Domestic Pleasure by Julia Nusbaum
Photo by Alexey Demidov for Pexels
Steam rises, mingles with the morning light cutting through the window. Tallis watches particles of dust catch and swirl. “Are you listening to me?” Tom’s voice comes from behind her. She’d been listening to the kettle bubble on the stove. The way the water pinged against the walls of the pot, angry, trying to escape, vaporizing. Sometimes, when she is alone, she lets the kettle whistle until it rattles, until she thinks it might explode. But it never does, just whistles and whistles until she turns it off, or the water simply boils away, leaving nothing but hot metal.
“Tallis,” her husband’s voice comes again, irritated now. “You have to talk to me.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” Tallis says, refusing to face him. Tears well in her eyes. She doesn’t want him to see her cry. She feels foolish. She should have known this was coming, her body has been humming for days.
Tallis has a knack for feeling things before they happen. Like how she knew in grade school the Challenger was going to explode. She felt it in the pit of her stomach and then like a fire, crawling outward, up her arms and down her legs. She sat in the gymnasium of her Texas elementary school with her classmates, helpless, watching the shuttle launch and twist upward until it came apart, plummeting toward Earth.
Or, how she knew her mother was dead before the police office came to the door. How she jolted awake in the middle of the night, breathless, heart pounding.
And she knew this was coming, too. Maybe not the affair, exactly, but she knew something bad was on its way. She’s spent days with the feeling of pins pricking her skin.
Tom has been sleeping with someone else. Again.
She pulls her thin bathrobe taut around her body. She is naked underneath. Naked, because she and Tom fucked last night, there is no other word for it. It had hardly been lovemaking. Not the way he talked to her. The way he handled her, rough and seemingly expendable.
They’d been to a party thrown by one of his clients. A fancy thing, on a yacht. Tallis still isn’t used to parties like that—to people with money—even after all these years. Sometimes, she forgets she and Tom are people with money. Forgets she’s not that girl anymore. The one with dirt under her fingernails. Bruises in unseen places, given to her by unseen men, who crept into her room in the dark, like monsters. She’s no longer the girl in the Kings Corners Trailer Park. Tallis Sawyer of Waco, Texas doesn’t exist anymore. She is Tallis Duncan of Miami now.
Tom touches her shoulder and she flinches, pulling away. “I can’t talk to you right now. I can’t even look at you.”
“I know you’re angry,” he says. “But we have to talk, figure out a game plan.”
“A game plan?” This makes her turn around. Tom is already dressed, wearing jeans she ironed for him yesterday and a freshly pressed t-shirt. Tallis knows a ‘game plan’ does not mean they should figure out how to work through this, that they should talk. When Tom Duncan says game plan, it is the lawyer in him asking how he can appease her, how he can make it so she looks the other way.
Tom sits down at the kitchen table, taking an orange from a bowl at the center, and begins to peel it. He seems relaxed for a man who just admitted to his wife of thirteen years that he’s been having an affair. He’ll offer her jewelry and when she reminds him she doesn’t wear any, he’ll suggest a new car, or a trip. Maybe they’ll go to Paris for Christmas this year. It’s always the same, Tom cheats, then feels guilty. Confesses, and then worries until Tallis relents. From his ease at the kitchen table, it is clear to her he has taken just her willingness to look at him as a sign she is ready to hear what he has to offer.
“What do you want, Tally? What does my girl need?” He asks.
Tallis watches him break apart the orange, laying each slice out individually. This is the third—no, fourth—time he has cheated. He eats the orange slices slowly, waiting for her. Tallis is annoyed by his smugness, the way he assumes she’s already forgiven him. Something tightens in her belly and bends, spreading. She opens and closes her hands at her side, willing the feeling to go away.
Tallis closes her eyes, she can’t help but feel like she is a version of history repeating itself. Somewhere in the universe this has happened before, not just to her. She sees her mother’s face the last time she saw her alive, hollow and dark, pocked with the scars of addiction. How, she wonders, did she end up here? Different from her mother, but somehow exactly the same. It doesn’t matter how much she’s changed her life, how far she’s run, how different she’s strived to be. It always comes back to this. Tallis will always be paying for her mother’s sins, her sins.
