Four Corners

by

Krista Madsen

Four Corners is a novel set in squares — beds full of absence, pick-ups that never get anywhere, tables where food pulls people together and apart. Laur, the narrator, tries to write her own life by changing her name to Lore and extricating herself from home. Instead, she finds herself haunted by the ghosts of the barely living and the mostly dead — her mom, wasting away until her brain breaks; a literally larger than life father, who in death looms larger still; a twin brother, with whom she communicates internally in italics. Nuns tickle in the night, and a man named Johnny Crisis might mean escape.

ISBN, trade paper: 978-1-931982-52-8 price: ($14.95)

ISBN, library edition:978-1-931982-51-1  price: ($25.00)

Excerpt from the book:

The nuns are tickling me again.
    Baby smooth fingers, free of the marks of age or labor, graze my limbs in the night. Somehow track me down here in my City space where I thought God, destiny, guilt, squares, family could not reach me, even in dreams. The nuns come – in summon? reckoning? touch? – when I am too naked, too exhausted, to stop them. Fingers grazing just barely but just enough, their swallowed tongues murmuring primordial deep in their throats.
    I sleep naked. Perhaps the nuns, closet perverts surely, take this as an invitation. But, my habit of sleeping naked began long before the nuns, in a landlocked childhood when we awakened to the musty midsummers greased with sweat. My memory tends to ladle all past events between two soups: the age of eight and sophomore year in college, whether they happened then or not these are the portals through which I reenter the past, the two blood-colored years when time asserted itself and did its cleaving. Childhood, then: age of eight: Joe and I begged our Father to please buy an air conditioner like other people had so we too could sleep without wading through our own private swimming pools. His response, “Take some of your clothes off.” My brother and I, only feet apart in our parallel beds, ignoring the inevitable threat of our dog’s omnipresent tongue, shed our piss-pitted t-shirts under the sheets and spoke of the smell of chlorine and the whir of filters, fans, ice cream machines, the salted sea, never seen but imbedded in our inherited memories nonetheless.