Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors shed light on their recently released books by comparing them to weird things. This week Erin Stalcup writes about And Yet It Moves, her debut story collection just published by Break Away Books/Indiana University Press.
If And Yet It Moves were a cat it would be Schrödinger’s.
If And Yet It Moves were Einstein’s daughter, she would be alive.
If And Yet It Moves were a woman, she wouldn’t smile on command.
If And Yet It Moves were ghostwritten, it would be by a female physicist.
If And Yet It Moves were a baby, she would be born with teeth.
If And Yet It Moves were a Marxist, it would be vulgar.
If And Yet It Moves were an empire, it would decolonize.
If And Yet It Movess were a lament, it would be for raped women and black and brown and Native men killed by cops and for murdered queer people and for suicide and for everyone who wants too much.
If And Yet It Moves were a praise, it would be for intimacy between strangers and for everyone who wants too much.
If And Yet It Moves were light it would be ultraviolet.
If And Yet It Moves were a color it would be the periwinkle of lightning.
If And Yet It Moves were a smell it would be petrichor.
If And Yet It Moves were a movement it would be anti-violence and By Any Means Necessary.
If And Yet It Moves were a painting it would be the lightbulb—the bombilla—in Picassos’ Guernica.
If And Yet It Moves were a bird it would be a Bohemian Waxwing, Bombycilla garrulous.
If And Yet It Moves were a flower it would be heliotrope.
If And Yet It Moves were an element, it would be helium, the first in the noble gas group in the periodic table, which floats.
If And Yet It Moves were to die it would want Sky Burial.
If And Yet It Moves were a marriage it would be at a drive-thru wedding chapel in Vegas, surrounded by neon.
If And Yet It Moves were a baseball player, it would be David Ortiz.
Erin Stalcup’s fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Sun, H_NGM_N, Hobart, PANK, and elsewhere. Find out more at erinstalcup.com.
