Abby Geni
(JEE-nee)
Stories & Essays Available Online
The Rapture of the Deep
The Missouri Review
Eloise hated and adored her scuba gear in equal measure. On the deck of the Aphrodite, she stripped it away like the plating of an exoskeleton—her monocular face mask, her breathing apparatus, and the sticky second skin of her wetsuit. Sunset stained the sky, reflected in choppy shards across the surface of the ocean. There would be no more diving today. The ship was chugging toward shore.
Childish
Triquarterly
I have fallen in love with a willow tree. I first saw it a week ago, on a golden, dusty afternoon. You and I were out for our daily constitutional. You move with a walker these days, tennis balls affixed to the bottom. You hunch over the metal frame, a shuffling figure with a cap of white curls.
The Sin Eater
Los Angeles Review of Books
At first glance, Alice Thomas Ellis might not seem an exemplar of Gothic writing. Her work is witty, scintillating, at times even comic. Her dialogue fairly glitters. She has been compared to Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark. As a rule, her writing defies easy categorization. Her work is an alchemical blend of disparate elements — humor and darkness, exquisite prose and empty banter, the spiritual and the commonplace. She writes about the trials and tribulations of the English middle class. She writes about ordinary people thrown out of their usual rhythms and routines by visitors, by holidays, by illness, by love. She writes with poetry and biting insight.
But what interests me most are her monsters.
Mysteries & Memoirs
Necessary Fiction
It began with Agatha Christie, as so many things do. In a moment of curiosity, I picked up The Murder on the Orient Express, and a few days later I read And Then There Were None. Over the month that followed, I devoured every one of Christie’s dozens and dozens of marvelous mysteries.
Lakeshore
Chicago Review of Books
My aunt has an apartment on Lake Shore Drive. There’s a bank of windows that overlooks the water. There’s a balcony that no one ever uses because the breeze is too powerful, the sound of traffic too persistent. The lake changes by the hour—now tropical turquoise, now murky, now topped by whipped cream whitecaps, now stone-flat and lightless, now dotted with sailboats, now bejeweled by birds.
The Urban Wild
Chicago Magazine
In 1987, there were rumors of mink in LaBagh Woods. The forest preserve on the city’s Northwest Side was a tradition in my family. My father, an avid bird watcher, had mapped the shimmering gravel trails that followed the line of the old railroad track through the foliage. On a balmy spring day, he and I entered the forest from the south. We passed fallen logs studded with mushrooms and marshy pools gleaming in the underbrush. I was 8 years old, clutching my father’s hand. I knew what mink looked like—smaller than otters, sleek and clever, usually found near water. We approached a bridge so thoroughly coated in graffiti that the clashing colors danced before my eyes, doubled in the water, a chaos of indecipherable symbols. My father and I lingered there, inhaling the musk of the river. We saw a turtle and a cloud of dragonflies. We did not see any mink.
New Books
Orion Magazine
The turtle was almost as big as I was. It looked like a relic from the deep ocean, or perhaps the distant past—a cruel, hooked beak and a shell studded with sharp points. The alligator snapping turtle was theoretically benign, but its broad maw and vicious claws were a bit too reminiscent of dragons and dinosaurs for my taste.