#carrow narby

[smokefalls]

Each of us is ultimately alone: a discrete little being with access only to our own senses and sensations, our own thoughts, and our own fragile body. Left to fumble for meaning in our constant pursuit of imperfect intimacies. We submit ourselves endlessly to that mortifying ordeal of knowing each other, just for the chance to be alone together. Language might be the best thing that we have to bring the void between ourselves, but it will never be enough.

Carrow Narby, "Indescribable" from It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

[showmethesneer]

"Monsters represent our fears, traumas, aspirations, and desires. Mermaids, werewolves, cryptids, and witches all make regular appearances in works produced by queer storytellers because the monster embodies so much meaning at once, it remains a contradictory figure. It is our distorted mirror image, our secret self."

-"Indescribable" by Carrow Narby from It Came From The Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror edited by Joe Vallese

[beehaiku]

“My gender is void, the null set, nothing. But it is impossible for anyone to look at me and see nothing. I cannot make myself unseen.”

Carrow Narby, “Indescribable” from It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

This essay covers disability, gender, and being perceived as a “thing” even if your personhood is on some level acknowledged, especially in a hospital setting where you are totally vulnerable to what a doctor sees when they examine you. It’s really hitting home for me as someone who’s been through, and goes through regularly, the violation of self that medical interactions require. In relation to the horror movies discussed, The Blob and Society, the essay becomes a discussion of how the total dissolution of boundaries that blob-creatures achieve in combining the self with the other through absorption of the other by the self is the only way to truly be known without being perceived. I really enjoyed it (and am enjoying this whole anthology so far!) and it’s really cool to hear people like me say out loud the thoughts I have about myself. :)

[glitterpuff]

I'm working on new fiction, but I haven't sold or published any in a while. In the meantime, if you'd like, check out this story that I had in PodCastle back in 2018(!).

[mahariel-s]

CURRENTLY READING:

It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, edited by Joe Vallese. Published 2022 by The Feminist Press.

From the back cover:

"Twenty-five contemporary queer and trans writers reflect on the horror films that shaped them and shook them, from Hitchcock to Halloween to Hereditary."

Featuring essays written by:

Samuel Autman, Jen Corrigan, Viet Dinh, Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Ryan Dzelzkalns, Sarah Fonseca, Bruce Owens Grimm, Richard Scott Larson, Jonathan Robbins Leon, Tucker Lieberman, Zefyr Lisowski, Carmen Maria Machado, Laura Maw, Carrow Narby, Sachiko Ragosta, Sumiko Saulson, Prince Shakur, Will Stockton, Grant Sutton, Tosha R. Taylor, S. Trimble, Stefan Triplett, Addie Tsai, Joe Vallese, and Spencer Williams

[non-essere-cattivo]

Carrow Narby, Indescribable in It came from the closet. Queer reflections on horror, edited by Joe Vallese, p. 81

[senkovi]

In queer culture, in the media and stories produced by queer people about ourselves, monsters represent our fears, traumas, aspirations, and desires. Mermaids, werewolves, cryptids, and witches all make regular experiences in works produced by queer storytellers. Because the monster embodies so much meaning at once, it remains a contradictory figure. It is our distorted mirror image, our secret self. We are as ambivalent toward the monster as we are toward ourselves.

Carrow Narby, “Indescribable,” It Came From the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

[the-final-sentence]

Language might be the best thing that we have to bridge the void between ourselves, but it will never be enough.

Carrow Narby, from “Indescribable” 

[razorsadness]

One of the clearest memories that I have of my first relationship is lying in bed with my then-girlfriend, our bodies intertwined and pressed together as closely as possible. In that moment, my most fervent desire was that she and I could somehow be even closer. That we could exist physically together without any boundary or separation. I still feel that familiar pang sometimes: the hunger for impossible intimacy, a desire to be known completely without first having to be seen and scrutinized. As I have come to know myself better, this fantasy of perfect intimacy has revealed itself to be inextricably intertwined with the problem of gender. Gender, among its other applications, is the primary framework through which desire and romantic intimacy are understood. We are gay or straight or bisexual or pansexual or asexual: we desire men, or women, or all genders, or no one at all. But if I am nothing, if I am without gender, how can I ever be desired? Is intimacy possible—that is, is it legible as intimacy—without some kind of interplay between femininity and masculinity?

