Katherine Carlson spent the first 20 years of her life in Michigan before moving to New York City in 2001. She holds an MFA in fiction from New York University and currently teaches there in the Expository Writing Program. This August she will be an Artist-in-Residence at the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, NY, where she will be banging her head against her first novel.
Baby Pictures was read by Heather Lee Rogers on 11th July 2012
You once spent the night in David Hasselhoff’s apartment. This is not an achievement, not something to put on your résumé or even as a fun fact in your online dating profile. Not an ice breaker type of story, it’s the tale you keep in your back pocket saving it for party lulls or for when you are feeling insecure about your lack of tangible assets. The story, like the girl you were then, is full of promise and from a far more precious time. Set in New York City, the last holiday season before September 11th, the story has all the mystique of a “Knight Rider” Hasselhoff minus the harsh reality of the Hoff’s drunken YouTube videos, or getting replaced on “America’s Got Talent.”
Her car was already there, pulled into the lay-by, facing the oncoming traffic. He pulled in in front of it, nosing his headlights to hers, and switched off the engine.
She was indistinct but recognisable despite the reflections in the two windscreens, and for a moment they sat staring at each other across the curved metal of the bonnets, each wondering if the other would get out of their car first. She flashed the headlights, a pale lightning seen obliquely, and he opened his door and slid out of the driver's seat and walked forward to her passenger door. She looked up at him through the glass and gently patted the empty seat next to her. He looked both ways, as if were about to cross a busy road, and got into the car beside her.
Everyone who was involved in the commissioning of the work had known that. There would hardly have been anything special about it if it was just a pile of replicas. They would all be the same and the idea was to celebrate the diversity of mankind, not to show how much one toe could be like another.
Up to that point, they had all been telling him how clever he was. How his monument had a point. How it would be a tribute to his genius. How he was reinventing public art.
And so he was taken aback when the questions started.
It was public knowledge that Martha coped really well when her husband of thirty years left her for an older, fatter model named Gloria. Everyone told her so.