***
Tallis was thirteen when her mother died at the hands of a married man. A lover’s quarrel, the police officer who came to the door tried to tell her. And Tallis wanted to believe him. But even she knew the men who showed up night after night weren’t her mother’s lovers. They were other women’s husbands, men looking for a reprieve from their own loneliness.
The addiction had taken her mother fully by then, withered her into nothing but bones attached to translucent skin. She’d become desperate for money, for anything that would keep her on a steady diet of meth and not much else. There was never any food in the house, which meant Tallis never ate. Which meant she, too, dissolved into herself.
When she answered the door for the police officer he recoiled, whispering, “Jesus, you look like a ghost.”
Tallis didn’t speak—what did she say to something like that? To the news he was bringing? She just let him usher her into the back of his car, drive her to the police station and call her grandparents.
Her grandmother, a woman Tallis had never met, drove from Florida to Texas to retrieve her. She took Tallis back to Florida, where the air was thick and wet and Tallis felt choked by the weight of it, the way it wrapped itself around her, permeated every part of her.
Her grandparent’s house smelled of moth balls and overripe bananas. It was dark and hot, even with the air conditioner pumping day and night. The walls were covered in Bible verses her grandmother typed on the computer, printed, and taped wherever there was room. The tan paint of the living room was barely visible. Verse after verse had been hung, overlapping. Sometimes the font was small, sometimes it was large and in all capital letters, screaming at the reader.
Her grandmother’s evangelicalness crept into every part of her life. At the grocery store she prayed about what kind of bread to buy or which apples would nourish them the most. If Tallis felt sick her grandmother would lay hands on her, proclaiming her healed by the power of Christ. Her grandfather was less vocal about his faith, but made it clear the moment Tallis entered his house she was expected to be in church every Sunday and Bible study every Wednesday. She wasn’t even allowed to speak to boys, let alone date them.
It was no wonder her mother left home at sixteen when she got pregnant. Her grandmother didn’t even wait until they were out of Texas to start carrying on about Jesus. An hour outside of Waco she asked Tallis, “Are you saved?”
“Am I what?”
Her grandmother frowned. “Saved,” she repeated. “Do you know Jesus?”
“Like personally?” Tallis shook her head. “No.”
“Don’t get smart with me. I’m asking about your eternal salvation. When was the last time you went to church?”
Her mother once made a joke that screaming God’s name in bed on a Sunday morning was as good as going to church, if not better. Tallis thought about imparting such a piece of theological wisdom upon her grandmother but decided better of it. Instead, she said, “Sometimes at night mom and I would eat cereal and watch those televangelists.”
Her grandmother flicked her gaze upward with a sigh, “Oh good grief.”
***
“I want you to leave,” Tallis says to Tom as he finishes the last slice of orange.
Tom cocks his head to the side, brows knit. Tallis has never asked him to leave before. “You can’t be serious,” he says. “What about Becca?”
Becca. Their daughter. Thirteen, just like Tallis had been when her mother died, and so unaware of life’s cruelties. Tallis packed her off to a sleepover last night before getting ready for the yacht party. She thinks about the innocent questions her daughter asks about kissing boys. About where the noses go and how a person breathes. She wants to protect her daughter, to preserve her innocence for as long as possible. She knows if Tom leaves, her daughter’s view of the world will be shattered. She has hidden his other transgressions from her, kept him innocent in her eyes. But she knows too, she has to do something to calm what is happening inside of her—to quell the fire—that, unlike the tea kettle, she will explode.
Tallis presses her lips together for a moment, then says, “I’ll take care of Becca.”
Tom snorts, leaning back in his chair. “How would you take care of her? You don’t even have a job. You’ve never worked a day in your life.”
And he is right, of course, Tallis has never held a job. She didn’t go to college, has no resume to speak of. She went from her mother’s, to her grandparent’s, to Tom’s. And Tom has given her what she’s needed ever since. This house, the rambling Florida plantation home with wide porches and lush gardens. He gives her money for her clothes, Becca’s clothes, books, groceries, any trips she wants to take. She is beholden to him. If he leaves, what will she have? What will she be?
“I—Can take you to court,” she says, but her voice waivers. Even she knows her threat is empty. Tom is a lawyer, with lawyer friends to protect him.
