The Refrigerator Monologues

by Catherynne M. Valente

  I couldn’t believe it was really happening. Daddy Warbucks was gonna make me a star. We’re in a movie now. Everything’s A-OK. But then my stupid mouth, which is a more authentic artist than the rest of me, decided to vomit up some senior-project-mission-statement bullshit. “Well, I mean, probably because outsider art isn’t about mass production . . .”

  Mr. Business Q. Endowment waved his hand dismissively. “Of course, but mass production comes with the kind of money that buys security. Which, yes, my dear, boomer fucks also love. Because that kind of money makes problems just . . . poof! Blow away like leaves. Here.” He gave me his card. “Come to my office tomorrow. You’re perfect for the endowment. I’ll have no trouble convincing the board.”

  “I can’t tomorrow. It’s my birthday,” I mumbled weakly.

  “The next day, then,” said my new best friend. “Do we have a deal?”

  He held out his hand. I took it, automatically. That’s what humans do when someone in a suit sticks out his paw. I squeezed hard. My dad always told me even a girl should shake hands like a man. I want to say it felt strange, that it tingled or burned. But he just had dry, warm palms—and he didn’t let go.

  “When you see Jason,” he whispered throatily, “tell him Reaganomics saved this country.”

  The businessman let go of my hand. I looked down at his thick, embossed card.

  ISAAC AMENDOLARA

  SECURITIES & FUTURES

  “Happy birthday, Samantha Dane,” Isaac said cheerfully, and left.

  I never saw him again, even when he killed me.

  • • •

  Jason opened the door at 4:40 AM, bleary-eyed and bruised. I sat rigid on the couch, awake as a year of coffee, my veins screaming tension, and the second I saw his fingers around the doorjamb, I blurted out:

  “Reaganomics saved this country!”

  I burst into tears.

  Jason knocked over the coffee table trying to get to me faster than a person can actually move. He kissed me, stroked my hair, and peered into my eyes like an ophthalmologist.

  “Oh shit, oh shit, Sam, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know he even knew about you. When did you see him? How long ago? Did he give you a business card? Where did he find you? What else did he say?”

  I explained in sobs and gulps, fishing the card out of my pocket. Jason yanked it out of my hand, threw it in the sink, and lit the corner with a match, watching it stonily until it burned totally to ash.

  “What the fuck? Jason, what the shit? I need that! He’s going to give me a grant . . .”

  Jason’s jaw clenched. His face went hard and cold. “You know, the weird thing is he probably would. He’s a man of his word.” Jason sat down next to me. He fussed over me, touching my face, frantic, turbo-powered mothering and smothering. “That man you met today . . . he’s like me. He has powers. He’s after the Avant Garde and we’re after him. He’s a dealmaker. He offers you something, and when you shake on it, he tells you what he wants in return, which would be fine except you have to do it within twenty-four hours or the despair will make you pitch yourself out a window. He calls himself Six Figure.”

  I couldn’t get my sweating under control. Jason brought me a new shirt. As I pulled it over my head, I whispered, “He looked like a lot more figures than that.”

  “I think he was just a middle-class guy when he started out. Now he runs the city, and he wants more. He’s the real deal. Way beyond that freshman ethics essay you keep revising. Evil. Like Satan-in-the-Monsanto-building-in-whaleskin-boots evil. Did you tell him where we live?”

  I shook my head. “I’m supposed to meet him, after my birthday. At his office. Jason, what about the card? You didn’t have to burn it.”

  Jason grimaced. “Yeah, I did. It gives you cancer. If you hold on to it long enough. He’s been handing them out all over town. I told you. Evil.”

  It was a long time till we slept. MacArthur kneaded the bedcovers and snored softly between us. Just as I was finally drifting off, Jason whispered:

  “After your birthday, you should go visit my parents. I know they suck, but they live in Kentucky. Six Figure wouldn’t be caught dead.”

  “Sure, darling,” I sighed, and then I was eating white cheese and white wine in a gallery full of white hippos in Jacobean collars and I was asleep.

  • • •

  Hello, maraschino cherries.

  Hello, farmer’s-market tomatoes.

  Hello, red and lovely things.

  This is the last good thing I remember. I’m so cold. I can’t feel my fingers or my toes. I want to remember this and nothing else.

  I woke up to an envelope on Jason’s pillow. Inside was a note:

  All good Samanthas deserve birthday gifts

  To find yours, my love, just get in the lift.

