The Likely World

Auteur

Melanie Conroy-Goldman is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges where she was a founding director of the Trias Residency for Writers, which has hosted such notables as Mary Gaitskill, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Jeff VanderMeer. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Southern Review and StoryQuarterly, in anthologies from Morrow and St. Martin’s, and online at venues such as McSweeney’s. She also volunteers at a maximum security men’s prison with the Cornell Prison Education Program. Her work is represented by Bill Clegg at the Clegg Agency. She lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, daughter, and step-daughters.

Texte du rabat

Single mom Mellie has just emerged from a shattering addiction to the memory drug, cloud, when a stranger who may be her baby’s father appears with a dangerous agenda.

Échantillon de lecture

**From *The Likely World

Excerpt 1:*

Look. I spent ten years, twenty, vowing to get sober. I’d wake up, today’s the day. Sometimes I’d make it to noon. Sometimes I’d make it to breakfast. Each evening turned into a story about staying high enough not to hate myself for my own weakness. And then in the hospital, they showed me Juni’s little beating heart on the monitor and I turned over a new leaf. Except no, I didn’t. Even a baby in my belly, even a baby three months old and crying did not get me clean. And then, two years later, in the senseless logic of addiction and recovery, my toddler got me sober where my baby did not. Twenty-nine days. It may not sound like much but it’s the biggest, baddest thing I’ve ever done, and every second of it hurts like hell.

Did I eat cloud when she was inside me? Yes. Was she born damaged because of it? Yes. Yes. She has a regular brain and all the usual limbs, but there are characteristic oddities in the size and shape of her fingernails, in the splay of her toes. There is a typical tendency towards respiratory infection that may turn to nothing, or may kill her. Developmentally, there’s real variation from child to child. Cloud use, in utero, is under-studied. For now, I can say that she’s fine.

Excerpt 2:

If they made a war on it, and funded longitudinal research about it, and started granting PhDs in it; if they put it in a large hadron collider; if they beamed lasers at it and pummeled it with particles and derived formulae about it, they would never prove what we know about cloud. What we who have indentured ourselves to cloud’s insight and greed know for sure. We know it in our bones and in our mouths. We whisper it to each other at the pizza shops and in the rehab centers and waiting to get our stomachs pumped in the emergency room.

There are other lives we lead, right alongside this one. Perhaps cloud makes those realities; perhaps they pre-exist the cloud use, and cloud merely shifts us from one plane to another. Regardless, the evidence is there.