City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where a grocers’ warehouse might become a palace, and an antique bank is hidden beneath a department store.
Recently, I went to see a Rothko exhibit with my friend Adam. We were in Paris, and the city was gray and cold. On my way to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, I walked through a wooded area. I looked up, and there were pine trees. For a few moments, I couldn’t walk because I was so flattened by the sight of these enormous trees. They were bare of needles. The scaly bark was an ashen purple. The branches were dark as they spread out over the milky veil of the sky. I used to run through pine forests with my cousins. The pine tree is an indelible image of my childhood. But something about seeing them there, when I least expected it, thousands of a miles away from the pine trees of my youth, the trees which had been cut down to pay for booze and which would never be replaced, all this time and distance away from those lost trees, to have encountered them in Paris, my life so radically transformed, startled me.
Happy Labor Day! Today is for me the fourth of a four-day weekend, so I feel I’m doing the holiday justice—though I have been engaged more than usual in the work of self-promotion over the course of it, which is in itself laborious. Ah, well. Let’s get to it:
Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.
“State vee,” there’s a hesitation, “um, Isabella, Perry,” a voice lent stentorian depth by a hint of amplification, “your honor, line twelve, uh, page seventeen, line twelve, of the two PM docket,” as she’s ushered through one of the four identical doorways set in the wall of this utilitarian hall, past a burly man in pale blue coveralls, his arm gripped by a deputy dressed in mismatched kelly greens, gear weightily jangled from black webbed belts, much like the one who steers her into a booth, two waist-high walls a close tight corner, thick panes of plexiglass set atop them, up to the ceiling, and only a gap where they meet at the corner, a hand’s width at most, opened out into the broader room, “misdemeanor, ah,” that voice is saying, the amplification makes it difficult to determine who’s speaking, maybe the clerk there, on the other side of the dais, hidden behind a couple of flatscreen monitors, “misdemeanor trespass,” but “I’ve got it,” says the man at the top of the dais, dark beard neatly trimmed to a puff of curls at his chin, shoulders robed in black, peering at a kiltered monitor of his own, but “You’re here for an arraignment?” a woman’s murmuring, stepped close to the other side of the plexiglass, “on a count of misdemeanor trespass?” Tight brown weave and a rumpled grey jacket, warm brown eyes behind narrow, wire-rimmed glasses. “Sam McDonald?” she says, “with the MPD? Metro Public Defenders? I can’t be your attorney in this matter, but I am available to assist you through this process?”
“What?” says Ysabel. The door closed behind her, the deputy stood before it, implacable.
“Do you consent?”
“—people who like urban fantasy written in a rather jumpy unusual style will like this book—”
“Long, complex with a lyrical rhythm to it that’s intoxicating.”
“Also there’s some bits that are sexy as hell so like, be prepared for that…”
