The Laws of Average
the laws of average
Praise for
The world in Trevor Dodge's
The Laws of Average
resembles a Donald Barthelme fever dream: a woman drives a Yukon Denali equipped with after-market rear and front-mounted surveillance cameras, so she can look both behind and ahead of herself at the same time, a lube both numbs the body and makes vigorous intimacy possible, a narrator takes James Frey and Oprah to task for introducing the concept that memoirs should have Terms of Service. With these stories, Dodge has managed to pull realistic fiction back from the brink of destruction.
The Laws of Average
is essential reading for anyone who wonders what happens next in the story of American Fiction after Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, and George Saunders.
âMatt Briggs
Though literature is usually the most conservative of art forms, a book sometimes appears that offers exciting, new possibilities. Trevor Dodge's
Everyone I Know Lives on Roads
is one of them: with the smooth surfaces found in new-painting, with the understated riffs of new-music, the stories collected here are as lean as they are savvy, as savvy as they are funny, as funny as they are connected to the thought, life and paths of our present moment.
âSteve Tomasula
The Laws of Average
Trevor Dodge
Dzanc Books
1334 Woodbourne Street
Westland, MI 48186
Copyright © 2014 Trevor Dodge
All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.
Published 2015 by Dzanc Books
A Dzanc Books r
E
print Series Selection
eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-941088-03-6
eBook Cover Designed by Matthew Warren
Author Photo by Wendy Peterson-Dodge
Published in the United States of America
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
.
Previous versions of these stories first appeared in the following publications, whose editors, staff and readers are way above average:
Altered Scale:
“13 Ways of Looking at Obscenity”
Dirty: Dirty:
“Lessons My Grandmother Taught Me”
Fat City Review:
“Siren”
Fiction International:
“Tonight on 48 Hours”
Gargoyle:
“Careless Whisper”
Golden Handcuffs Review:
“Fortress of Solitude”
Natural Bridge:
“Dear That Lane Bryant Girl”
Notre Dame Review:
“Ransom”
Perceptions:
“If Only”
Spilt Infinitive:
“Apartment M”
Submit Magazine:
“Always Driven to the End”
and “Proper[ty]”
Sleepingfish:
“Iota”
The Bacon Review:
“We Always Just Say Catastrophic”
Unfinished:
“Authorization Declined”
Western Humanities Review:
“Unsolicited Advice”
My sincerest thanks to these collaborators, conspirators, feedback loopers, life coaches and all around more-than-just-okay human beings who helped so much more than they should have or probably even knew:
Matt Briggs, Trista Cornelius, Mia DeBono, Bonnie Dodge, Jim Grabill, Kate Gray, Lily Hoang, Tawnya Knights, Sue Mach, Paul Montone, Andy Mingo, Dave Mount, Lance Olsen, Andi Olsen, Michael Sage Ricci, Ben Slotky, Tom Spanbauer, Matt Warren, Lidia Yuknavitch
For. Wendy.
siempre, siempre, y no importa lo que
You can't live and write at the same time
.
âAlison Bechdel
Discontent
When You're Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want
13 Ways of Looking at Obscenity
When You're Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want
Plausible Deniability: A Parable
When Youâ²re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want
We Always Just Say Catastrophic
When You're Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want
When You're Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want
When You're Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want
Lessons My Grandmother Taught Me
When You're Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want
When You're Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want
When You're Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want
When You're Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want
IS NOT MEASURED BY THE BREATHS YOU TAKE, BUT BY THE
moments
THAT
take your breath away
.
Unsolicited Advice
Upon finding yourself in a room with Them, low ceilings, and needing a fresh coat of paint, and one hands to another a firearm, and it is immediately apparent that they discussed handing this object off well in advance of right now, but quite obviously never contemplated discussing the particulars of such an exchange, if you were in the room at the time, in that situation, it is perfectly understandable that you feel panic. You must not do this. There are no specific suggestions or recommendations as to how you avoid this, by the way, only know that you must.
His uncle, the unconvicted child molester, wanted to go and didn't care that they wouldn't be spending any time together. All the nephew really knew and cared about was she would be there without parental supervision. Because she lived on the city's power grid and water system, she could walk to the open air stadium without much time or trouble. Because he was living on irrigation streams and a septic tank, he needed a ride.
