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 all content copyright 2003
Slow Sand Writers Society
or individual authors

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Jean Hanson

Jean Hanson's essays and short stories have appeared in magazines including North American Review, Zoetrope, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Nimrod. An MFA graduate from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she was nominated for a 2002 Pushcart Prize, has received an Artist's Fellowship from the Colorado Council on the Arts, the Litteral Latte essay prize,the Hackney Prize in the short story, the Writers' Repertory Award in Fiction, and a Poets & Writers, Inc. award for emerging fiction writers.

Publications

  • 2003 New Letters, "The Gift of Her Hands," short fiction
  • 2003 The Alchemist Review, "La Squelette Humaine," short fiction
  • 2003 Green Tricycle, "Bucket," short fiction
  • 2002 Kalliope, "True Love," short fiction
  • 2002 Tiny Lights, "The Lightning in My Eyes," reprint; creative nonfiction
  • 2001 Many Mountains Moving, "Slit-Eyed Sparrow," creative nonfiction
  • 2001 Alaska Quarterly Review, "Soup," short fiction
  • 2001 Nimrod, "The Cutting Garden," short fiction
  • 2000 Indiana Review, "Runaway Moon," short fiction
  • 2000 Undressed, "The Loop," creative nonfiction
  • 1999 North American Review, "The Fever," creative nonfiction
  • 1999 Kaleidoscope, "The Albino Finch," reprint; short fiction
  • 1999 Puerto del Sol, "Saving Laika," short fiction
  • 1999 Zoetrope, "Love is in the Little Lies," short fiction
  • 1998 Creative Nonfiction, "The Lightning in My Eyes," creative nonfiction
  • 1998 Mediphors, "The Albino Finch," short fiction
  • 1989 Owen Wister Review, "Chain Reaction," short fiction
  • 1984 Colorado Monthly, "Carver's Uncomfortable Art," essay

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Short story "True Love" (previously published in Kalliope)

When I was in grade school and my face was as smooth and shiny as the skin of a white eggplant, three boys vied for my attention. I tested them: Wear green on Thursday. Sing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" on Main Street. Bring me the carcass of a wild animal that died a natural death. Only Matthew prevailed. For me, he simulated puking during a filmstrip on Magellan. For me, he walked barefoot on hot pavement. And when I asked him to swallow a worm, he opened his mouth wide and dangled the creature over his tongue. I stopped him. He didn't have to kill to prove himself; he only had to be willing to. As soon as I declared him the victor of my love, however, he lost interest.

As a teenager, my dates were cutout dolls. At first, Roy Rogers stood proud and erect on his plastic stand. But after movies and bowling and miniature golf, after milkshakes and burgers and fries, he was greasy and smudged, bent at the waist; perhaps he'd been too old for me. Robin Hood, though, was made of durable coated paper. He had no long pants in his wardrobe, so we stayed in most nights, entertaining ourselves inappropriately. During a vigorous necking session in the basement rec room, just as the nuns had intimated, the romance ended. Robin slipped between the seat cushions of the couch and disappeared forever.

In my college years, I lit incense, listened to music, and explored previous lives. I learned I had dated Abraham Lincoln. I remembered the nickname I'd given him: Ham, because, in downplaying his raw-boned backwoods beginnings, he overcompensated. To "How old are you?" for instance, he would answer, "One score and three." Ham was a rail-splitter, a flatboatman, storekeeper, postmaster, surveyor—the kind of man I'd been warned from: a charming loser. I paid for our dinners out, bought theater tickets, gave him first editions, begged him to make something of himself. He accepted my money and advice, my support while he studied law; I even looked the other way during his infatuation with Ann Rutledge; yet once he passed the bar he dumped me for a woman from a fancy Southern family.

After that I dated books—long ones, short ones, paperbacks, hard covers, romances, mysteries, spy novels, poetry. I picked them up at the library, a new one every week. I admit it: I was promiscuous. That is, until I discovered Remembrance of Things Past. At three thousand pages, here, finally, was a relationship that could last. So Proust shared my bed. By the time I had finished Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove, I was sure of our rapport. One Friday, I came home early, ready to settle in with a bowl of tapioca pudding and my beloved. I walked through my kitchen. The floors shone, the stove gleamed, the sink sparkled. I opened my bedroom door, then gasped. There she was, my cleaning lady, sprawled across my bed, transfixed, her nose in my Proust. "You cad!" I screamed at Volume Two. I wrenched him from her arms, ran out of the house, and hurried straight to the library. I stuffed him in the return chute roughly. "That's it," I said, and vowed never to renew again.

That evening, in a bar so dim that my bright red fingernail polish took on the rich, smoky hue of an aged burgundy, I nursed my disappointment. I sipped a single malt scotch, neat, and practiced spitting the word "spurned." It was then that I sensed someone watching me from across the room. I looked up, my eyes heavy-lidded, my lips pursed. Who would he turn out to be, my mysterious admirer? I squinted through the smoke. I concentrated. But it was simply too dark to see if this attractive stranger was a man or a post or a painting or a chair. Nevertheless, I would call him Armando.

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