Tom stands, his chair scraping against the kitchen floor, moving toward her slowly, a soft smile on his lips. “I don’t want to leave. I love you.” Tallis moves backward, but he grips her hips, steadying her, keeping her in front of him. The stove is still on, the kettle still warming. She listens to the metallic pop of the water as it starts to churn, imagines the bubbles rising to the surface. Tom’s hands gather the fabric of her bathrobe and he brings his mouth down on hers before slipping his hand inside the robe. “I’m sorry,” he says, cupping her breast, then moves his hand down her belly to where she is already starting to warm, where her body is already—frustratingly—starting to respond to him.
“Don’t throw me out baby,” he pleads softly against her ear. He slips one finger inside of her, then two. She melts against him, powerless.
***
Tallis was saved a year after moving to Florida. Plunged into freezing water in a church that smelled of mildew and Windex. She opened her eyes underwater, watched the wavy image of the cross above her coming in and out of focus as the pastor dunked her three times.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Her teeth chattered as he called her a child of God, water dripping from the hem of her white robe, pooling at her feet. The girls from her Sunday school class stood in the front row, their smiles wide, hands clasped under their chins or lifted to the heavens in praise. After, they gave her flowers and hugged her. “Welcome home, sister,” they said. And Tallis looked around the drab sanctuary, with its wood paneled walls and dark, stained carpet, and felt an ache, just under her breast bone and wondered if it was God.
She was washed clean of everything that came before. Of the Texas dust still on her feet. Of the trailer with peeling linoleum floors and empty cabinets. Of the memory of a mother who loved her—a mother who no one called a whore.
Tears collected and overflowed. Her body went numb and she shook, from fear or love, she didn’t know which. She didn’t know the difference. Her grandmother’s bony arms came around her. “God bless you, child,” she wept.
***
The night of the yacht party, after she’d seen Becca off to a friend’s house, Tallis dressed deliberately. Waxing, plucking, tucking, trimming. Smoothing herself out. She rarely spent so much time on her appearance. It wasn’t uncommon for Becca to accuse her of being a frump. She preferred shapeless slacks and flowy blouses to anything that showed off her figure. But on the night of the yacht party, she needed a distraction, something to calm whatever was stirring inside of her. So she dressed methodically, trying to ignore the way her insides seemed to be vibrating.
She had a memory of her mother doing this in the time before the drugs. Her mother made getting ready into a ritual and Tallis would sit on the bed and watch. She didn’t know then the men her mother was dressing for were paying her. Didn’t know soon her mother would quit her job at the CVS because she could make better cash doing ‘other things.’
“A man likes you to be smooth, Tallis.” She drawled one night as she sat in front of her bedroom mirror. “I ain’t going to tell you what that means, you’ll figure it out soon enough, but just remember: smooth and round.” Her mother adjusted her Victoria’s Secret push-up bra, so her breasts spilled over the top of her tight black dress, an unlit cigarette dangled from her lips. Then she turned, removed the cigarette, and kissed Tallis on the head. “There are Lucky Charms in the cupboard,” she said. “The real ones, not that fake shit. Be good baby, don’t wait up.” And she was gone, out the door and into the night.
Later—days, months, it wasn’t important—Tallis would understand what her mother meant. But it wasn’t a man she would learn it from.
“Gross, Tallis, I can see your pubes.” It was her sometimes-friend Lindsey in the girl’s locker room before gym class. Tallis had just removed her jeans, was about to pull on her gym shorts. She looked down at her threadbare underwear. It was late winter, cold in Waco. The hairs between her legs started showing up sometime in the fall. She hadn’t known what to do about them, was too embarrassed to ask her mother, not that she was around to ask. And now Lindsey and all the other girls in her seventh-grade gym class were staring at her. That night she found her mother’s electric razor under the bathroom sink and shaved herself smooth.
She’d worked hard to forget her mother. But it was impossible to forget someone she saw every time she looked in the mirror. Tallis smoothed her hands over her own black dress, adjusted her own push up bra. Her things were more expensive than her mother’s, more luxurious, but the actions were the same. The results, the same.
When Tallis arrived at the yacht party, she couldn’t find Tom, even though they’d agreed to meet at the bar. She ordered a drink. Her skin was still buzzing. Nothing, it seemed, would calm it.
