Lacy Loar-Gruenler
Bio
Lacy Loar-Gruenler worked for a decade as a newspaper journalist and editor. In March 2023, she completed an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature at Harvard University.
Stories (15/0)
- Top Story - March 2024
Dead Snow
The relationship lived and died in winter, born when the sun made the pristine snow glitter like gems flecking a magic white blanket covering Boston in a reverent, heavy silence. I was from New Orleans and had never seen snow. Garrett introduced me to the angels you make, the hot chocolate you spike with Irish whiskey, the icicles hanging from the skeletal trees like stalactites hanging in a cave. You can shoot them with BB guns, sending them crashing silently into the magic snow blanket. I learned to love it all, along with the chapped lip, chattering teeth kisses and finally, the lovemaking under thermal blankets in the meat locker cold apartment.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler3 months ago in Fiction
- Top Story - January 2024
- Runner-Up in the Whodunit Challenge
The Fallen Angel MurderRunner-Up in the Whodunit Challenge
A 10-year-old boy they call Hams found the body in a shallow grave in a wooded area just outside Norman, Oklahoma. It wasn’t a body really, just picked and bleached bones scattered among the fallen autumn leaves, as if scavenging animals had smelled the buried offal and made short work of digging up the meal. The incessant heat in late August had burned off the marrow and shrunk the bones, so it was difficult to know much about them. Hams picked up the skull with a hole in it and intact, almost perfect white teeth that the medical examiner later determined showed early signs of ravage from drug use. Tufts of dyed blonde hair clung to the top of it. Unearthed nearby, police discovered a patterned vinyl backpack, bright aqua with a worn handle, filled with moldering pictures of two children, a toothless newborn and a toddler, drooling and smiling. They also found a lone piece of what looked like a gold earring glittering under the late sun. It had been separated from its backing, and a few worn scratch marks caked in dirt may have been a faint initial, indistinguishable as a D, or B, or P.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler4 months ago in Criminal
- Runner-Up in the Neolomicro Challenge
LivelocityRunner-Up in the Neolomicro Challenge
My husband of 52 years snores lightly in his hospital bed, wincing occasionally from the fall that landed him here. I dab a white washcloth in the ice bucket on the little wheeled stand separating him from the blinking lights and beeping monitors and his wheelchair. The cold to his temples makes him groan. Perhaps he’s dreaming and it’s not the pain. I kick off my shoes and climb into the mechanical bed, folding myself around him like a spoon. Don’t die, please, I whisper.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler6 months ago in Fiction
French Kiss Chapter 14 Hair
I nestled in Frédéric’s embrace at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, the cacophony of travelers’ voices, loudspeakers, and the squeaky wheels of dragged luggage fading as I tucked my head beneath his chin, willing his pulse to sync with mine, pretending I was breathing life into the cells he had dispatched against the cancer. He was thinner. The wig fit him like an inside-out fur cap without the ear flaps, more fur-hair than he ever had, more than his gaunt face needed. It was cut professionally, like some mirage of normalcy. His sooty eyelashes were gone, but the chemo and radiation had not completely erased his five o’clock shadow and caterpillar brows, now pencil lines above his doe eyes.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler8 months ago in Chapters
The High Cost of Living
Most of the members of the Oldtimers Club are gone by attrition, their ashes thrown to the wind and water, freed from their aches and woes. Only three of us remain. All in our 70s, we are more afraid of death as each year passes, but who isn’t? We avoid the end of the road by not thinking about it, by just traveling it in search of some small joy, beginning with waking another day. My sister, Ida Lupino, says it would be a joy if we enlist new old members. She decides we need a man to join our club, all the men have died, and so she finds Larry Sousa at the beach one day, dragging me there on a late afternoon to meet him. Our club has rules of course, not unfair but decidedly unconventional, and loyal members can’t be squeamish.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler8 months ago in Horror
Nabokov's Lolita
My mom taught me to read when I was two. I toddled around the neighborhood reciting Dr. Seuss to anyone who would listen. By six, I had inhaled Nancy Drew, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and anything Robert Louis Stevenson. By eight, I had blown through my dad’s library of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, much of Steinbeck, and a lot of private detective novels like Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler8 months ago in BookClub
- Top Story - August 2023
French KissTop Story - August 2023
The flight attendant dimmed the cabin lights hours ago. Only three reading lights glowed, casting an eerie pall on the few passengers under them who, like me, couldn’t sleep. The man behind me was awake and staring out the window as I stood and pirouetted toward the lavatory. He turned in his seat and looked up at me, the spitting image of William Shatner in the Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which I had watched two days earlier. He had the same pensive way of lifting the inner corners of his eyebrows, His hair was razor cut around the ears and nape, combed away from his face. Almost everyone else on the airplane was dressed in jeans, but he wore a charcoal suit with his tie still knotted. I hoped he wasn’t seeing little gremlins scurrying on the wings, trying to disable the plane. He smiled at me, and murmured, “Something is on the wing.” Damn, I thought. I knew it! I knew this would go badly. I must have looked like I had not understood him, because he repeated what he said: “Bonne nuit, Mademoiselle.” Relieved, I whispered, “Good night to you, too, Monsieur.” Thank God there were no hairy gremlins far above the Atlantic Ocean, only the twinkling lights that made us visible in the velvet night as we sliced through it toward Paris. My jitters were a product of my active imagination --- and what I had done.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler9 months ago in Chapters
- Top Story - August 2023
So, You’re Ready to Write a Sex SceneTop Story - August 2023
Whether you pen fiction or essays, eventually your human characters are going to want to have sex. While coupling is an instinct to ensure a species survives, for humans, it’s far more, mostly because our brains are the largest sex organ we possess. Sex can be existential if we procreate to leave something of ourselves behind when we die. It can feel sinful, nasty, embarrassing, terrifying, pleasant, loving, unifying, and downright like the best thing ever invented. So, why is it so difficult to put it down on paper?
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler9 months ago in Writers
- Top Story - August 2023
The Pleasures of Hemingway and FreudTop Story - August 2023
In “The Pilot Fish and the Rich,” a vignette included in the restored version of Ernest Hemingway’s last novel, A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964, one can make the invisible claim that human minds are influenced by Sigmund Freud’s pleasure principle. We avoid unpleasure and seek pleasure. However, the ego’s instinct for self-preservation attempts to replace the pleasure principle with the reality principle which, out of practicality, postpones the ultimate pleasure we are seeking. Our sexual instinct, which is difficult to educate, often succeeds in overriding the reality principle to the detriment of the organism (Freud 3-7). Poor Papa is the poster boy for the pleasure principle. This vignette is an anguished memoir of his love for two women, his first wife Hadley, whom he eventually betrays, and the woman he betrays her with, Pauline Pfeiffer, his second wife.
By Lacy Loar-Gruenler9 months ago in BookClub
