Synopsis

In late 2019, award-winning Portland author Alex Behr reunited with Chris Hartman, a lost love, after thirty years. Their brief, intense romance in San Francisco left behind no photos, and yet they’d never forgotten each other. Chris soon moved to Portland to start a new life with her. Tragi­cally and suddenly, he was diagnosed with a rare, aggres­sive prion illness, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and died just months after the move.

It explores desire and searches for meaning from chaos and loss. With piercing humor, the collection explores a couple bonding over alien visitations, the brutal accommodations in a marriage between musicians, sexuality during menopause, and a teen girl’s bruising path to feminism via her Fender guitar. The stories share the theme that humans can’t escape their primal urges and are intelligent animals in the flawed kingdom we all share.

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Excerpt

Cat Rituals

Excerpt from Animal Kingdom

Originally published on Vol. 1 Brooklyn

1. Please empty the litter box. Albus pees a lot. Play the game called “Find the prize” every day with the scooper thing. There are lots of prizes!
2. Please put the litter bag out on the porch. Better yet in the outdoor trash. If you put it in the kitchen trash, it will smell. Can you lift the lid and smell? Do you think it smells bad? Like, unusually? Did you notice weird smells on me? Like between my teeth, or behind my ear, or in my navel? Remember when you used to kiss it? Or is that inappropriate, now that we’re divorced? When you’re smiling and walking toward me at baggage claim, do you forget you’ve told me you don’t love me? Our cat is on my thigh. Two paws on, two paws off. Remember after a trip I found a weird walnut on the rug, but it was a bird’s head?
3. Please give him meds twice a day. First, heart meds, one pill cut in half and crushed, twice a day. Put it on a spoonful of squishy meat. But wear the blue latex gloves when you give him the thyroid meds and mark the doses off on the dry-erase board. It’s hard for you to remember medications. Like when you forgot to renew your heart meds and you ran out for five days straight? And who, indeed, was late for work getting them for you? And you texted, “Thanks.”
4. Please pet him as much as you want. The abscess is healed. The vet cut it open. That was a lot of goo. Part of it was gray.
5. Please don’t read my journals. They’re all over the place, like the porn in my friend’s house growing up. The father had stored it by the cookbooks and boxes of Ritz crackers, and by the salad tongs and the Quaker Oats. Let’s pretend we’re still married and all the bad stuff never happened, like you never were hospitalized for wanting to kill yourself, but let’s pretend you got caught at the neighbors’ house, spying on them. Maybe that couple who used to watch gay porn with the curtains open, even though they looked like a regular hetero couple with a yellow Alfa Romeo. Let’s pretend they invite you in and seduce you, under the cathode glow, and you ask them to order bread rolls with marinara sauce from Hot Lips.

About the Author

Alex Behr is the author of Animal Kingdom, Planet Grim, and Grief Stick. Her writing has been published in Tin House, Utne Reader, Salon, Oregon Humanities, The Rumpus, Buckman Journal, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, in anthologies, and others. Her multimedia website and film projects have been supported by grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. She holds a BA in humanities from UC Berkeley and an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. Behr lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is a senior academic designer for a global education company, teaches creative writing workshops, and plays piano and bass guitar.

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