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- - - - To order Robert Coover's Stepmother, click here.
Robert Coover: The Big Liberator Robert Coover is flame retardant. He can do the splits. Due to a botched plastic-surgery procedure, he has a lactating breast on the back of his head. Newborns clamor. He's sorta bulletproof (he uses gunpowder instead of salt). "It's, like, food as inoculation," he mumbles, with his mouth full. He's the straight-up definition of a heterodyne athlete (widely feared for his ladybug-style jujitsu and duck-duck-goose). He can strafe time, has on several occasions returned to his mother's womb, which he calls "the cafeteria." I've seen him bound, gagged, hooded, and thrown face-first from a helicopter into the ocean by malevolent government operatives. When he struck the water's surface, he bounced upward. Headbutted the helicopter out of the sky. He's often said he's a "Latino girl trapped in a Big White Male's body." His vertiginous thoughts hover above, in the shape of brooding clouds, or precision-guided birds. The vagina on his chest is strictly "hands off." As his student, I once stuffed a grenade in his mouth, and quickly duct-taped it shut, to no effect. He does an inimitable rain dance he calls the Crucifix Two-Step. He's a terrorist (in the most ebullient sense of the word). His prayers are gelatinous, and often arrive in the mouths of other people, disguised as a sneeze. Bless you. His head, when severed from his body, can be used as a kite, or as an indefatigable go-cart. He's the first man in history to give birth to a talking kitten. He's fought the widespread proliferation of myths of mass destruction—he's one of the Big-Ass Founding Mothers of modern fiction. And we, my fellow Americans, need him now more than ever.
- - - - Here are the first several pages of Robert Coover's Stepmother.
By Robert Coover Look at it this way, love, I tell her: no more slops to empty. I get no rise out of her, game as she is, my poor desperate daughter, her head is locked on one thing and one thing only: how to escape her inescapable fate. How many I've seen go this way, daughters, stepdaughters, whatever—some just turn up at my door, I'm never quite sure whose they are or where they come from—but I know where they go: to be drowned, hung, stoned, beheaded, burned at the stake, impaled, torn apart, shot, put to the sword, boiled in oil, dragged down the street in barrels studded on the inside with nails or nailed into barrels with holes drilled in them and rolled into the river. Their going always sickens me and the deep self-righteous laughter of their executioners causes the bile to rise, and for a time thereafter I unleash a storm of hell, or at least what's in my meager power to raise, and so do my beautiful wild daughters, it's a kind of violent mourning, and so they come down on us again and more daughters are caught up in what the Reaper calls the noble toils of justice and thus we keep the cycle going, rolling along through this timeless time like those tumbling nail-studded barrels. Of course, the child, naked and spread-eagled and shackled to the floor below me, expects me to get her out of this somehow. I'm a witch, I should be able to do something. And it's true, I do have a few tricks, though in general it's more useful to be thought a witch than to be one. An aura lingers on, accruing respect, but tricks are only tricks and they come and go. Magic rings and slippers are misplaced or stolen, unbreakable rods get broken, spells collapse for a fault in the grammar or a memory lapse. To which I'm increasingly given, as if my inborn malice were being mocked by my own particulates. Nevertheless, I've gotten in here only because I've been able to change into a bleating lamb and put her jailors in a trance. They're stupid boys, baa baa, a child could do it. But the trance won't last much longer, we only have a few minutes, and so far I've not been able to conjure up a way out of here. Not for a lack of effort. I've been at it since she got taken. First, I tried to turn the king into a frog so as to improve my negotiating position, but he only ended up with a rash of warts and a goutish temper. So then I sent him some sacks of gold to try to make my peace and buy her freedom, but magic gold has a way of fading to cinders while being counted and I've been told I am now in debt to the castle by that amount. I delivered a poisoned apple to the queen, who my poor daughter insists is her hateful and revengeful stepsister, one of them, but somebody nicked it and a kitchen boy was said to be poorly. I have nothing against kitchen boys and so sent another apple to make him well again, but the king appropriated this one to doctor his warts and let the boy die. I even borrowed Old Soldier's magic horn and tried to bring down the prison walls by blowing it at them, but I am short on musical gifts as everyone knows and only got pelted by garbage from the neighbors. And now I've recited a few incantations from the catechism, trying to pop her shackles, but they're of a make I haven't seen before and the old spells don't seem to work. I've rubbed her wrists and ankles with my warty thumb, trying to shrink them and so free her that way, but they're raw and I only made her cry. Time is running out for us, she'll die before the sun's down, and die horribly, unless I can stir the ashes in my old chimney and think of something. But it's clear she's losing confidence in me. When I arrived, I caught her praying to the Ogress, which goes against the family grain, though I could hardly blame her, that ruthless ghoul has a lot of heavy magic, or so they say, mother of the top dog among sorcerers and queen of a host of others, but she's so infuriatingly full of herself and a monster all the same, and I say, her magic be damned, may the shameless turkey-assed tyrant rot in hell. If there is one. And why not? No more unlikely than this pesthole. I warn my daughter. Stay away from the Ogress, I say, she only wants you dead. She's got a thing for corpses, always has had. She's a soul eater. I am running out of choices, mama. I am afraid. - - - - Robert Coover's Stepmother is available to order here.
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