On this page, you will find excerpts of unpublished shorts. If you want to read more, please email me–cdulaney.willett@gmail.com

Stripping Blue

I was born in July, but you wouldn’t know from the way it welts my neck. Over the phone, my mother’s voice comes through in splinters of sweat and stress. The job is going fine, I tell her. I am the goddess of search engine optimization. The tech speak scuttles her off to prune the hydrangea.
Goddess scrambled is dodges, plus an s. I was laid off two weeks ago.
Back in September, my roommate Danya and I toasted to our senior year at Wellesley, and to what we were sure would be a spangled future. The foam bubbling out of our pilfered champagne flutes felt frothy and right then. By spring it was sour and flat and we made ironic eyes as we clinked. At the office, Jonathan Coulton’s “Code Monkey” looped over and over, chafing against stale button-downs and filmy teeth until the shredded lips of my supervisor pushed out a version of those world-crashing words. Now, in the 95-degree heat of the studio I share with Danya, I have only Sarah Bernhardt and Greta Garbo, who pass out baleful stares through faux-vintage sepia. MORE

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Winter is coming to Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement, and the Café Carette is filled with burbles and trills and newly-furred Parisians. No one sits alone, apart from a lady of a certain age, near-mummified and imperious, and a girl of about twenty, rosy and intent. The mutton watches the lamb, who watches the passersby in between pretending to read Elle and taking tiny, grimacing sips of her café allongé. The one is here because she is the owner, and because her husband is probably having an affair with the neighbor’s guardian; as for the other, Café Carette is simply where she goes every afternoon.

It’s odd, though, as she has come to Paris for New and Unexpected and Spontaneous, as she has come fleeing routine, that her world remains one built on order. On order, and pieces, and agendas, an endless and planned mundane-ness. Sometimes, when the city’s presence manages to silence the little analyzer and editor who live in her head, she catches a smidgen of hope –but only sometimes. She still divides her day into rigid segments, runs the same loop from her apartment down to Ile St. Louis and back along the right bank, buys the same baguette aux cereals from the same corner boulangerie.

“Bonjour Mademoiselle. Et comment va les etudes?” The boulangier asks, as he always does, while he slides the baguette into its yellow wrapper.

“Toujours dures,” she answers, placing her fifty-five centimes on the counter (the boulangier gets flustered making change.  The plump religieuses in their flaky wimples (or sometimes the rose macaroons or the intricate, shiny mille feuilles) continue their taunting as she turns to leave. MORE

After the Sting Has Gone

Usually I get couples. It’s a bicycle buggy built for two, and half full, it looks sort of dejected.
Most common are the love-struck young tourists, followed by the love-stuck older tourists, PETA supporters, eco-hipsters, and fathers during take your daughter to work day. If I want to make real money, though, I have to wait until evening, around the lower confines of Central park, when tourists are replaced with businessmen, flushed and flush and blearily hopeful about their chances of turning biker chick fantasies into reality. The blur of salmon and cream who flagged me down as he stumbled out of the Oak Room, was all of these things. One docksider had barely landed on the platform before he’d asked me my name.
“Caelie, ” I said, and then wished I’d said something different, more flamboyantly ridiculous. MORE