She drank champagne and sat, surveying the crowd. It was what Tallis imagined adulthood was supposed to be like when she was spending long summer afternoons sprawled on the tattered couch with her mother watching movies like Pretty Woman. She imagined extravagant parties in fancy dresses, sipping champagne. She imagined that was what her mother did when she left at night. Her mother was Julia Roberts. The men who came to see her loved her. Even after her mother started to come home strung out or sometimes didn’t come home at all, Tallis chose to believe her life was charmed, that her mother was eating escargot at five star restaurants or sassing back to sales women at high class shops.
But women who went to fancy parties, who were loved by men like Richard Gere, didn’t live in trailer parks or work at CVS. Women like that didn’t wither into nothing. Didn’t have infected sores on their faces from the pervasive itch that came with the meth high. And women like that didn’t trade their daughters for drugs. Didn’t invite men back to their homes with the promise of a few minutes alone with a twelve-year-old girl in exchange for a few hours of a high that would make the world disappear, make the bad seem worth it.
When Tom found Tallis at the bar, he did a double take. Tallis knew he would. Knew he was expecting the usual Tallis, in a shapeless dress or an ill-fitting pants suit. When he was close enough to touch her, he slipped a hand up her dress, just enough to caress her thigh. “You look...sexy,” he said.
She shoved his hand away. He was drunk. “Where have you been?” She asked. His tie was crooked, shirt half untucked. It wasn’t like him to be so sloppy.
Tallis should have understood then what was happening. Guessed where he had been or who he had been with. Instead, she pushed the feeling down as Tom touched her thigh again, pressing his fingers one at a time into her soft flesh. Insistent, he said, “I want you. Right. Now.”
Her skin ignited.
They had sex in one of the tiny yacht bathrooms. It was cramped and Tom came too soon, grunting with pleasure and pulling out, dropping Tallis’ legs from where he’d pinned her against the bathroom door. She stumbled and fell sideways into the vanity, the corner jabbing hard into her hip.
“Guys like me are lucky,” Tom said, pulling up his pants.
“Why’s that?” She found her underwear on the floor, pulled it on and smoothed her dress, noticing as she did her skin no longer hummed.
Tom took a step toward her, closing the space between them in the tiny bathroom. He pressed up against her so she could feel he was getting hard again. He put his lips to her ear. “Not every woman shaves her pussy.”
***
Tallis and Tom met at school. Right away their relationship felt dangerous. Tallis knew she wasn’t supposed to date, knew her grandfather would not approve of the things she and Tom did in Tom’s car after school. The way they touched each other, pressed their bodies together. She knew her grandmother would call her a whore if she found out, no better than her mother. But in the moments she and Tom were together, Tallis didn’t care about any of that. Didn’t care about right or wrong, good or bad. The world fell away when they were together. With Tom, she could forget all of the bad that had come before.
“You keep a man happy by keeping your home happy.” Tallis looked up from her dinner, dry chicken and limp green beans. Her grandmother was eyeing her from across the table.
“Excuse me?” Tallis said, surprised by the sudden change in subject. A moment ago they were talking about her math homework.
Her grandmother picked up her napkin, dabbed at the corners her mouth and sighed. “It’s time we talk about this, Tallis. Heaven knows your mother never did.”
Tallis felt heat creep to her cheeks. Did her grandmother know about Tom? It was only the two of them at the table. Her grandfather was in his usual spot in front of the TV, eating his dinner from a tray. Tallis waited for some indication the woman knew what she was doing after school, waited to be damned to hell for it, but her grandmother simply continued. “Men like it when you make home pleasurable. They like you to be domestic.”
“Okay…” Tallis nodded slowly, trying to follow. “Domestic pleasure. So like, dusting and stuff?”
“Yes. And stuff.” Her grandmother glanced toward the living room. Tallis stiffened, but her grandfather stayed planted where he was, intent on the evening news, paying no attention to his wife or granddaughter. “There are certain things a husband wants,” her grandmother went on. “Needs.”
“Grandma—”
The woman cut her off with a raised hand. “You need to understand these things. You’re of age now.”
She did understand, that was just it. She understood what men could do in the dark. Tallis closed her eyes, tried not to think about those men in Texas, their sour breath and heavy bodies. With Tom it was different. He said things to her. Sweet things whispered in her ear while they kissed and touched, while he was inside of her. Things men like Richard Gere said to women like Julia Roberts.
So when the pregnancy test came back positive, Tallis wasn’t frightened. She wasn’t worried about what her grandmother would say or what her grandfather would do. She slid into the front seat of Tom’s car on a Wednesday afternoon after school, clutching the test she’d taken in the girl’s bathroom during lunch.
