Oh hai, it’s the first post in our new monthly section called “Reader’s Pick”!!! I was trying to think of a creative birdy-type name like “From the Nest” or “Great Egg-spectations,” but literally every idea I have sucks. If I can think of something I’ll change it. But for the time being it’s called “Reader’s Pick,” and it goes something like this:
At the close of our winter contest, we quickly realized the strength of our submissions and it seemed unfair that only one person in each category would receive publication. We racked our brains for tens of minutes until professor (of realness) Roy Pérez suggested we run some of them on our blog. SO once a month, each of the six readers will present their favorite unpublished winter contest submission right here!
This is what Lauren Wilkinson had to say about CJ Hauser’s short story, “Who Cooks for You?”
“I liked this story for a lot of reasons. It’s very birdsongy–weird & wonderful, simple & magical. The scene on the deck is beautiful &, I think, pretty close to perfect. And gawd, after all those years of seeing your mom as MOM, then realizing she’s sort of as weird and fucked-up as you are (so THAT’S where you got it from)– it’s sort of sad but also sort of quietly nice, just like this story. Right? #projecting?”
CJ Hauser, “Who Cooks for You?”
My mother loved birds. Back in Connecticut we heard the mourning doves when we woke up (oo-waoh) and the barred owls dolefully hooting at night. Sometimes she’d point out an owl, sleeping in the hollow of a tree, the hole seemingly stuffed with fluff. All this was fine till she started hooting at them. She’d stand out on our wrap-around deck and hoot and hoot, trying to call the owls down. I gave her a lot of shit for that. I said she was going to turn into the crazy bird lady of Mystic, but she kept at it. I got looks, a mix of pity and disgust from our neighbors. From the cigar-smoking ones, the compulsive laundry-drying ones, and especially the just-clearing-sticks-from-my-yard-which-is-the-thinnest-damn-excuse-for-spying-ever ones. But fuck all of them. Did they want to take care of her?
One night, she slid open the glass door, her body set against the black, and said, “Pssst, Quinn, come here. Pssst, pssst.”
I went out into the dark, into the spring cold, and stood on the deck with my hooting mother. She was barefoot and wore a white nightgown. It was the kind with cut outs at the bottom and a hem that swirled around her ankles as she paced about the deck, calling between cupped hands hoo, hoo, hoo hoo.
“It’s Who Cooks For You,” she said. “That’s what it sounds like. Their calls. Who cooks for you!” So I sat on the deck railing, feet dangling like a child as I smoked through half a pack of cigarettes while my mother continued hooting about who cooked for whom. Then, dead silently, this owl the size of football, bigger, came and perched on a branch not three feet from the deck. He had drag queen eyes that owl, rimmed in black, with a weird filmy lid that slid back and forth instead of blinking and a white mask like a ven diagram. His head sat densely on his chest, no neck to speak of, and he did not so much cock his head as rotate it around and hoot, Who Cooks for You? The strong yellow curve of his beak barely parted when he said it, but she was right. My mother in the moonlight, her white nightgown bright in the dark, the soft bulge of her freckled arms exposed to the air, was right. This owl was asking a question.
I thought about my answer. Who cooks for you? Is that like, who does your dirty work? Or is it more like, who loves you? One of my mother’s favorite expressions used to be, can’t it be both? She resolved all manner of crises this way. I think that was the case with who cooks for you. That it might mean both of those things.
CJ Hauser is a spinner of yarns and writer of fiction who lives with the Trout Family of writers in Brooklyn,New York. Her fiction has appeared in The L Magazine, The Brooklyn Review, The Laurel Review and The Kenyon Review. She believes that New York is the best possible place to grow a story and is currently at work on a novel about fishing towns, taxidermy, and love. www.cjhauser.com