Thursday, August 15th 2019 – I Have Not Pushed My Cuticles Back With An Orange Stick Since The Nixon Administration

[My mother] said, Beware when a man calls you angel. Every earthly thing you do will disappoint and enrage him.

– Kathy Fish, “I Have Not Pushed My Cuticles Back With An Orange Stick Since The Nixon Administration”

Kathy Fish is an extraordinary woman. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t encounter her work until the end of 2017, when she published “Collective Noun for Humans in the Wild,” an absolute gut-punch and something else you should read when you have time. Since then, I’ve dug greedily through everything else I can find online and enrolled in her Skillshare Flash Fiction class. This piece is, like all her work, so short and powerful; one of those sort of ominous moments when you connect all these things you’ve been told, how they come from who they come from and how they’re a cultural inheritance, in a way.

Read “I Have Not Pushed My Cuticles Back With An Orange Stick Since The Nixon Administration,” by Kathy Fish on Monkey Bicycle here. If you’re interested, buy a copy of Kathy’s collection, Wild Life: Collected Works 2003-2018 on her website.