Pretty Piece of Flesh

By Jennifer Arnspiger

In this coming-of-age collection of three short stories, sensitive young women navigate the damage and healing potential of intimacy.  Iris is a naive teenager who experiences her first love and most altering loss in a ballroom dance studio.  A band groupie has more to offer a rising star drummer than her body, and newly married Stella, obsessed with cooking the perect foie gras, is grappling with more than one trauma in her relationship.  Lyrical, emotionally bare with a slightly magical bent, Pretty Piece of Flesh invites you to consider what tiny cracks and cruelties can do, and how ordinary those moments can sometimes look.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jennifer Arnspiger
• Release date: May 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393696421

Jennifer Arnspiger

Jennifer Arnspiger is a writer, dancer and author of the new short story collection, Pretty Piece of Flesh. With over a decade writing prose in academic and literary communities, Jennifer has a uniquely lyrical voice that shines through in her newest collection of stories about the echoing effects of intimacy. Jennifer graduated with honors for her creative writing thesis from the University of New Mexico, and attended the Hollins University Creative Writing MFA Program.  Her short story "Foie Gras" was a runner-up for the Jeffrey E. Smith Missouri Review Editor's Prize.

Book preview

Pretty Piece of Flesh

I’ll never forget the way the air smelled in the reception area of the dance studio where I first met Kenn Copeland.  The walls were pink and the couch was leather and the giant, waxy potted plants intimidated me with their effulgence of class.  I felt tiny and ridiculous sitting there in my twelve dollar peach and tan skirt with its little white flowers and my chunky black shoes.  Men and women in three piece suits and satin heels skittered past in clouds of perfumes so exotic I had no reference for them.  I had the sense that my mother, whose signature fragrance was Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion, felt exactly the same way. 

What kind of girl spent a random Tuesday evening waiting for a first lesson at a ballroom dance studio in 1994?  I’ll tell you: the kind who watches an Australian movie called Strictly Ballroom and is so moved she goes on her own quest for magic. The kind who always felt herself entering rooms to whispers of that single, dirty word:  dreamer. 

I was a sophomore in high school. I spent every moment with my best friend, writing and fantasizing about dreamy love, the kind that exists not with bodies or hands but merely from the neck up.  The man of my dreams was a movie star named Dwayne Reese.  Only an imaginary man would do.  He was soulful, the tender hero of action movies.  He was always the one to rescue the girl, provide the missing piece to her puzzle.  A gentleman in armor.  I could not have been less interested in boys from my high school, and for all intents and purposes they seemed to return the sentiment.  What did I care for loud, brash boys when there were heroes out there?

I’d been on one date prior to my first dance lesson.  A boy rumored to like me asked me to the Sadie Hawkins dance and I’d been so flustered I said yes.  It was the most boring, awkward experience of my life.  He probably never called me again because I didn’t drink a drop of alcohol all night and I wouldn’t kiss him.  I was holding out.  And for what?  The dream first kiss.  The cliche.  I was nowhere near ready to give up hope that it was out there.   

That was how I found myself on this pink leather couch. 

When Kenn walked into the reception area and his wide blue eyes landed on me, I felt something shift.  The room dissolved around me when he clasped my hand in his pleasingly dry handshake. 

Ms. Iris Adams? He tilted his head slightly left.  I must have nodded.  Hello, he continued with a little bow and a kind smile. My name is Kenn Copeland.  I’ll be your instructor tonight. 

One life can change with the utterance of a single sentence, I know that for certain.  A girl can think she knows who she is, but when a Botticelli angel takes her arm and leads her onto a floating hardwood floor surrounded by wall-length mirrors and floating mirror balls, when she hears Ella Fitzgerald’s You’re the Top for the very first time, she learns how very fast her heart can cease to be her own, how enchanting a moment can really be. 

Kenn was like no man I had ever known.  He wore light olive green pants, black patent dance shoes, an ivory dress shirt and caramel-colored vest and tie.  He smelled amazing - so classy.  He stood at least six feet tall, the most lithe and graceful thing I had every seen with a cap of frosted blonde hair flopping boyishly across one pretty blue eye. 

Ballroom dancing was many things to me over the next few months.  Depending on my partner, I began to form opinions about each dance: with the man I called Mario (because of his  meticulously groomed mustache), the Viennese Waltz felt like flying; the Rumba with Mr. Mallow was embarrassing.  Rumba is the sexiest dance, he would say to me.  "Your every motion must exude desire!  Cha-cha, same concept but three times as fast, was a hilarious effort in disaster, but with Kenn Copeland every single one felt like love.  He tossed his arm around my shoulders constantly, as if I were a prized possession.  When he danced past my table with other students at parties, he’d stick his tongue out and kick my chair.  He taught me to lean left into his arm, proper dance position, he told me.  He ended every lesson with a whirlwind triple-time swing, he dipped me and flipped me over his arm at random moments; he commandeered me my first pair of dance shoes.  Don’t hurt yourself," he warned with his chin elevated, lips pursed teasingly.  I was on stilts.  Three inches of satin on my feet, the old shoes of Ms. Maria, and I was in another stratosphere. 

He then proceeded to deliver the most glorious lesson of my three month