University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 5-8-2015 Maybe Mermaids and Robots Are Lonely: 40 Stories and a Novella Matthew ogF arty University of South Carolina - Columbia Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Fogarty, M.(2015). Maybe Mermaids and Robots Are Lonely: 40 Stories and a Novella. (Master's thesis). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/3061 This Open Access Thesis is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MAYBE MERMAIDS AND ROBOTS ARE LONELY 40 STORIES AND A NOVELLA by Matthew Fogarty Bachelor of Arts University of Michigan, 2001 Juris Doctorate Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, 2006 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2015 Accepted by: David Bajo, Director of Thesis Elise Blackwell, Reader Ed Madden, Reader J. Alexander Ogden, Reader Lacy Ford, Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies © Copyright by Matthew Fogarty, 2015 All Rights Reserved. !ii ABSTRACT Maybe Mermaids and Robots are Lonely comprises 40 stories and a novella all set in or around Detroit and featuring figures that have become almost legendary in American culture. Stories in the collection range in form from a more traditional, if quirky, realism to a somewhat more ethereal or slipstream or magical realism. In the title story, for example, we meet a pair of star-crossed lovers, a robot and a mermaid, who must find a way to bridge their different worlds. "Rollo is Rollo" is a more realist play on the Cain and Abel, good brother-bad brother story. There's an Andre the Giant story and a Bigfoot story. A story about an aging flower child as she tries to fight off disease. A story about a young moonman who's crash landed on earth and seeks safety in the arms of a wolfgirl. Stories featuring popes and pirates and Elvis. And in the last story of the collection, a short novella, we see a family torn in the churn of aging industry in a failing city and in the city's rebirth as it struggles back from the zombie apocalypse. While magic doesn't always exist in the worlds of these stories, the characters often perceive some magic in their worlds, just as we often see magic in ours. In particular, there's a special kind of magic threaded throughout the collection, a magic unique to life in the suburbs. In all their safety and sterility, the suburbs -- the not city and the not country, the middle-class households with two working parents -- there is some kind of magic that helps pass the afternoon time before everyone gets home from work. !iii These stories attempt to render the world as we perceive it, which is somewhat different and more interesting (and perhaps more important to the times we live in) than traditional realism. In these stories, time collapses. Days turn on weather and modes of transportation. Water interrupts. Always, somewhere just out of reach, there's something we're supposed to want that seems better than what we have. And yet there's something just as (if not more) special here in the places we call home. !iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ...........................................................................................................................iii CHAPTER 1: MAYBE MERMAIDS AND ROBOTS ARE LONELY: 40 STORIES AND A NOVELLA ......................................................................................1 !v CHAPTER 1 MAYBE MERMAIDS AND ROBOTS ARE LONELY: 40 STORIES AND A NOVELLA Maybe Mermaids and Robots are Lonely 1 And just because his skin is steel doesn't mean he feels nothing. Maybe they're at a beach and she's in with the tide. Or maybe they're at the tops of skyscrapers, a city between them and all they can see is each other: her with the curls that fall in a tangle over her shoulders and the dress that drapes her fins, him with the earnestness of a logic board. Wherever it is they find each other, he has to believe in the possibility because if this isn't possible, what is? Maybe they have coffee or a drink. She's intelligent, passionate about the oceans. He's funny. She touches his arm and there's a spark. Maybe later they're at his factory afterhours. In the breakroom, he finds salt and a jug of water. She lies by his favorite socket. He's barrel-chested, cylinder limbs heated drunk with the coursing energy of her. She's an electrical drug; her lips tap his circuit veins. He says, "I'd rust for you." She says, "You leave me breathless." Her grip is firm. His alloys green her clamshell breasts. !1 2 Maybe it’s morning then and maybe they're still at the factory when the first shift comes in. Or maybe they woke early. Maybe they're already at the shore among schools of surfers. There's sand in his hinges; he feels unplugged. She says she has to go back. She says, "I wish you could come with me." And maybe that's it. He just lets her go. Maybe his heart is a heat sink, a dull organ that shields his mainframe from her glow. Or maybe it's clockwork, his heart, and maybe there's a screw that's twisted, a gear that slows. His LED eyes fade. There's an electric tear. "I can't," he says. A wave flows in and she ebbs out with it. 3 At the factory, he ratchets parts on the line, his hard drive looping that last image -- her arms extended, hair trailing behind, the flip of a fin as she dives under, her wake shimmying the fiberglass boards. Maybe that's when his memory sees a surfer shedding a wetsuit. In the closet, there are sheets of silicone rubber, bottles of glue and sealant, spools of thread. He lays them over a worktable, looms it all into the shape of him, his metal hands mechanical, methodical. If he could sweat, he'd wipe his brow. The moon sets in the high factory window. !2 4 At the beach, his pincers clamp at the sleeves, fit the wetsuit over his tin-can body. He goes awkwardly into the water, the cool of it fogging the plastic he's sewn in to see. His metal body buoys. He flails. He wonders whether robots can drown, or maybe she's forgotten him. Or maybe he's in the wrong ocean or maybe it's all just fantasy and she doesn't exist. Maybe this is what happens in the night when the factory is closed and it's dark: idle robots dream of mermaids. Or that's when she catches him, thrashing for life, fishhooks her arms under his. Maybe he says, "I'm not programmed to swim," and she smiles, takes his gloved hand, says, "Then don't let go." A Monster for Always That night there were frostquakes and thundersnow and the whole house shook and swayed like bombs were dropping, like an army was down the street clearing houses the way we've seen it happen in movies. In fact out the front window we saw cop lights, blue and red swivels patrolling the neighborhood, looking, we guessed, for the Snow Man we were hiding in the shed out back. Meghan said, If they come to our house we can't say anything because they'll take him away from us and do all sorts of tests on him and stuff. We were in the front sitting room we never used, ducked below the windowsill so no one on the street could see us and only every once in a while sitting up to look out. I didn't know any better at the time !3 so I just said, I know, and sat back up to see whether the police car had turned down our street. He had, and I ducked again under the red and then the blue as the lights took turns crossing through the window. They think he's a monster, she said. That's what the papers were calling him, anyway -- the Snow Monster. But really he was just a man, or at least an animal no different from a bear or our dog, Sitka, and we'd never call Sitka a monster except for the times she'd get into the garbage while we were gone. Even then, she was just impatient and wanted us to get home and you can't really blame something for needing its people. Meghan and I were out in the forest near our house when we found him. It's not a big forest -- just a square block in the middle of our subdivision -- but when you're in it it seems like it goes for miles. The trees were all bare and sick-looking and there were thin trails of white snow piled on the branches from the last time it had snowed. School was off and we'd decided we wanted to make a movie that day. We'd thought up a story about two adventurers lost out in the middle of a big woods and making all sorts of discoveries. The trees there are all pretty thick and I was trying to shake the trunks to make the snow fall, to make it look like it was snowing, for the camera. But it wasn't working; they were too thick to move.