  I pulled on pajama pants and a Blowhole T-shirt. I couldn’t wait. I ran out to the elevator. The doors opened—inside was a French impressionist paradise. Jason had painted A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte all around the walls of the elevator car. It was perfect. My favorite since I was a kid. The spray paint re-created the pointillism of the original better than I’d ever have thought.

  And it was alive.

  I stepped inside, shut the door, pulled the emergency stop. The alarm broke years earlier. Seurat’s picnickers swirled around me, smiling, shaking my hand, bowing. The black dog and the little tan pug jumped up, leaving black and brown acrylic paw prints on my pajamas. The soldiers saluted and kissed both my cheeks. I couldn’t stop crying and smiling and giggling. The sportsman flexed his arm for me and I clapped my hands. The ladies in their beautiful dresses gave curtseys. One held her black umbrella over my head, in case of rain. The monkey hooted noiselessly and ran up my leg onto my shoulder. And the handsome man in the top hat and suit bowed and held out his hand. I hesitated. I saw Six Figure’s face in my mind, holding out his dry, warm hand.

  No. It was my birthday. Fuck him.

  The nobleman swept me into a waltz around the elevator, very cramped but very elegant. I swore I could hear the Seine lapping at the island shore. The man in the top hat kissed me, a real kiss, full of good wishes. His lips felt as smooth as a canvas.

  They faded after an hour. I pulled the emergency stop out and rose back up toward my floor. My heart felt like a hot-air balloon. I couldn’t stop smiling. I stepped out and practically skipped back to the apartment.

  Simon stood in my kitchen, sobbing in black and white. He was holding MacArthur the Genius Cat. MacArthur was very dead. Simon had twisted his pretty, silky striped neck horribly until it broke. I screamed. Simon screamed.

  “I’m sorry!” he bawled. “I don’t want to! It’s not me! I don’t want to do it!”

  He pixelated into a minotaur. His minotaur. Sketlios the Earth Mage. The minotaur dropped my cat’s corpse on the kitchen floor. I think I knew what was going to happen. I just couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t do anything wrong. We’re in a movie now. Everything’s A-OK in the movies.

  Simon beat me to death on my birthday with his monochrome minotaur fists, stripped me naked, and stuffed me in the refrigerator for Jason to find. He cried the whole time.

  I love you, Marsupia.

  For honor and King Minos.

  We will avenge thee.

  It’s almost over. I was only barely alive when he crammed me in here. I tried to hold on. I tried really hard to not die.

  Boomer fucks love it when you fail.

  • • •

  I guess my photographs will sell now. My hard drive is solid fucking gold the minute my breath stops.

  I can’t bear to think of Jason’s face when he finds me. Us. Simon shoved MacArthur in the crisper drawer. I wish I could feel his fur. It would be comforting. But there’s a sheet of glass between us. How will Jason ever be able to get over it? To forgive Simon? To unsee my blue fucking face smashed up against week-old pizza? But then I think—and it’s almost the last thing I think—about that avenging thing. Be
cause they will avenge me. I know it. I know it because we’re in a movie now and I know how movies work. This is the second-act break. I’m an accepted part of the structure. Jason Remarque will kill Six Figure because Six Figure killed me. It will be an amazing battle. Really fill the seats. And when it’s over, he’ll move on to bigger and better villains. He’ll be the kind of famous I was gonna be. Eventually, he’ll start dating again. Someone who understands the responsibility. The stakes. Though he’ll probably never get another cat.

  I try to cry out. One last effort to be not dead. My lips won’t move.

  I belong in the refrigerator. Because the truth is, I’m just food for a superhero. He’ll eat up my death and get the energy he needs to become a legend.

  Goodbye, broccoli.

  Goodbye, grape juice, not from concentrate.

  Goodbye, farm-fresh butter.

  Goodbye, MacArthur the Genius Cat.

  Goodbye, Nikon F1 camera with a red strap.

  Goodbye, gallery system.

  Goodbye, Jason.

  THE HELL HATH CLUB VS. ETERNITY

  Samantha Dane is almost melted enough to stand. We all help her up, even Pauline. Bayou drapes one of her arms over her shoulder. Daisy gets the other. Julia kisses the top of her head. Nobody says anything about her wearing nothing but a refrigerator. When they find her body, they’ll put her in something nice and modest that has nothing to do with her and she’ll wish she’d stayed like this.

  It’s all right. The dead don’t do shame.

