Ricky

by Whitney Collins

Overview

From Whitney Collins, the award-winning author of Big Bad, come twenty-three new dark and derelict (and hilarious) tales about—you guessed it—love. 

With Ricky, Collins applies her sharp eye, black humor, and generous heart to love stories (and the stories we tell ourselves about love). Among the wacky, tacky, lovesick, and lovelorn characters are: Ilona, the misanthropic mother and unhappy fiancé who is increasingly transfixed by a rash of local shark attacks; Imogen, the sperm bank client who cultivates the love she madly desires inside herself; and Aurora Flood, the coma survivor on a mission to plant a sacred seed from the Olive Garden. Blending elements of southern gothic, speculative fiction, and horror, Ricky & Other Love Stories is political and personal, bitter and sweet: ultimately, a lot like love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781956046243
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	08/25/2024
Series:	Series in Kentucky Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Whitney Collins is the author of Big Bad, which won the 2019 Mary McCarthy Prize, a 2022 Gold IPPY, and a 2021 Bronze INDIES. Whitney earned a Distinguished Story by The Best American Short Stories 2022. She also won a 2020 Pushcart Prize, a 2020 Pushcart Special Mention, the 2020 American Short(er) Fiction Prize, and the 2021 ProForma Contest. Her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, AGNI, The Idaho Review, Gulf Coast, The Pinch, Grist, The Best Small Fictions 2022, Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror (Catapult), and Fractured Literary Anthology 3, among others. She received her MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing and lives in Kentucky with her sons.

Read an Excerpt

"Brain, Brian"

(Pinesap Plaza III)

Marvin’s tumor is the size of an unshelled walnut. His doctor, who wears Crocs the color

of bile, has told Marvin and Marvin’s wife, Cathy, that he plans on removing the tumor with a knife that’s not really a knife but a beam of light. When the surgery was first explained, Marvin saw a hot spatula cutting cold cheesecake, but now that the operation is tomorrow, he keeps seeing a red, plastic flashlight pointed at a dense, winter wood. Who goes there? He hears the surgeon call out, gleefully. Make yourself known!

The neurosurgeon is as young as Marvin’s son, Brian. Brian no longer speaks to Marvin.

Brian lives in Arizona with a girl Marvin and Cathy have never met but whose name is Begonia. They’ve seen a picture of their son and this girl. A dog that looked like a coyote was also in the picture. “Who wants a cartoon for a dog?” Marvin asked Cathy. “Who wants a houseplant for a girlfriend?”

Marvin was a terrible father, but the tumor has lessened the reality of this. The larger the tumor grows, the better father Marvin was. And the faster Marvin walks, the faster the tumor grows. Which is why, every morning, he goes to the mall in his big white shoes, the ones that look like loaves of junk bread, and walks eight-thousand steps. He walks the length of Pinesap Plaza fourteen times, back and forth, and as he does, he recalls things he thought about doing with Brian as things he actually did. Camping under a swirl of stars. Shooting clay pigeons. Making cowboy beans in a cast-iron frying pan. “There’s Orion,” he hears himself say. “More pintos?”

In the early morning mall, the managers raise the gated storefronts with much audible

ado. The mall fountains sputter to life. Together, the fountains and the gates sound like static, and Marvin’s mind becomes the roaring space between canyon walls. He passes stores. There’s Queen B., Banana Pants, Mr. Stupid. He stares at the things for sale and cannot remember what they are for. He imagines a pair of underwear on a potted begonia. A women’s yellow sweater on a coyote. A whoopee cushion as a map of Arizona. Marvin moves his big white shoes faster. He forgets Brian’s thin shoulders and crystalline singing voice. He forgets Brian’s pitiful deer eyes, his milkweed hair. Instead, Marvin remembers throwing a football that was never thrown, laughing at a joke that was never cracked.

At the end of Marvin’s morning walk is Sprinkles, the ice cream kiosk. If Marvin times it

right, he takes his last step when Dashel, the ice cream boy, flips over the OPEN sign. “Good morning, Marvin,” Dashel says. “The usual?” Marvin’s excitement is such that he can only nod. His head nods and the tumor nods, and fireworks go off in Marvin’s mind— red and green and violet.

Dashel scoops the vanilla while Marvin watches. It’s a sphere of snow rolled through a

pristine field, the belly of a snowman that Marvin and Brian did and didn’t build. Dashel rolls the vanilla through rainbow sprinkles, a brain dragged through artificial memories. He puts the ice cream into a paper bowl and places a shelled walnut on top. He hands the ice cream to Marvin, and Marvin goes and sits on a bench by the fountains. Every morning, he sits there until the ice cream has melted and the sprinkles have bled and all that remains is the walnut—floating in gray matter—and Marvin, quite pleased. Tomorrow is another story. Tomorrow he will have his brain. Today he has Brian.

Editorial Reviews

Featured in Book of the Month's Volume 0

"Tales that tackle 'love and the stories we tell ourselves about it' through humor, horror and elements of Southern Gothic."

—Jacelyn Sturgill, Chevy Chaser

“Rippling with lusty eccentrics and village witches and any number of go-for-broke schemers, Ricky & Other Love Stories is the kind of wickedly funny book that, whenever you throw your head back in laughter, drops a fierce capsule of truth into the pink of your throat.”

—Karen Tucker, author of Bewilderness

“If you prefer your love stories shaken, stirred, or dashed upon the rocks, Ricky & Other Love Stories is for you. With her trademark brevity, insight, and wit, Whitney Collins beautifully blurs the line between love and obsession. These stories yank aside the curtain, exposing the raw, and often rusty, inner workings of human affection.”

—Jen Fawkes, author of Tales the Devil Told Me

“In her latest collection, Whitney Collins doubles down on her reputation as a fiercely imaginative and devastatingly astute writer. The characters within possess humor, passion, and (sometimes) crazy outlooks on life but are capable of striking moments of clarity. Reading Ricky & Other Love Stories, I couldn’t help but be reminded of such witty and singular writers as Jill McCorkle and Bobbie Ann Mason.”

—Hannah Pittard, author of We Are Too Many

“Ricky & Other Love Stories is brilliant, tender, and true. In these stories, Whitney Collins achieves an ecstatic portrait of the human heart.”

—Dana Vachon, coauthor with Jim Carrey of Memoirs and Misinformation  

“In Ricky & Other Love Stories, Whitney Collins reveals and revels in the lives of the odd, the grotesque, the lonely, and unloved. Combining elements of horror, magic realism, and Southern Gothic, Collins never ceases to amuse or amaze. She has a voice so funny, so unsparing—yet so humane and tender—that it’s hard to think of any other writer doing anything quite like her.”

—Andrew Bertaina, author of One Person Away From You

Past Praise for Big Bad:

“Beautifully written, wildly imaginative stories.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Not a word is wasted in Big Bad, an unusual and masterful collection of short stories.”

—Foreword Reviews

“Collins exhibits a contagious appreciation for the world’s strange horrors, big and small.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A deliciously dark world in which anything is possible and the most horrifying is probable.”

—Southern Review of Books

From the Publisher