"Fruit of the Dead"

Rachel Lyon is author of the novels Self-Portrait with Boy—a finalist for the Center for Fiction's 2018 First Novel Prize—and Fruit of the Dead. Lyon's short work has appeared in One Story, The Rumpus, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at various institutions, most recently Bennington College, and lives with her husband and two young children in Western Massachusetts.

Lyon applied the Page 69 Test to Fruit of the Dead and reported the following:

By page 69 of Fruit of the Dead, Cory has just agreed to work for a few weeks as a nanny for Rolo Picazo's two children, Spenser and Fern. She has signed his NDA, and he's driven her from all she knows to the rocky coast of Maine. It is nighttime and, far from any electric lights, Rolo seems particularly menacing to Cory: "In the fog and dark, with a child’s sleeping head on each of his broad shoulders, he is very other. She knows he is a big man, but he looks bigger here, more sinister. The contours of his face seem unstable somehow, as if his outlines have been drawn with thread." However, a boat appears, shining its light across the sea...:

In its illumination the beach and dock take on their familiar textures, sand and splinters. The water shines opaque as foil, and Rolo goes dimensional again at last, just some fattish aging dad holding his tired daughter, sweat darkening his pits, fog-demon no longer.

Under the lamppost in the boat’s nose stands a hooded figure, dwarfed by a massive lifejacket and anchoring the craft with a ferry pole. A cigarette glows in the shadow of its hood. It raises its unoccupied hand in eerie salute and, in a wry, time-sanded voice, greets them all: Ahoy.

Sherry, Rolo says. How’s tricks?

Business is booming, the captain replies, deadpan, and secures the boat with a length of rope to a piling. Hey, kids.

Spenser says, I went to sleep-away camp.

You’re a big boy now, the captain observes.

Snared a new sitter for the kids, Rolo says, indicating Cory.

Great, says the captain without interest, and pulls open a door in the gunwale: All aboard.

Spenser climbs in, followed by Rolo, balancing Fern. The boat rocks. Where the smooth wall in the hull hinges open there has been secured a handmade mechanism: the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy. As they pass, the captain pulls it open, and the dummy’s weighted eyeballs roll, the better to watch as Spenser, then Fern, deposit their tokens in its mouth. The coins clatter within, metal against metal. When the captain releases the head it snaps shut again, cartoon eyes bobbing.

Rolo extends a hand. Cory hesitates.

His outstretched fingers beckon impatiently, slapping his palm. Come on, he says. Sherry doesn’t have all night.

This scene is a particularly surreal one. Sherry (our counterpart for Charon, who ferries the dead across the river Styx), and her tricked-out boat, are written with intentional campiness, and campiness is not for everyone. While the book is semi-satirical in certain ways, and can be campy from time to time, I wrote from both Cory and Emer's perspectives with minimal irony, because I feel strongly that too ironic a tone will minimize a character's humanity. This is a long way to say that, while this scene is crucial—Cory is making her final decision, whether or not to enter Rolo's isolated world—I don't feel that Fruit of the Dead passes the Page 69 Test. Tonally it contains only one facet of the overall book, and plot-wise, there are more telling scenes.

Visit Rachel Lyon's website.

The Page 69 Test: Self-Portrait with Boy.

My Book, The Movie: Self-Portrait with Boy.

--Marshal Zeringue