—Carrow Narby, from “Indescribable” (It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, The Feminist Press, 2022)

[smokefalls]

For one thing, I am not a woman. I wouldn’t know how to correct anyone about this, though, because I am not a man either. I am not something in-between, or in some third-gender category like nonbinary. My gender identity does not have a name, because I do not have a gender identity. My gender is void, the null set, nothing. But it is impossible for anyone to look at me and see nothing. I cannot make myself unseen.

Carrow Narby, "Indescribable" from It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

[wellesleyunderground]

Alternative Class Notes: Carrow Narby ‘11

How were you awesome this month?

I'm not sure that I have been, but that's okay.

What's on your mind?

The suffocating weight of just how much I don't want to do what I've been doing for the past several years.

This month has been

Frustrating

because...

Like everyone else, I'm navigating a lot of very heavy, very negative emotions. The world is falling apart, the bad guys are winning, and I feel deep, creeping existential despair. It's been the final straw in my constant waffling about what I want "to do with my life." I hate what I'm doing, it's just so boring and such drudgery even though arguably it's "important" work.

I wish people knew that

...it's bullshit to expect people to lock themselves into their life path at 18-22 years old.

After graduating from Wellesley, I thought I would be

...on a really clear, relatively direct trajectory toward tenured professorship, with just a minor detour into a master's degree before my doctorate because my undergraduate grades just were not very good.

but instead I am

...coming to terms with how much time I've wasted pursuing a career that I only half-heartedly desired in the first place. Academia is a crumbling industry, but even if it were doing great it's not what I've always wanted to do. I've always wanted to do something creative but I've been denying that part of myself since high school. I applied to liberal arts institutions instead of art schools. I let myself drift into grad school related to my undergrad studies instead of aggressively pursuing a creative path despite rejection.   At this point I'm still set on finishing my PhD, but after that I'm resolved to let myself off the hook about finding a career in "my field." I'll always have my education. It's pointless to dwell on whether or not it's been "a waste." I'm going to pursue work that actually interests me and makes me feel good. I've started to get back into visual art, and I've been writing fiction despite a lot of doubt about my talent or potential. I've also been proactive about spending more time with friends. I met someone new who told me that I'm "really easy to talk to," which was a fabulous compliment. People who only know me from Community might roll their eyes at that and it kind of made me laugh, but it is something I've been working on and the work has started to pay off. 

Love reading the Alternative Class Notes? Submit your own here!

[lordofmasks]

Artwork for the Mothers and Others Podcast

Hosted by Carrow Narby and Julian K. Jarboe. It’s all about maternal figures in mythology, folklore, history, and pop culture—especially scifi, fantasy, and horror genres. You can check it out at mothersandotherspodcast.com.

[glitterpuff]

Someday I would like to revisit these characters. Particularly Thunderhead.

[glittership]

Episode #67: "Instar" by Carrow Narby

Direct download

And here’s the RSS feed: http://glittership.podbean.com/feed/

Episode 67 is part of the Summer 2018 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/

    Instar

by Carrow Narby

      They just broke ground this week on a new high rise. When they cracked into the earth it flooded the neighborhood with the stench of sulfur. There’s a layer of ancient rot beneath the pavement. Centuries worth of life, ground into filth.

Or so I imagine. I had to look up the source of the smell and some local news site attributed it to “organic materials” in the soil. I was worried that it might be a gas leak.

For the past few mornings the wind has pushed the awful smell in through the screen above my bed. As bad as it is, it isn’t worth shutting the window. Even as late summer beats on, I can’t sleep without the weight and softness of ten thousand blankets. Without the breeze my nest would become unbearably hot, so I tolerate the smell of brimstone and corruption. It’s sort of fitting, I think, given the maggoty turn that my life has taken.

  Full episode after the cut.

  Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 67 for March 8, 2019. This is your host Keffy, and I’m super excited to share this story with you. Our story today is “Instar” by Carrow Narby, which is part of the Summer 2018 issue of GlitterShip.

  Carrow Narby lives on the north shore of Massachusetts. Their writing has been featured in Bitch, The Toast, The Establishment, and PodCastle. Follow them on Twitter @LocalCreature.

      Instar

by Carrow Narby

      They just broke ground this week on a new high rise. When they cracked into the earth it flooded the neighborhood with the stench of sulfur. There’s a layer of ancient rot beneath the pavement. Centuries worth of life, ground into filth.

Or so I imagine. I had to look up the source of the smell and some local news site attributed it to “organic materials” in the soil. I was worried that it might be a gas leak.