  The Hell Hath Club walks its newest member out into the Lethe Café, into music and moonlight and steaming cups of nothing that taste like remembering. Her frozen blue skin gleams like the bottles behind the bar. We help her into the booth, hold her hand, slip her a joke or two to make her smile.

  What’s the difference between being dead and having a boyfriend?

  Death sticks around.

  She smiles. Samantha’s smile is as strong as a superpower. Neil brings her a drink and waggles his claws shyly. When she lifts it to her chapped lips, there’s a key in the cup, attached to a novelty skeleton keychain that says Elysian Arms Apartment 14.

  “What do you know? You’re just downstairs from me,” I say. “The neighborhood’s gone to hell, of course.” I wink. She winks back.

  Quarter Inch Bleed starts up a new song. The crowded dead roar joy. Gail steps up to the microphone, her tinsel-wrapped rhino horns proud and thick as horns of plenty, her long, sleek black fur gleaming like ink in the stage lights.

  She starts to sing. By the time the chorus rolls around, we’re all singing together, the infinite dead and the gargoyles and the evil clown and the scaly punk princess and the star-eater and the porn star and the science-queen of hypermercury and the girl in the refrigerator, giving no fucks for the hackneyed, predictable tales steaming on without us, full speed ahead. We escaped. The Deadtown moon turns all our faces into four-color saints, and for a moment, this moment, every night, we all feel almost alive again, dancing together at the end of the story, where nothing in heaven or earth can hurt us anymore forever.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A book like The Refrigerator Monologues owes too many debts to count in the few small pages tucked in after the ending. It exists at the nexus of popular comics culture, and so takes inspiration from . . . nearly everything and everyone. One cannot thank the original authors of fairy tales when one retells them, but this is not the case when it comes to cape-and-caption tales. From the bottom of my heart, I would like to thank the pantheon of comics writers, artists, and creators—great and small—who built the grand superhero universe in which we all have been swimming in over the last century. None of my girls and none of my heroes could possibly exist without them, and even when I get my anger on, I have nothing but respect and honor for the monumental feat of deliberate mythology they have, and continue to, accomplish. Where I have thrown my BANG!s and POW!s, I have done it with love, and where I have dissected, I have, I hope, made as little mess in the lab as one could hope.

  More specifically, the deepest bow and greatest thanks must go to Gail Simone, who first noticed, named, and collated evidence for the phenomenon of Women in Refrigerators and brought it to the attention of the culture at large and who has fought the good fight for decades. If there is any good in this work, some credit for it must go to her. On the other side of the coin, thank you to Eve Ensler, whose The Vagina Monologues detonated the theatrical scene when I was coming-of-age as a young feminist-actress type of thing. Both in title and structure, The Vagina Monologues gave me a sturdy framework on which to hang my frustration with the roles of women in superhero stories. This play was the first seed of The Refrigerator Monologues, the first thing that came to my mind in a Cuban bar on a rainy night in Baltimore, and it drove the car forever after.

  Further gratitude must go to my editor, Joe Monti, who pursued this project and bolstered it almost from the moment it was concieved. No one could ask for a warmer, more personal, or more understanding editor, and no other editor’s GIF game comes close. My agent, Howard Morhaim, continues to be the noble superhero sweeping in to rescue all my misbegotten children, and I would trust him till the ends of Metropolis and back.

  Thank you to the coven: Leah, Rabbit, Kat, Shelle, Molly, Cylia, and Beth—friends so old that the word friend doesn’t quite cut it anymore—who gave me such support and love that it would bring back the dead.

  And thank you, finally and always, to Heath, my partner, who sat with me in that Cuban bar and tolerated me crying over a Spider-Man movie and never once said the idea of creating an entire superhero universe to make a point was ridiculous; who sat with me for weeks performing the Herculean task of brainstorming superhero and supervillain names that hadn’t been used in the last hundred years; who gave me feedback and back rubs and backtalk and bacon sandwiches in equal measure. I love you right in the face.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

  CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

  ANNIE WU is an illustrator currently living in Chicago.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Catherynne M. Valente

  Illustrations copyright © 2017 by Annie Wu

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Saga Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

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  The text for this book was set in Electra.

  The illustrations for this book were rendered digitally.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Valente, Catherynne M., 1979– author. | Wu, Annie, illustrator.

  Title: The refrigerator monologues / Catherynne M. Valente ; with illustrations by Annie Wu.

  Description: First edition. | London ; New York : Saga Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016040142 | ISBN 9781481459341 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781481459365 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3622.A4258 A6 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040142