Mistakes I Made
by Pamela Painter
My new shrink wants me to talk about mistakes I made. He doesn’t use the word “mistake” but I know that’s what he wants to hear when he asks me to think about the past. I’m flat on my back in water-boarding position on a most uncomfortable chaise. It is our first appointment. I close my eyes, communing with my mistakes. Mistakes that bring me to tears. Not men, pets.
I tell my new shrink that as a child I was forbidden to have pets. All my friends had pets. My cousins had pets. I used to visit their pets. Then after college, I had pets. The three kittens were my first obvious mistake that morphed into two litters I didn’t have the heart to give away or drown. I moved out and didn’t leave a forwarding address. I think about those tiny cats. I tell him the fish were boring, but easy. I took them into the office. But the snake. Whatever was I thinking when I walked out of the pet store with a Ball Python the size of John Wayne’s belt. I knew immediately that it was a mistake. I refused to name it, unwilling to allow even simple syllables to give it definition, before I returned it to the Pet Store and its dinner supply of mice. I hear the tears in my voice as I remember the parrot whose lush voice was that of Maria Callas, except for all her toxic swear words. Here, tears spring to my eyes.
I sit up abruptly, swing my feet to the floor. I say, “The tiny miniature horse was…” My new shrink holds up his hand. He tells me there will be no charge for this exploratory session, but the session is over and alas he is booked solid for the next year. I leave. You are waiting for me. It might be a mistake to tell you about my pets.
PAMELA PAINTER is the award-winning author of five story collections, and co-author, with Anne Bernays, of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Five Points, FlashBoulevard, Harper’s, Ploughshares, SmokeLong Quarterly, New Flash Fiction Review, among others, and in numerous anthologies, such as New Micro. Painter’s stories have been presented on National Public Radio, and on the YouTube channel, CRONOGEO, and her work has been staged by WordTheatre in Los Angeles, London and New York. Painter’s newest collection of stories is Fabrications: New and Selected Stories from Johns Hopkins University Press.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Mistakes I Made”? I’ve never been to a shrink, though I’ve known several, and I like the possibility of confounding them. I do not know why. I imagined the shrink in this tiny story hearing too much already and not wanting to get to “the miniature horse.” And I don’t know why I continued the story past the narrator’s exit from the shrink’s office. Perhaps she has learned something from this session–that some things are better kept to oneself. Perhaps. by Pamela Painter For a while I kept a list. I don’t know why I started it because when I started it I was already pretty deep into numbers and it was embarrassing, looking back, not to remember some last names, and even the first name of one man on the list. He was X, with the year and party where we met. Then I worried that someone would find my list and be appalled that I couldn’t remember last names. Then I wondered if that was all the someone would be appalled about? What about the dives and bars. Conferences. Artist residencies. Concerts. Hikes. Match.com… What was the list for? Why did my list make no distinction between a one-night stand and the first man I was married to for 13 dreadful years? Never mind the name of my second husband whom I loved? I didn’t use a code: No code for education, salary, cultural interests, weight, size, length, length of the attachment, who broke up with whom—if indeed the “attachment” was long enough to warrant a break-up. One-night stands do not. On the other hand, there is the second night of a one-night stand. You would think it doesn’t call for or deserve rules for disengagement. But it does. PAMELA PAINTER is the author of four story collections, Getting to Know the Weather, which won the Great Lakes College Award Award for First Fiction, The Long and Short of It, Wouldn’t You Like to Know and Ways to Spend the Night. She is also co-author with Anne Bernays of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Five Points, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, Matter Press, New Flash Fiction Review, Ploughshares and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others and in numerous anthologies, such as Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction, From Blues to Bop:A Collection of Jazz Fiction, MicroFiction, Nothing Short of 100, and New Micro. She has received grants from The Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, has won three Pushcart Prizes and Agni Review’s John Cheever Award for Fiction. Painter’s stories have been presented on NPR, and on stage in Los Angeles, New York City and London by Cedering Fox’s Word Theatre Company. Painter’s new collection of stories, Fabrications: New and Selected Stories, is due out from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2020. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Her List”? Someone in the group of writers staying at my Cape house suggested this as a story idea and we all wrote our story on the spot, and then read them out loud to much hilarity. I don’t know why, but it pleases me that I use third person in the title, but first person in the story. by Pamela Painter This summer we’re renting a cottage not in Maine, but in a new place on the outer Cape. And just like past summers, you’ll pack your own suitcase, not the one with pajamas and shorts and swimsuits, but the pink suitcase with Ishbel, your fuzzy goat, and games, and books from your shelf. You will have a room all to yourself, mysteriously, and we’ll make sure it is close to our room for when you call out in the night, which you have almost stopped doing. Yes, you can stay up as late as Danny used to—how do you remember that—and you won’t have to think about the ocean. Tides and riptides are words we will not use. The kettle ponds are round and calm, home to tadpoles we will watch turn into frogs, and you will marvel about how things grow and change—like tadpoles and caterpillers—and be sad that some things don’t. Painter is the author of four story collections, the most recent is Ways to Spend the Night. She is also the co-author of What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Ploughshares, Smokelong Quarterly, Threepenny Review and Epoch, among others, and in numerous anthologies. Painter teaches in the MFA Program at Emerson College in Boston. See what happens when you click below. What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Ponds”? I’ve always been fascinated by what is missing, felt to be missing. And with water. The two came together in this story. I’m in the passenger seat cause my husband says I don’t drive fast enough for his ‘haste.’ (more…)Her List
Ponds
In My Head
by Pamela Painter
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
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