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Informationen zum Autor Dawn Raffel is the author of five books, most recently The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies. Other books include two short story collections, a novel, and a memoir. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including NOON, BOMB, Conjunctions, Exquisite Pandemic, New American Writing, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, and more. Klappentext Elise, a young woman with a mysteriously ill son, returns to her childhood home years after running away with a lover. Now destitute, she begins to search for an object hidden somewhere in the house, which has been in a state of disrepair since her mother's untimely death. Her father, who fled political terror in in his youth, is frail and often dreaming. So it falls to Elise's older sister, who has never left home, to maintain family order. Unraveled by alcohol and her own longing for escape, "Aunt," as Elise's sister is simply known, is further disturbed by the child's illness and his mother's irresponsibility. To placate the child, she turns to the bedtime tale of the Three Little Pigs, which becomes increasingly corrupted with each telling. As Aunt struggles to take care of the child, she recalls -- with a mixture of jealousy and resentment -- the day her sister left home. Meanwhile, Elise continues her search, with consequences that will alter Aunt's life irrevocably.A writer of "obvious and extreme talent" (Los Angeles Times), Raffel uses starkly beautiful, stunningly precise language to etch this compelling portrait of a family torn apart by longing, miscommunication, and misdirected love. Meticulously crafted and utterly absorbing, Carrying The Body is ultimately about the inescapable emotional legacies passed from generation to generation, and our dreams of refuge and release. Chapter One: Late The child had a rash across the chest, a fearsome swath of color -- infection, the aunt thought, bred of the child. Mold on dough. Blood mold. Why, look at the child, just look at the child! -- dripping, it seemed, the irises fluid -- red in the nose, the cheeks, pale belly as if risen; and there in an indolent fist, a bulbous, sucked-on toy in the likeness of some sort of life-form. "What, this?" said the mother. "This?" It was only the weather, the mother said, the heat, this rash. The sight of her, the aunt thought: wan unironed sister in the light. The hand a fleshy visor. Useless. To have traveled like this, with the heat and with the child, in the festering light, no bags but bags, the aunt observed, brown paper gone to pulp, as if juice had leaked or milk had leaked or sodden, fungal diapers; and clothes spilling over the tops of the bags, such clothes you could scarcely imagine, or not quite imagine, slack-hemmed, rayon, secondhand, the aunt supposed, with rounds of stain below the arms, a bra strap dingy as unrinsed teeth. "I have never..." the aunt said. "Never mind." The platform was empty. The train had been late. The child lacked a shirt. "Up," he said. He looked at her: aunt, tall stranger, relation. There he stood with bare, afflicted chest -- arms held out, toy held out, offered to her, beseeching her, and yet, the aunt thought, there was something familial and hard about the brow. "Here," she said. "I'll lend a hand." She took a bag. Her dress began to dampen. "Shall we?" she said. "Shall we hasten?" she said, and her sister -- a touch, a breast, a way of moving, Mama to the child, Elise her name -- said yes. They walked. The child toddled. The tracks were beside them. "James," said the mother, Elise, for the child had come into possession of things -- a pebble, twig, a splinter. "Jim," she said. A berry. "Baby," she called him. Poison? "Drink?" she said, and lifted him (one-armed, muscled, the aunt saw) squalling to a hip. The wonder the toy not lost.<...