“What the fuck?” Tom said when she handed it to him.
“We’re gonna have a baby,” she smiled.
“Jesus Christ,” Tom ran a hand through his hair.
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.”
“Fuck, Tallis. I’m going to college in the fall. I want to go to law school. I can’t have a baby.”
Tallis deflated. “I though…I thought you loved me.”
“Shit—no—shit, Tallis I do. I mean—yeah, you’re great. It’s just—” He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Fuck. A baby. Are you sure—are you sure you don’t want me to take you somewhere?”
“Take me somewhere?” Tallis frowned, “What do you mean?”
“You know, like, to have an operation…or something.”
Tallis’ eyes went wide. “You mean like an abortion?”
“Well…yeah.”
“Tom, that’s a sin.”
“Well so is sex outside of marriage, but you didn’t seem to bulk at that. I don’t think you can pick and choose your sin, Tallis. That’s not how God works.”
Tears pricked at her eyes. “I thought you’d be happy. I thought you loved me,” she said again.
Tom let out a breath. “I do love you Tal, I really really do. It’s…this isn’t exactly—”
“I’ll make your life perfect,” she cut him off.
“What?”
“I’ll give you everything you want. Everything you need. I’ll be the perfect wife, mother. You’ll live in nothing but domestic pleasure.” She knew she sounded desperate.
Tom’s brows knit. “Did you just propose to me?”
“Please,” Tallis bit her lip. “I love you.”
***
The morning after the yacht party Tallis woke to one of those perfect Florida days, elusive even in the winter. The humidity had lifted; the heat felt less oppressive. The sky was a brilliant blue outside her bedroom window, and for a moment she felt like a girl again, waking up in her bedroom in Texas. Her mother still alive, the monsters of the night gone. When she rolled over Tom was watching her.
They’d come home from the party and fucked again. In the kitchen and then in the bedroom. Tom was insatiable. Biting her, clawing her, pushing her down. Tallis’ skin had started to prick again, to the point of distraction. “I love you,” Tom said, over and over again, but all Tallis could think about was the way Tom looked when he finally found her at the party. His crooked tie, his untucked shirt. She’d gotten to the party just ten minutes after its official start time, and yet Tom was missing, had shown up unkempt and drunk. She knew what that meant, should have known what her body was trying to tell her all along.
Maybe she was wilfully ignorant. After all, she had lived by her grandmother’s rules. Given her husband everything he needed, wanted. She’d acquiesced to everything.
But in the morning, rolling over to Tom perched on his arm, watching her, something new started to simmer in her bell. Something cool and dark and mean.
“I—I have to tell you something,” Tom began, licking his lips. He was always nervous when he confessed, like a puppy who peed in the house confronting his master.
“I’ve been sleeping with Fallon.”
The champagne from the night before came back acidy in Tallis’ mouth. There it was. And of course it was his secretary. What a cliché. She rolled out of bed in a fluid motion, taking her robe from the back of the door. Shrugging it on, she left the room. In the kitchen she filled the kettle with water and turned the gas on high. The lighter clicked twice before it caught. She stood with her arms crossed, jaw clenched, willing the water to boil.
***
Now, the water hisses, steam escaping into the air, as Tom tries to make her come. He’s lifted her onto the counter and she’s let her head fall back against the cabinets, gasping. This is how it’s always been between the two of them. Tallis falling to him every time. Letting him beg forgiveness with his hands, his mouth, his words, his wallet. She learned a long time ago, in the darkness of her bedroom, men will take whatever they want from you. People, no matter how much they claim to love you, will use you.
She thinks of her mother, on the other side of her bedroom door. Of the police officer who came to the trailer, his face full of pity for the girl who had been starved nearly to death. Her grandmother serving dinner every night to a man who rarely looked at her.
Her body quakes. She has been exactly what she was supposed to be. She left the little girl in Texas behind, in a ditch with her mother. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost she was made new, renewed. She repented for her mother’s sins, her sins. She lived by all the rules. She has loved Tom, worshiped him even. But in the end, it didn’t matter. She is not enough. She has never been enough.
Her body thrums in a way it never has before. The water in the kettle hisses and tings. She glances down at the wooden knife block next to the stove. It would be so easy, so simple. The roots of this anger are deep. Have coiled and twisted inside of her for years.
