American Soma
a So New Publishing Book

"Guz is an innovative, witty, imaginative writer. Her stories are carefully structured—some as flash, some as letters, and some as longer stories—and powerfully executed, full of provocative images and meticulously detailed explanations."
-- Catherine Harrison, JMWW

Read the whole review here:
http://jmww.150m.com/Guzrev.html

No asteroid collided with Earth. Humans did not fall victim to the post-impact atmospheric fluctuations alleged to have slain the dinosaurs. Instead, we evolved to become something entirely different. We developed and adapted, as there were certainly other factors, not detected by the era’s scientists that contributed to our new physiological morphology. If one were to suspend themselves over the great family tree of man, which begins with the Australopithecines, one might feel fortunate that we did not halt in our development as did the branches a. robustus and a. boisei.

There was certainly every indication that humans would stop reproducing and would die out as the early hominids had done. Men’s capacity to produce egg proteins and egg cells had increased in direct proportion to their failure to manufacture sperm. And it appeared that this phenomenon would continue. Without seed, there could be no babies. But there were. There were babies in great profusion, thanks to fertility shots, to scientifically harvested spermatozoa, to the unwitting chemical enhancements brought to women in their processed yogurt, their veal cutlets, their grilled chicken and pan-seared tuna. The resulting male children all manifested an enhancement of the traits that had made their fathers so different. Even female babies began to show signs of gender dysfunction.

From "Not Very from the Tree":

Later, with the old man, there was a modest amount of tactical proximity. This controlled, but demonstrative intimacy had more purpose and meaning than any of her more openly sexual encounters with boys from school. Sometimes, she sat recklessly on his wheelchair as he was perched in it, bird-like and brittle-boned. She tickled his bald head, twirled the little white strands, which lay, flaccid and silken, across its eggshell surface, and asked him in a little-girl voice to tell her that she was his favorite dancer. She guided his bony hand to one rather expansive breast and, again throwing her voice up several octaves to sound no older than eight, ask: “You’ll always, always take care of me, won’t you, Pawpaw? I don’t know how your Baby will ever make it all alone.” Occasionally, she felt his pitiful endeavors to ascend begin in the crotch of his Harris Tweed, but she need only poke him in the ribs or in the neck for it to harmlessly deflate. It always felt like an accident, that poke, but it surely happened every time.

Periodically, there were tears. Never from him, always from her. But they were the squint-eyed and waterless kind, crocodile tears. After she left, he often sat for long periods in a bemused catatonia, and then, eventually, began asking for his lawyer, mumbling something about his will and that lovely, lovely girl. So enthralling. Makes a man feel again. And he was happy, at this point, to feel anything at all, be it no more than the weight of her bottom on his buckling knees.

To see the girl in photographs a few years later, one initially expected that she was smart and fiery, that, perhaps, her internal architecture was complicated and intricate, that she possibly spoke Delphic predictions. Surely one would think that the sophistication of the spirit determined a person’s physical appearance. But she barely knew that Los Angeles was part of California. She confused camels with horses. She could add numbers repeatedly and never get the same solution twice. Still, the directness of her gaze beneath those dark eyebrows and tumble of platinum hair, the way she seemed to look skeptically at the glowing center of the viewer’s soul in her photographs, made it all forgivable. Certainly this woman has depth, if not intellect. She has edges, beautiful and sharp. Look! You can see them in the photos.

Among her friends, she remembered how quick they were to embrace their mortality. With some, their faith in their own heroic abilities caused them to believe they could escape anything. They lived with such convexity in space and time, wanting to be known by everyone who orbited their microcosm. And all the while, they ran with their heads down, concentrating on a sprint towards dark obscurity. It was, she supposed now, chic to disdain and squander that which you had so much of. We have time. Loads of time. The whole future is ahead of us. We will look back and say, remember how we use to raise hell. Remember?

Natalie was thirty-two now, years distant from that dining hall conversation. Yet, it played and replayed in her mind, its edges as crisp and as sharp as if it had happened the day before. She wondered if that boy was still alive, still proselytizing about the proper way to go, or if he had assumed a life like everyone else—if he shaved each morning and then reported to a desk at which he made client calls and analyzed spreadsheets. More likely though, he was on the street, stung out on something he could not afford, spitting his teeth onto the sidewalk and cradling a rib cracked in a struggle over a ten dollar bill.

Natalie’s own youthful convexity had, over the last few years, grown more and more unconvincing. She felt a dismal insignificance descending on her, and her convexity’s edges began to curl inward in response. In the shower one morning, she realized that she feared so many things now, things she had never been afraid of before, things she had once barreled into with such enthusiasm. Little parts of her were dying. She mentally touched her sense of purpose, cautiously feeling for its response. It quivered uncertainly and ached with emptiness.