[Fiction] The Amazon Princess of Globeville

by Thomas C. Mavroudis

1980-1986

Catherine is a poor thing. She hears people say so. They say her teeth look like two fists balled up into each other. She can’t climb the rope even though her arms look like a monkey’s. She can’t run because of her medicine shoes. They say she has frog’s eyes. Her best friend’s grandfather tells her, “You’re such an ugly little boy. I hope you grow up to be a nun.” Some boys at the Kmart called her a beaner.

Catherine: poor thing. For Halloween, she was Wonder Woman. “This is perfect, Cath,” her mother said. Her Wonder Woman Underoos looked exactly like what the Amazon princess wore on television. Catherine even had her own golden headband. The only things missing were the boots and the lasso. “Look at her,” they said during the costume parade. “She’s just wearing her panties.”

Catherine wore a passed-down Girl Scout uniform in the St. Patrick’s Day parade with achievement patches sewn on that she didn’t earn. The entire troop wore a mismatched green patchwork of the same. They were placed in line directly behind the Budweiser Clydesdales and ate sandwiches wrapped in wax paper while they marched, dodging piles of horse dung. The girls didn’t question why they have to eat their sandwiches as they march, or why they were the only troop doing so. “Oh, look at that little welfare troop,” the audience said as they passed by trying to munch their bologna on white bread.

Catherine had to wear a bra when she was in sixth grade. Not a cami, not a tank top, but a thing with straps and wires and lace and support. The boys who knew better and the boys who didn’t chased her onto the dirt soccer field and snapped her bra amid the red-ant mounds and the green beer-bottle glass. And all the girls, except for the Black girls, were jealous. Catherine just wanted to work on her newspaper.

1979

Catherine sits on the couch, watching Days of Our Lives, her feet tucked beneath her. She lifts up and looks out the window. Nothing.

In the kitchen, her grandmother burns toast for Catherine’s lunch. She burns it because she doesn’t want Catherine to get sick. To keep Catherine from getting sick, her grandmother keeps the pots and pans on the counters. She keeps the boxes of cereal and cans of soup on the counters. Although she has never done it, Catherine’s grandmother is afraid she might have put mouse poison in the cupboards.

After it pops, she puts the toast on a plastic plate and rubs cold, hard butter across the black surface. Flecks of earlier toast dot the yellow stick like stubble.

The Ty-D-Bol Man cruises a suburban toilet, and Catherine stands up, goes to the window, parting the smoke-greasy sheers. Nothing.

“Here, Cath,” her grandmother says. The cobblestones of butter slowly soften and spread across the toast, pooling in the crushed depressions.

Catherine turns from the window. “Can I have some milk, Gramma?”

“We’re out of milk.”

Catherine smiles. The wider her silly smile grows, the wider her cola brown eyes open. “Can I have a pop, Gramma?”

“Okay, Catherine. You know which one is the pop, right?” Gramma sits down on the opposite end of the couch. She twists her long black hair into a ponytail, adjusts her black tank top and the black bra beneath it, and lights a Kool. She is not quite forty, but nobody knows for sure, and it is difficult to tell her age, especially on Friday nights.

Catherine pulls open the refrigerator door with both hands. There are eight red-white-and blue cans inside. She knows that much. She counts them several times. There are three that look one way and five that look the other way, and they all have a capital P on them. She looks into the haze of the living room. She’s afraid to touch the wrong can, but she holds one of each in her scabby hands. Maybe she can feel the right one. She smells them, but they both smell only of the refrigerator.

The back door begins to jiggle and Catherine jumps, shoving the cans back onto the wire shelf, slamming the refrigerator door. She waits for Grampa to once again solve the puzzle of the back door. When he does, she runs to him, hugging his legs despite the black, oily handprints. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says. Grampa has scabby hands too. Sometimes he has a scabby face. Catherine thinks he must fall down a lot, just like her.

“Grampa,” Catherine says, yanking open the refrigerator and grabbing the cans again as if she just had the idea, “what do you want to drink?”

“You know I don’t drink that shit, honey,” he answers, taking one of the cans and popping the top. Catherine smells the cold, familiar smell of poison and isn’t thirsty anymore. She isn’t hungry either.

1980

Catherine, teeth brushed, long black hair combed and braided, goes to the window before bed. “Oh no,” she cries, “oh no, no, no.”