The old Chevy pickup was a sorry sight to say the least, and even worse on the interior, with his uncle hunched over the cracked plastic steering wheel breathing through his teeth. The factory-installed upholstery had long given way, replaced by a matted quilt the nephew thought was once a pack blanket for his grandfather's mare, the one he'd hauled all the way to hunt moose in British Columbia in a thin sheet metal trailer which bounced dutifully behind his grandfather's power-stroked Ford. His uncle was his uncle by marrying his aunt, who was a decent enough bowler to go on self-financed tours to places like Cleveland and Buffalo and Kansas City but not nearly good enough to be on TV. This was just as well, really, because his aunt was the furthest thing from telegenic and had a bulbous pear-shaped body that earned her the nickname “Mudflaps” in the local Bowladrome, a name she turned to her advantage a surprisingly high number of times all things considered; a lot of the league guys found it nigh impossible to keep her gigantic ass out of their sleeping patterns. Mudflaps spent big swaths of her 30s and 40s flitting around like an awful butterfly in a trash heap. Her husband shared a little house with her on a state highway but little else. She hadn't let him touch her for a good decade at least, and he couldn't stand the thought of doing it anyway.
When he was forced to spend time in their presence, the nephew definitely preferred spending it with the uncle, which, of course, isn't at all saying he enjoyed the time. The first time he saw a porno mag was at their house, when his uncle handed him one.
“You like to
read, I
hear? Here, take a look at what
I'm
reading.”
The nephew flicked through the glossy pages, littered with couples sporting perms, handlebar mustaches and overgrown pubic hair, all of them in various stages of sexual congress, all of them paired up across the gender divide, mouths agape and eyes penetrating each other with intense stares.
“Gets your âlil pecker hard, don't it?”
The nephew was confused. There were no ciphers to interpret on the slick paper. His Hooked On Phonics program was totally worthless to him here; no clue what a “pecker” was, let alone what could/should/would make it “hard.”
He was 5.
That was 10 years ago, though, and through more visceral interactions than this one over the years, he grew into a fuller understanding what his uncle meant back then. But still, a story for another time.
The uncle pointed the Chevy towards a parking space and pulled all the way against the concrete berm. The engine sputtered to a stop and the nephew slid out the door. As he went to close it, his uncle barked for him to “lock âer up” by depressing the chrome-plated knob just below the window, which was stuck open at least a full fist's width at the top. The nephew didn't think twice and did what he was told. The uncle did the same on his side. They walked along a freshly-trampled ribbon of grass, an impromptu path making clear the fastest way from the parking lot to the stadium rising up, a massive tower of bleachers. The uncle pulled two dollar bills from the wallet chained into his belt loop. The nephew flashed his activities card, the one with his picture from the previous school year.
She was already waiting for him at the base of the concrete ramp which trickled into the bleachers, jeans cuffed and rolled tight against her calves, Keds impeccably matched to her lipstick red T-shirt screenprinted with the word “CUBS” in a fat white Helvetica font, sweatshirt strung around her hips and secured by its own intertwining arms, hair primly brushed and ribboned above her forehead, eyes radiating through the shamrock green contact lenses she'd been wearing nonstop all week and keeping shut behind her eyelids every night despite her optometrist's warnings.
She was, without question, The Most Beautiful Thing On The Planet.
She wore the two-toned necklace he'd given her, the one full of jags on the left hand side, a half-coin with half-heart and half-bibleverse stamped into it. She'd arranged it to lay perfectly flat against the top curve of her chest mere seconds before the nephew and his uncle walked between the chain-link posts and up to the ticket stand.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
She hooked her thumb under the gold-plated chain and gently jerked it up, cocking her eyebrows into her forehead as she did this. He didn't say anything, but thumbed the exact same luster and gauge of chain buried into the fold of his neck. A half-coin with dovetailing jags on the opposite side as hers surfaced from below the depths of his own red T-shirt, a hand-me-down ¾-sleeved prototype of the one she was wearing. He grimaced as the entire line of chain emerged at once, biting into his neck when he spun it around for her to get a good look.
She nodded her head and released her thumb, the pendant spilling back onto her shirt, a wide grin on her face as she laced his fingers between hers and yanked firmly on his arm.