Elizabeth Genovise

Elizabeth Genovise is Associate Fiction Editor of Solum Press. Her fiction has appeared in several dozen journals and has won numerous awards including the O. Henry Prize. She is the author of five collections of short stories, the most recent being Lighthouse Dreams from Passengers Press. Her first novel, Third Class Relics, is due out from Texas Review Press in 2024. Currently she teaches literature and creative writing to her community in east Tennessee.

an excerpt from “Meridian”

When I do sleep these days, my dreams are Ira’s electrons—a handful of particles trapped in a tiny vessel where they ricochet off the walls and crash into one another with nowhere else to go. When I’m not reliving those horrific few minutes with Sean Wakefield, I am dreaming the same triad of dreams, over and over. In the first, I am lying on my stomach in a patch of black, piney woods, balancing a shotgun against a rock. In the open field beyond the tree line are wolves — four or five of them gathered in a gash of moonlight, licking and ripping at the body of a buck who is not quite dead, his back hooves pawing hopelessly at the grass as tendons tear and bones snap. I sight the biggest of the wolves through the scope of the shotgun. My finger finds the trigger, carbon-dark and slick with sweat. The wolf’s head lifts from the deer’s guts and the moonlight is blue metal in the animal’s eyes. I can see the reams of blood between long, white teeth. I fire; the wolf collapses atop the mauled deer and the rest of the pack scatters. I walk into the field’s sudden silence and then I shoot the deer dead before I drag the wolf’s corpse into wakefulness. 

            The second dream is a surrealist painter’s fantasy, Mary Shelley’s wet dream. I am in a dark workshop knitting together silver-furred bits of wolf into a kind of doll — a pup with a pointed little face and perfect nose. It’s a gift for Alyce, but it’s not coming together right; my hands are shaking and the stitches are crooked. The creature purrs to life when I attach the tail and then it takes its first wobbly steps across the worktable’s surface. One leg is inches too short. One pointed velvet ear is turned backward. The tiny wolf falls in a heap and makes a pitiful mewling sound. I think, I cannot give this to Alyce. It’s too terrible.  But I can’t kill it either, this innocent creature with its tinsel fur standing on end and baffled eyes searching mine for an explanation.

            The third dream is actually a memory. Clyde and I are on our first real vacation together, before Alyce’s birth, and we’re driving down a lonely, ice-edged highway in Colorado. The Rockies on either side blush coral as the sun falls. We haven’t seen a town or another car in an hour. Then something quivers into view up ahead, wraithlike and silver in the snow. It’s standing in the dead center of the road. Clyde applies the brakes, murmuring a question. We come to a complete stop. It is a wolf standing there, perfectly erect and unafraid, his blue-green gaze locked on us. He doesn’t move. We don’t move. Clyde reaches out to stop the windshield wipers’ dance, as if afraid to break some delicate communion with the animal. The wolf watches us a moment longer and then trots left over the heap of snow curdled at the roadside and into a stand of green-black pines, where he vanishes. 

            Sometimes the order of the dreams varies. I see the mountain wolf, I kill it in the fields, I stitch it back to life. I sew the wolf together, I see it on the road, I shoot it from the woods. Each sequence is as terrible and right as the other. I don’t ask myself what it means. These are not physics I want to understand. 

Read more of Elizabeth’s work in Solum Journal Volume II and Solum Journal Volume III.

Listen to our interview with Elizabeth on Solum Podcast.