It wasn’t my mother's prejudice regarding her potential adopted offspring that struck me; it was this racism infecting my adoption origin story. She hadn’t waited years and years for me because there was some baby shortage in our small Midwestern town. She had waited to adopt because she wanted an "all white" infant girl.
“Write me an erotic story about Batman and the Queen of England. Bonus points if you get the Queen’s corgis in there somehow.” “Write me a story about a backpacker whose dying wish is a tiramisu cupcake.” “Write me a meet-cute about Cthulhu and a woman at a bar in the style of Charles Bukowski.” I say yes. Of course I say yes -- I’m the man sitting under the tree with a typewriter. In…
This is the story you’ve been told: you walked at nine months, ran at ten, and by eleven were doing somersaults upon somersaults until you collapsed red-faced from the motion, but most of all from the giggling.
Hunger is the beginning of every story. It might not be the most literal sort of hunger, but there is always something wanted, what the folklorist Vladimir Propp summed up as “lack.” There is something missing--to get the shivers, to find a lost brother, to make a solemn princess laugh, to have a child-- and by the end of the story, that absence is satisfied-- the lack is “liquidated.”
