. I hold my arms above me. There is a ceiling, but my hands are far from it. There’s my mother, but her breath is just plain sweet, not Sweet- Jane sweet, and she holds me to her. Maybe she says, “You make your mother and father proud,” and maybe my father says, “You’re my favorite son,” and Welder says, “I wish I looked as much like Dad as you do,” and then perhaps Edie, the young Edie, the Edie of the first time ever I saw her, dances toward me shyly with her hands held behind her. “I brought you a present,” she tells me, “I picked it out special.” And she produces a small box, wrapped in paper with a bow, “I’ll open it later,” I tell her, “Right now we should dance.” And then the rest of them will disappear, the way dreamt things often do, and we’d be in a small space all our own, nobody in sight of us, and we’d hold each other and move with a music that would speak to our souls, and in unison, and with grace. We’d be together.
3. When you do it, why?
“Your mother,” I told him, “was fat and smelly. She found my arms hideous, and I found her girth disgusting, but people told us we’d be perfect for each other, because I’d be the only person in town who could hold her, who could wrap my arms around her hut-thick frame, and it was a joke they’d all say to us, carrying along with laughter in their throats and hearts, pointing at us at socials, and giving us a hard time, and once, when we were somehow alone in the evening, and I was loose with liquor, I clutched her to me, and we laid in a hay bale, thrashed around nude, the smell stills hangs about me,” I waved the remembered stench from my face, and it was natural, I wasn’t teasing, “and that is how you came to be. Me, drunk. She, fat. My long arms wrapping the expanse of her and crashing her into me with thoughts of other more suitable women running my imagination. It lasted longer than I’d hoped for. She went off first. A quick comer. And I had to think of many things, on account of my drunkenness and my company, and she dried up in the endeavor, which didn’t help matters, because she became bored with the situation, and, in the quelling of the lust, again sick with disgust at the arms that laid upon her, the same arms you’ve been cursed with, she asked me, time and again, if I was close, and every time she spoke it seemed to knock me down a mountain, but, like Sisyphus, I endured, until the task was toward completion, but, unlike he, I achieved, though at the end I did not feel glorious. I didn’t get to the top of the mountain with my rock and feel successful. Instead, shame filled every molecule of my being, and I had to drink more, swallowing much liquor, trying to kill the brain cells that contained the memory of it, but, as you can see, I was not capable of the task.”
4. When you don’t, why?
When I was very young Welder would often find me while I played alone, and he’d throw a blanket over my head and hold me down so I could not move. I thought of this as I trailed Pahnder on my own horse. He rode with purpose, and I knew he needed away from the thoughts he’d just had. His thoughts, though, birthed thoughts in me. Welder would hold my head in the fold of a pink quilt and lean his weight on me, and keep me so I could not move, and I would thrash and claw, throwing all of my energy into each movement I made, trying to kick him off me. I’d scream, and Welder would laugh. Often this was done in front of my parents. They would see my struggle and laugh along with Welder. My father would entice him. “He’s getting loose,” my father might say, “hold him tight now.” My mother’s cackle always came through the quilt the cleanest, and, as I laid there with my head in the dark, and with the weight of my brother upon me, it was she I hoped to kill first when I escaped, but I could never thrash Welder from me. I’d always go limp, and my father would grow concerned, and he would hoist my brother off of me when he realized I might suffocate. They’d pull the blanket from my head, and my mother would look straight at me, her drunken face like a smudge of hate. “Got some growing up to do,” she’d say to me. “Your brother’s a man already,” she’d say. Then, “Come hug your mother, little boy.”