For the past few mornings the wind has pushed the awful smell in through the screen above my bed. As bad as it is, it isn’t worth shutting the window. Even as late summer beats on, I can’t sleep without the weight and softness of ten thousand blankets. Without the breeze my nest would become unbearably hot, so I tolerate the smell of brimstone and corruption. It’s sort of fitting, I think, given the maggoty turn that my life has taken.

There are these long, wonderful moments, in between waking and rising, when I am both sentient and senseless. The light doesn’t resolve yet into images. Sensation doesn’t crystallize into meaning. Best of all, I can’t feel my body or apprehend its shape.

You see an awful lot about monsters these days. Just everywhere you look, endless breathless chatter about fucking monsters, turning into monsters, giving birth to monsters. Beautiful and interesting people who just happen to be monsters: some sad grackle-winged boy, a girl with coral antlers. Everyone always looks so slender and sharp. Perfect rows of needle teeth, perfect iridescent scales, perfect gold stiletto claws. It seems downright glamorous, like it would all be neon witches’ sabbaths and subterranean raves or something.

For me, monsterhood is mostly just strangers demanding to know what I am. There wasn’t any kind of initiation waiting for me. No coven or cabal. No prophecy or secret past was revealed. It was on my own and by creeping increments that I realized I had become a thing.

Kris is a friend of a friend. I saw her around a few parties and we fumbled into each other’s orbits. She called out my name from across the room once, amid the din of disparate conversations. It was so charming, that little gesture of being summoned. I let her ask me out, to sit with her in that park at the edge of the North End.

When we meet, she wants to go down Hanover to Mike’s but I point just across the street to a tiny storefront with a blue and yellow sign. “It’s way better,” I insist, and I feel strangely proud as she acquiesces.

The leading edge of autumn has brought a welcome break from the suffocating heat, but it also means that the sunlight has shifted. As Kris and I sit together, the late afternoon light lances down at us. It’s relentless, prying. I wonder if she can tell how much I’m trying to hide from it.

Despite my anxiety, we talk easily and idly. When she was little, Kris recalls, she heard somewhere about the dangers of zebra mussels. They’re an invasive species around the Great Lakes, she explains. Her mother must have read a sign to her or something, warning boaters to inspect and clean their hulls. Except that Kris was maybe four at the time, and she had no concept yet of what a mussel is. She heard “zebra muscles.” What she pictured, she tells me, was downright nightmarish. Not a muscular zebra or something, but a boat encrusted with disembodied, pulsing zebra flesh. She says that the image came from nowhere except the most literal understanding of what she had heard, and that it became horrible only afterward, in retrospect.

“I didn’t understand but I just accepted it,” she laughs.

I grin too, and I tell her “I love that.” And I love sitting here, with a friend of a friend that I met at a party. Normality is too distant even to long for, but here is something so conventional, so pleasantly dull. I wonder if there are people who feel like this all the time and I almost ask that out loud.

But all at once I realize that she’s looking at me, and I can’t bear it. She can see me in the slanted orange light. The rays reveal the translucency around my edges, the ugly pulse of slime beneath the membrane of my skin. I can feel the buttons of my jacket straining. I can’t eat the pastry that I’ve bought, not in front of her. She must realize that my clothes are holding me into a human shape. She’s imagining the strange organs that shudder and twitch beneath the seams.

I can’t force myself to say much more before we part ways. She knows. I’m sure that I won’t hear from her again.

I slump back toward Haymarket. I huddle stingless on a crowded E train. My spines are sparse and transient: often I neglect to shave, sometimes my keys poke out through a hole that they’ve worn in the pocket of my coat.

It is the fate of monsters, no matter what, to attract would-be monster-slayers. For me, this has never been as straightforward as a jeering mob or as romantic as a lone man with a glittering sword. This time it’s kids. A small group of ninth or tenth graders, maybe, standing on the other side of the train car. They gesture toward me and consult each other in stage whispers, wondering aloud what I could possibly be.

There’s this image, a fragment of a story. I don’t remember where I picked it up or what first made me think of it, but it’s there in my brain and it’s this: Once upon a time a baby was found in a beehive.

By chance, a passing witch heard a newborn’s squall. Amid a hovering cloud of bees, she cracked apart a hollow log. And there was an infant nestled in the rot, slick with honey, as pale as a grub.

I don’t know what happens after that or why any of it happened at all. It had started with sacrificing some of the other larvae to widen her cell. And things just took off from there, I suppose. Things took a turn, as they will do.