Gramma looks away from Johnny Carson. “What’s a matter, Catherine? Is your nose bleeding?”

“The gate, Gramma. Somebody’s left the gate open.”

“That’s okay, baby, come here and lie down, now,” Gramma says. She scratches Catherine’s head until she begins snoring. “Son of a bitch,” she says, looking out the window.

2008

Below, in the shadows of the highway above, passing warehouses and train tracks, Catherine tells her daughter, Lilly, “Daddy didn’t know people lived down here, can you believe it?” Lilly doesn’t believe it. The dog-food plant continues to pump its rancid fumes, but the other factories are closed and rusting. A man naps on a couch on his front porch. Maybe it is not his front porch. Weeds dominate the roses. In a few parts, the roses have won over. It is hot and loud: dogs, music, and freeway traffic. Catherine looks around at all the decrepit houses, astonished that people still live down here. But what’s more amazing is the new construction, the modern townhomes, the refurbished dive bars. Catherine thinks somebody has tricked these people.

Catherine wonders if this is what Stockholm syndrome feels like. The neighborhood is so ugly, but she loves it. It makes her feel warm inside, like a slap in the face. They drive past the old school, children running on lush grass where Catherine used to stumble over dirt and trash.

She can’t decide if it’s safe to get out of the car and walk around. She’s not sure she wants to know.

1983

Maria S. lives directly across the street, and Maria V. lives on the corner. Two houses to the left is Teresa, and next to her is Isobel, whom everybody calls Pinky. On that opposite corner from Maria V. is Junior (one of many in the neighborhood—his given name is Victor), who runs the girls down like some apocalyptic marauder with his Big Wheel. Way down on the next block are Heather and Fat Gloria. There is no Skinny Gloria, no Little Gloria. As an adult, Catherine will realize there is a White Gloria, but nobody called her that. And then she will remember White Gloria’s name is actually Jessica.

From the front yard, behind the safety of the chain-link fence, Catherine can see all these houses. The Torres house. The Rios house. The Valdez house. Far down, she can see the beautiful roses that guard Fred and Hildy Herman’s. She can even see the weeping birch that shades her great-grandmother’s house. The weeping birch she calls the ladybug tree, because it is infested with fat little aphids and the ladybugs that gorge themselves on the pests. But the house itself, she can only see in the winter, when the nasty stink trees, the ghetto palms—what some botanist mislabeled Tree-of-Heaven—that run uninhibited along Mrs. Freise’s fence are dormant.

She counts the houses on her block: first, the houses across the street and then the houses on her side, but not her own house. Never her own house. When she forgets, when she ends up with fifteen in total instead of fourteen, she finds a crack somewhere in the sidewalk, a natural crack, not a seam in the concrete, and whispers “liar” to the crack seven times.

Sometimes, when she can’t eat her burned toast, she finds a dark stain in the carpet and whispers “liar.” She whispers it to rust marks in the bathtub at night when she can’t pee. At school it is easy, all the raw fissures in the playground’s old asphalt. When boys pinch her ass, or ignore her; when girls make fun of her medicine shoes, or say she smells like pickles, “liar,” she whispers, over and over again.

1982

Catherine hula-hoops in her yard on the dry grass while Gramma sits on the porch, on a white wire-frame picnic chair, smoking, flipping through People. As she did once a week, Dana Torres steps out of her house across the street, her long brown legs, the legs of an Aztec idol, striding across the burning street to Catherine’s fence.

“Hi, Dana,” Catherine says. Dana waves her fingers. She has a beautiful triangular beak of a nose and white teeth the color of chalk. She smells like Coppertone, although she doesn’t need it.

“Hi, Mrs. Martinez. Can Catherine come over and play?” She is at least four years older than Catherine but can pass for sixteen, and does.

“Are you crazy?” Gramma says. She waves her away with her cigarette. Catherine always wants to play at Dana’s, but Gramma never lets her.

1979-1983

Catherine says, “Mama, I love you.”

And her mother says, “Stop being a weirdo.”

Catherine says, “Mama, when are we going on vacation again?”

And her mother says, “We don’t have to go on vacation like that ever again. After the baby is born, we’re all going on a real vacation.”

Catherine says, “Mama, when you’re home next time, can I please have a sleepover?”

And her mother says, “Don’t be a beggar.”

Catherine says, “Mama, look…those boys are climbing—”

And her mother says, “Don’t be a tattletale.”

Catherine says, “Mama, when I grow up, I want to be a laitress.”

And her mother doesn’t say anything.

1982

Saturday night and almost everybody is home. Catherine tries to sleep, but her bed is in the living room and her bed is the couch. She pretends to sleep. It smells like the bar: beer and cigarettes. Behind her eyelids, she knows it looks like the bar, dim and hazy, brown and yellow. But it doesn’t sound like the bar.

In the bar, even when the jukebox plays “Rose-Colored Glasses,” everybody is happy. They laugh and sing. They sing about Luckenbach, Texas. Waylon, Willie, and the boys. They sing about tears in their beer. They sing about how hard it is to be humble. “Hi, sweetheart,” they say. They give her peppermints and butterscotch. They give her quarters for the jukebox. They give her quarters to keep. She sits at the bar, eating a bag of stale popcorn, until it’s time. “Cath,” someone says, “you better get your grandpa, now.” Sometimes it’s the bartender. Sometimes it’s Gramma.

Catherine says, “Come on, Grampa,” grabbing a rough, empty hand. When he realizes it’s her, he picks her up. He is beer soaked, sweating beer.

“Here’s Catherine!” he says, tossing her into the air, coming close to the Budweiser globe with the rotating Clydesdales and wagon.

“Okay, Dean,” someone says, “you better get Catherine home.”

“But Catherine’s here. She just got here, goddammit. Here, Catherine, play us a tune.”

At some point, they leave.

It’s another Saturday night, and Gramma has sent her uncle to get Grampa.

Catherine thinks, One Saturday night, when everyone is yelling on the porch, I’m going to leave. I’m going to go to Great Gramma’s house. Before they come in and wake me up, I’m going to call Mama and Mama will come and get me, or send Bernie to get me, or send someone.

1989

Catherine and her mother drive the tangerine Chevette across town as if they are the only car on the road. Catherine carefully applies her mascara in time with the bumps and seams of the highway. She sprays her hair again with the cucumber hairspray, and Mama chokes. “Sorry, Ma,” Catherine says.

There is no GPS, no MapQuest. There are pay phones and Yellow Pages. They exit the highway and drive down the boulevard that separates one gang from the other. They come to a neighborhood of old Victorians.

“Is it around here?” Mama asks.

“I don’t think so, Ma. He said it’s past the zoo.”

They come to the neighborhood that Catherine had been bussed into for school.

“Keep an eye out. It’s gotta be around here, right, Cath?”

“I…I don’t know.” Catherine dabs eyeliner from the vitreous humor of her eye with a tissue.

They keep driving, past the university, the university hospital. They come to a stoplight. To the right is the new mall with Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. Both women are afraid of the mall; How can I help you? doesn’t mean the same to them as it does to women with Gucci handbags and Bally shoes. To the left is an arch of old green trees. A gateway.

“Not here,” Mama says.

“I think so. I think this is what he said.” Catherine isn’t looking. She is carefully drawing her red lipstick along her bursting lips.

“Are you sure? I don’t want to get pulled over.”

Catherine looks at her mother, then into the neighborhood. “Ma, who is going to pull us over?”

“Isn’t this a, uh, private community?”

“Come on, Ma. There’s no gate. It’s just a neighborhood.”

“A fancy one. Are you sure this is right?”

They turn left. The streets are wide and smooth. The houses are brick mini-mansions. They can see tennis courts in the backyards. A Mercedes is parked in a driveway as though it is not a Mercedes. There is another, and another. There is a BMW with an honor student bumper sticker. In the park, teenagers play catch with lacrosse sticks.

“Shit, Cath,” Mama says.

They turn down the wide streets, deeper into the neighborhood until they find the street they are looking for.

“I guess this is it,” Catherine says, patting parts of her head and fluffing others. To the boy she is meeting, she will be the most beautiful girl he will ever see in his life.

The Chevette creeps down blocks of long, wide yards. There is a house that looks like an Arabian palace. There is a house that looks like the headquarters of a James Bond villain. Catherine wonders what the neighborhood looks like at Christmas, and smiles.

The Chevette pulls past the house, a flat ranch; maybe it’s too simple.

“That was it, Ma. That was the number.” She thinks she sees the boy pacing behind the picture window.

Mama, defying the imagined laws of the neighborhood’s covenant, makes a U-turn at the next intersection, and the Chevette shudders. It stalls before the house.

“What happened?” Catherine asks, gathering her stuff.

“Nothing. Go. Just go.” Mama is smiling, pumping the gas pedal, cranking the ignition until it fires. Catherine kisses Mama.

When Catherine opens the Chevette door, it falls from its hinge. “Oh shit, Ma,” Catherine says, trying to hold on to the door.

“Shit, shit,” Mama says, looking around, hoping no one is watching, hoping no one is calling the cops. “Just give me it, Catherine. Go. Go!”

Catherine aligns the door in its place, and Mama grabs on. “I love you,” Catherine says as her mother pulls away. At the stop sign, Mama pulls the door onto the passenger’s seat and drives off.

1983

Sheila tells Catherine she is moving. Like Catherine, Sheila lives with her grandmother. They are on the swings, their feet passing cautiously over small pools of rainwater that have collected in the sand’s depressions. Earthworms writhe, drowning in the clear water.

“I’m going to have my own room,” she tells Catherine, “with pink walls and curtains. And I’m going to have a canopy bed, and a cuckoo clock and a Barbie Dreamhouse.”

Catherine has a Barbie Dreamhouse, but it is at Bernie’s apartment. Her cousin Tammy plays with it more than she does. Tammy calls her on the phone and says, “Guess what I’m doing, Cath-er-rine?”

“Stop it,” Catherine says. She wants to talk to Mama. Mama tells her not to worry.

“Please, Mama, don’t let her touch any of the little foods, or the plates. She’ll lose them.”

Tammy calls again and says, “Look at this little chicken leg, Cath-er-rine.”

Catherine doesn’t have to sleep on the couch. There is her mother’s room, her uncle’s room, both in the basement. After Grampa dies, there is the space in bed next to Gramma. But every bedroom has a closet, and in the house’s closets, Mr. Fly worries his legs and waits.

Grampa says, “Don’t ever open the front gate, Catherine. If you do, Mr. Fly will get you.”

Grampa says, “Don’t ever tell anyone Grampa is in the closet if they come looking for me. In fact, if someone knocks on the door, don’t open it, or Mr. Fly will get you.”

Grampa says, “Never drink Grampa’s pops, or you-know-who will come out of the closet.”

Catherine is a good listener. She obeys the rules.

When the weekend comes, and she gets to stay with Mama at Bernie’s, she organizes her Barbie Dreamhouse. She spends more time organizing it, cataloging all the little parts. The chicken leg is there, but it feels like something is missing.

“Mama,” Catherine says, “when we move into a house together, can we move to where Sheila is moving? She’s going to have her own room and a canopy bed, and all kinds of stuff. And there’s going to be kids all over the place.”

“Where’s Sheila moving, Cath?”

“I don’t know,” Catherine says. “She keeps calling it ‘the projects.’”

1984

Saturday morning and the cartoons are over. Catherine sits on the couch in her new nightgown, massaging her great-grandmother’s dog with her feet. There is a plate on the side table with a few scraps of bacon fat, a few hardening lines of egg yolk. She’s looking for a movie, maybe Godzilla or something with Ray Harryhausen’s clay figures. Golf, bowling, auto racing. She stops on a spaceship buried in a subway tunnel, but changes the channel back to golf when she sees honeycombed hives of devilish, alien locust. They remind her too much of old Mr. Fly, even though Great Gramma’s closets are free of monsters.

“Catherine. We’re ready, honey.” Great Gramma looks like a lamb, fluffy and clean. She already has flour dusting her glasses. Catherine springs from the couch, stubbing her toe on the side table leg. It doesn’t matter.

Catherine and Great Gramma make egg noodles all afternoon. Later, they will make apple strudel. They share cold cans of Pepsi as they work. Great Gramma sighs after a long sip and says, “A cold beer on a hot day is a wonderful thing, but next to lying, getting drunk is the worst thing you can do.”

There are so many noodles, it’s absurd. They fold them neatly into half-gallon Ziploc bags.

“We’re not giving them all away, right, Gramma?” Catherine’s eyes are still large and beautiful, but darker now; a combination of her deeply set, maturing features and years of fatigue. Men already look at her, make her uncomfortable, but the boys couldn’t care less. She thinks she most likely will become a nun.

Great Gramma looks at the stock, and calculates. “Two for tonight,” she says, “one for the veal—”

“Veal,” Catherine says. Her eyes get even bigger and darker.

“Yes, honey. What’s wrong with veal?”

“That’s baby cow, Gramma. They take it away from its mama and put it in a little box, so it craps all over itself. That’s what’s wrong with veal.”

“Oh, that’s a load of horseshit,” Gramma says. And she says it with such assurance and confidence and kindness that Catherine can’t help but believe her.

2008

Catherine tells Lilly, “This is the corner where it happened. See that stop sign? There used to be a hook on it. That’s where the jump rope was. I don’t know why we were early. I guess to get that jump rope. Maria V. and I turned the corner, and there it was. I couldn’t believe it. Maria just looked at me and ran right out into the crosswalk, and boom! A car hit her, right in the ass. She looked like she was sitting in an invisible chair. An invisible wheelchair, because she flew through the air like that, and then she came down, skidding across the street. Her dress was up in her armpits. I almost peed my pants because I had never seen anything so funny in my life. The driver looked at me like I was crazy, but he drove on. Maria was pretty shaken, but I guess she was okay. We never made it that early to the bus stop again.”

1979

Before she started being bussed, Catherine walked to school with her grandmother—when she went to school. A social worker came to the house once.

“Hi there,” the woman says through the screen door.

“Oh, hi,” Catherine says. She wears one of Grampa’s white T-shirts and her Wonder Woman panties underneath. She is painting at her easel. Mama and her on a picnic. Mama and her at McDonald’s.

“How are you, Catherine?” the woman asks. She wears a crisp denim dress.

“I’m just fine,” Catherine says. “Look, I lost a tooth. On a pickle.” She smiles wide so the woman can see the void.

“Wow,” the woman says. She has a clipboard and jots down details as she peers through the dusty mesh. “Say, who else is home? Is your grandma home?”

Catherine thinks about it, but of course her grandma is home. “Hold on,” she says.

Catherine is in trouble, but it isn’t the worst kind of trouble. She sits on the couch, watching Barker’s Beauties present the day’s Showcase Showdown. Between the descriptions of Samsonite luggage and the cliff divers of Acapulco, she hears from the kitchen descriptions of meal plans and free coats.

As the woman is leaving, she tells Catherine they miss her at school.

“I miss school, too,” Catherine says. “I’m going to go back when vacation is over, or when I’m in first grade. Right, Gramma?”

“Yeah, Cath. Tomorrow, when vacation is over.”

“Yes!” Catherine says. She discovers another loose tooth.

1983

Catherine asks Gramma if she can go to Fat Gloria’s house to play, and Gramma says no. So, Catherine asks Gramma if Fat Gloria can come over to her house to play, and Gramma says, “No way, José.”

“Can’t we just play in the yard, Gramma?” Catherine asks.

Gramma wants to see the end of General Hospital, so she says, “Whatever.”

Catherine is so excited, she doesn’t know what to do first. “Stay right here,” she tells Fat Gloria. Fat Gloria doesn’t speak much English. She smiles with silver-capped teeth and sits on the concrete steps.

Catherine grabs a tablet of colored construction paper and a pair of safety scissors from the buffet. She stuffs two Barbies into the pockets of her dress. She considers digging Monopoly out from the closet, even though she isn’t sure she knows all the correct rules. Passing the kitchen where Gramma smokes and cuts chunks of pork, she thinks about what Fat Gloria might like to drink, if she wants potato chips or tortilla chips.

When she gets back outside, Fat Gloria is pacing and rubbing her belly. “Bathroom,” she says.

“Okay,” Catherine says. She creeps up the porch and peers into the house. “Come on,” she says.

“Hurry.” But Fat Gloria can’t hurry. In school, Catherine is learning about Harriet Tubman and Anne Frank. She feels like a reluctant crusader. She carefully closes the bathroom door on Fat Gloria.

From the bathroom, Catherine hears moaning. “Shhhh,” she tells Fat Gloria.

“Help,” Fat Gloria says. “I shitted.”

Catherine feels the same way herself. She strains to hear the chopping of meat in the kitchen. She opens the door and indeed, Fat Gloria has shitted. It covers the toilet and the floor. It covers the bottom half of Fat Gloria. “Help,” she says.

Gagging, Catherine wraps a boxing glove of toilet paper around her hand and wipes Fat Gloria. She knows the wad will clog the bowl. She wraps her hand again, and just as she is about to swipe, she hears from behind, “What the hell? What the hell?”

“Sorry, Gramma. She had to go.”

“What the hell?” Gramma says. She looks like a car crash.

Fat Gloria leaves, waddling down the steps in faded black sweatpants rolled up past her knees. “You see, Catherine? You see why you can never have people at the house?” Gramma is spraying Catherine’s hands with Lysol. She is scrubbing them with dry paper towels. It burns.

2008

“Well,” Catherine tries to say, but she can’t say anything. They can smell cherry blossoms and old roses. She and Lilly are pulled over to the side, in front of a mailbox that used to be blown up by a string of Black Cats at least once every summer. Catherine can almost picture herself inside, her great-uncle pounding on the window, calling someone a son of a bitch, her great-grandmother telling him to be quiet.

“This is really it, Mama?”

“Yes, honey, this is really it.”

Catherine can see her great-grandmother tending to tomatoes that look like eggs of melted wax, mutated by iron-smelter-poisoned soil. She can see her great-grandmother as a child, shaking a bar of soap out of her flour-sack underwear. She can hear the rasp of her gentle voice, the courage and fortitude. She remembers sitting in the kitchen for Sunday dinner with the boy who became her husband, goading Great Gramma to talk about the meat-processing plant. “Gramma, what did you do with the pork?”

“The pork? The butts, you mean?”

“Yeah, Gramma. What did you do with them?”

“Oh, I boned those butts.”

Catherine could scream, and never stop screaming. Instead, she laughs.

Lilly asks, “Where’s the ladybug tree?

“Oh,” Catherine tries to say.

“It’s okay, Mama. It’s gone.” Lilly pats her mother’s hand as if she just skinned her knee or dropped a bowl of cereal.

“Yes, baby. It’s gone.”

“Is this still her house?”

“No, honey, I don’t know whose house this is.” Catherine wants to run away.

“Can we go see Gramma Fran’s house now?”

Catherine wipes her eyes, but there is nothing left to wipe away. She says, “You don’t want to see that house, honey.”

1981

There is a candle, an elephant that looks like it came from an illustrated version of One Thousand and One Nights, and it lives on the buffet with the souvenir ashtrays and bottle openers, and towers of accumulated ephemera.

“Mama, can we light that candle?”

“No.”

“Mama, when can we light that candle?”

“We’re not going to light it, Catherine.”

“Mama, can we light that candle for my birthday?”

“Sure, Cath, we can light it for your birthday.”

“Is it almost my birthday, Mama?”

Then one day, Catherine’s uncle says, “Tricia, why don’t you let Catherine light that candle?”

“Okay,” Mama says. “But you have to blow it out right away.”

They put the candle on the kitchen table and light it for her. She tries to lock the moment away forever, and blows.

“Wow. That was pretty good. Do you think you could do it again?”

“Yes,” Catherine says. She is happy to see the candle relit.

“Hey, Cath. If you can blow it out from across the table, I’ll light it again.”

“I don’t think she can do it,” her uncle says.

“Watch,” Catherine says, and with little effort, blows it out.

“She did it,” they cry.

“What if I stand over here?” Catherine asks.

“I don’t know, baby. Try it.” Mama bites her purple lip, but smiles.

Catherine concentrates on the flame and blows.

“That’s amazing, Cath! Now, stand by the door and try.”

Out of sight, the candle is dripping a little, but not much, and Catherine stands on the sidewalk with a ripe face and her eyes huge with astonishment. Her uncle stands at the front door. “Are you ready, Catherine?” She nods. She doesn’t want to waste her precious breath. “You ready, Trish?” he yells into the house. “Go!” he says. Catherine draws air deep into her chest and holds it. She sucks more air in, filling every pocket of her mouth. Then like the North Wind in old cartoons, she expresses her breath, nearly blowing herself into the street, expelling it all. Mama runs outside and down the steps, picking Catherine up. “You did it,” she says.

“I did it,” Catherine says. I’m Wonder Woman.

Thomas C. Mavroudis is a member of the Denver Horror Collective as well as the Horror Writers Association. He has an MFA from the University of California, Riverside at Palm Desert, under the direction of Stephen Graham Jones. His debut novella, Bergdorf & Associates, was released in May of 2021. His short stories have appeared in Creepy A Horror Podcast, Weirdbook, Mooncalves, and elsewhere, and are forthcoming in The NoSleep Podcast and Cosmic Horror Monthly.