The kettle begins to whistle. Low at first but rising—up and up and up—until it is screaming. Tallis could do it now. Reach beside her and pick out the biggest knife, curl her fingers around the handle, feel the weight of it. She could plunge it into Tom’s back while he is focused on her. He wouldn’t realize what was happening until it was too late. Until it was already over. Until Tallis was alone, in the stillness of their kitchen, with just his body.
“Stop. Stop. Stop this,” she pushes him away from her.
“Tally,” he frowns, “what the hell?” He reaches beside her and turns off the burner to quite the kettle that is still screaming then he reaches for her again.
Tallis holds up her hand. He stops.
“What is wrong with you?” Tom asks.
Tallis stares at her husband, looks down at her empty hands, shaking. It would have been so simple. She feels her chin start to tremble, swallows back her tears. She will not cry in front of him. She will not.
Tom doesn’t touch her again. Instead, he grumbles something about going to the office. She doesn’t respond, doesn’t look up when he leaves the kitchen, doesn’t say goodbye when she hears the front door open and close. She stays balanced on the counter, head hanging, body numb. The kettle on the stove next to her is silent now, just a slow jet of steam rising from its spout. When she finally moves from the counter and pours herself a cup of tea the water is lukewarm.
She sits down at the kitchen table, remembers something else her mother told her. It is her mother before the drugs, before the men that used her and threw her away. Her mother when she dressed in the red CVS smock, kissed Tallis on the head and brought home discounted boxes of mac and cheese that had been damaged in the CVS store room, dented in the corners, unfit for the shelf. In the memory Tallis sits at the kitchen table with her mother, sun streaming in through the dirty windows. Her mother drinks coffee, Tallis eats cereal. Her mother looks tired, there are bags under her eyes. Bills are spread in front of her and Tallis can see the tension in her shoulders, the worry that lives between her brows.
“Are we okay mommy?” Tallis asks over her cereal bowl.
Her mother looks up, expression softening. She reaches across the table and touches her daughter’s arm; her blue nail polish chipped. “We’ll be fine baby; I’ve got it all worked out.”
“What are you going to do?”
She gives her Tallis’ arm a squeeze. “Save us.”
Tallis doesn’t understand. When she doesn’t say anything, her mother continues. “It’s like this: you can’t wait around hoping a solution will fall into your lap. You’ve got to find the solution on your own. Find your own way out. Save yourself.”
Save yourself. Her mother’s voice echoes in the silence of the kitchen. The mug of tea has grown cold between her palms, the sun has risen higher, afternoon shadows stretch across the kitchen floor.
Save yourself.
Save yourself.
Save yourself.
It is a drumbeat. A thrumming. It moves through the still air like a ghost.
Tallis hears the front door open. Becca’s soft tread in the hall. And then her daughter is in front of her.
“Why are you in your bathrobe?” Tallis hears her ask. “It’s four in the afternoon. How long have you been here?”
Tallis doesn’t know. Doesn’t answer. She just stands and takes her daughter by the hand, pulling her back down the hallway, toward the front door.
“Mom? What are you doing?”
“Get your things,” Tallis says, pointing to Becca’s duffle bag by the door. Then she doubles back, through the kitchen and into the laundry room where she strips out of her robe and pulls on the first pair of pants she can find and a t-shirt of Tom’s. She picks up her car keys from the kitchen counter where she dropped them the night before and goes back to Becca by the front door.
“Come on,” she says, opening the door and ushering her daughter through.
“Mom, wait, what’s going on?” There is terror in Becca’s eyes. Tallis recognizes that terror, knows how it feels.
“I’m saving us,” she says. “Now get in the car.” Her voice is stern and her daughter obeys. But when they are belted into the front seat Becca asks, “where are we going?”
“Wherever we want,” Tallis says. She backs the car down the drive and points them west, toward the dipping sun. Her skin burns. But this time, she knows what is coming and in that knowing there is a pleasure.
Julia Nusbaum (she/her) is the Founder and Editor in Chief of HerStry Literary Magazine. She is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago. Her work has appeared in Moon Cola Magazine, The Heartland Society of Women Writers, Peach Velvet Magazine, Antipoetry Magazine, Magpie Literary Journal, The Feminine Collective and elsewhere. She lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with her partner and son.
Visit Julia’s website