At home I start to undress as soon as I’ve closed the door. When I finally peel the tight undermost layer away from my torso, my body sags out, shapeless. I slump onto the bed and burrow down into the tangle of blankets. As I curl up tight, I tuck a bit of sheet between every segment and fold, so that I don’t have to feel the awful touch of myself.

I can’t say when or how my metamorphosis began. Day by day I watched my face bloat outward, swallowing up my eyes, my jaw. My skin became a pallid casing. It strains to hold in my shuddering mass, as if my body wants to burst and dissolve.

I have always been drawn to hollows and nests and to the dirt. Spaces in the dark where a thing might press itself flush against the walls, unseen and safe. As a child I would build a cairn of pillows around myself before falling asleep. I used to turn over the rocks that edged my mother’s garden, to watch the millipedes and woodlice scatter. Eager to recoil from the sight of a grub writhing helplessly against the light.

In my tiny apartment there is an alcove that, I think, was meant for a writing desk. But I wedged my bed into it, and closed it off with a heavy curtain.

I guess that it has all been a sort of instinctive preparation. Like the bees widening the larval infant’s cell. The thing is, it’s not just shiny little flying things that start their lives as fat, fumbling worms. It isn’t all butterflies and bluebottles. There are things in the world that wriggle freely as larvae and then pupate into sessile blobs. I think about all those mornings when I stretch out shapeless and insensible. I wonder if I’ll turn out to be more of a sea sponge than a sphinx moth.

Kris calls. She wants to see me again.

We meet at my place. I don’t know what to say about the evening in the park but she doesn’t ask about it. She calls me by my name again. She wants to know if I’m alright.

I tell her about that unshakable image of the bee-child. “What must it be like,” I sigh. To wonder why, out of a sea of sisters, you were the one to swell into something wingless and terrible.

“What must it be like,” she echoes. She’s sitting beside me, looking down at her hands. She smells like soap and trampled grass. I want to settle in closer to her—to kiss her, I realize—but she has seen me in that searching autumn light.

“You know,” I say.

She takes my hand. “Is that your bed?” she asks, nodding toward the alcove.

“Yes.”

“Can I show you something?”

I don’t know how to respond. She tugs me gently toward the bed and draws the curtain aside. The final cast-off rays of sunset are glancing in through the window. She turns and looks at me. Her cheek catches the light with a faint damson iridescence. She tilts her head and reveals a weird translucency about her neck and face. I can see the steady pulse of veins and pulpy glands beneath her skin.

Her tone isn’t mocking, just forthright, as she asks, “Did you really think that you were special?”

I guess that I did. I tell her: “I thought I was alone.”

She reaches out to draw me close. We sink down into my nest and curl up tight against each other. In her touch I can feel the hum of twenty thousand sisters, the promise of clover and of wings.

  END

    “Instar” was originally published in The Fem, and is © Copyright Carrow Narby, 2017.

This recording is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license which means you can share it with anyone you’d like, but please don’t change or sell it. Our theme is “Aurora Borealis” by Bird Creek, available through the Google Audio Library.

You can support GlitterShip by checking out our Patreon at patreon.com/keffy, subscribing to our feed, or by leaving reviews on iTunes. You can also pick up a free audio book by going to www.audibletrial.com/glittership or buy your own copy of the Summer 2018 issue at www.glittership.com/buy

Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back soon with “These are the Attributes by Which You Shall Know God” by R.B. Lemberg.

Episode #67: “Instar” by Carrow Narby was originally published on GlitterShip

[smokefalls]

That is what indescribable really means. Not that a thing literally cannot be described in terms of its physical properties or observed behavior but that it exists so far outside the observer’s or the listener’s frame of reference that mere description—and perhaps even direct observation—cannot render it comprehensible. The phenomenon remains inscrutable; it resists legibility.

Carrow Narby, "Indescribable" from It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror

[smokefalls]

The nature of society is that we necessarily observe each other through certain prescribed lenses. Gender is one such lens. Not just a lens but, in its way, the entire telescope, observatory, research institution, and epistemology through which any and all observations are gathered, logged, and interpreted. Gender is inescapable. So, someone like me, however much I might insist that I “identify as agender,” can never actually be genderless. The best that I can hope for is what I usually get: I must be some kind of gender clown. A living parody—though a parody of what, exactly, no one can quite be sure. I might read as something like a woman, as a mannish, if not quite butch, lesbian. Or else I am curiously effeminate, a clumsy imitation of male femininity. An embarrassing distortion of womanhood or a wan pastiche of manhood—ridiculous, either way.

Carrow Narby, "Indescribable" from It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror