Like many of TWENTY GRAND’s female voices, the narrator in “The Alpine Slide” conceals her thoughts from parents and others. Readers, on the other hand, prove worthy of the storyteller’s unguarded observations and intimate desires. In her favorite books, the ones in which young Victorian women were forced by adverse circumstance to have sex with swarthy highway robbers who were twice their age and had impeccable manners and great taste in jewels, the narrator notices that each roguish robber-villain inevitably compels the captive to look into his face. His black eyes are smoldering like burning bread. His lips are so rough they are cracked into segments…/Two brief pages later, she’s pregnant and locked in a tower. /I prayed that something similar would happen to me.
Will this young amusement ride employee ever secure the x-rated Rapunzel-inspired fairy tale fate she envisions? In each of her stories, Curtis skillfully and silently cultivates an ominous cloud—until suddenly we are blindsided with a sense that everything is about to go horribly wrong. Or perhaps horribly right? At least, it depends on your fantasy…