Free The Family Fang: A Novel by Kevin Wilson

exciting for a kid to hear.”
    “That’s what I want to talk about,” Eric said, his face bright, his left eye twitching. “You were ‘Child A’ in all those art pieces that your parents created. You were, for all intents and purposes, the star.”
    “Oh, Buster was the star, for sure. He had it much worse than me.”
    She thought of Buster, tied to a lamppost, stuck in a bear trap, making out with a St. Bernard, the numerous ways he’d been left in some bizarre situation and made to fend for himself.
    “Still, you were placed in circumstances where you were doing some form of acting, some guerrilla-style, improvisational acting, so do you think that if you hadn’t been a member of the Fangs, you would be an actress?”
    “Probably not,” she answered.
    “That’s what I’m interested in,” Eric said. “I have to admit, I think you’re a pretty talented actress. I thought you deserved to win the Oscar for Date Due and you even managed to subvert the cartoonish sexuality of Lady Lightning by giving the character a postfeminist spin in the two The Powers That Be movies, shooting lightning bolts at Nazis and whatnot.”
    “Yes, well, I think we can agree that everyone loves watching Nazis getting hit with lightning bolts.”
    “Well, anyways, you’re a good actress but I wrote my thesis in college on your parents’ career, I’ve seen nearly every piece your family has created, and I really feel that your strongest work, when you were doing the most unexpected and emotionally resonant acting, was in those art pieces.”
    “When I was nine years old,” Annie said. She felt like she was going to be sick. This magazine writer was expressing her worst fears, what she’d convinced herself was not at all true, that being a Fang, the conduit for her parents’ vision, was perhaps the only worthwhile thing she had ever accomplished.
    “I’m going to get a drink,” she said, and pushed away from the table. It was two in the afternoon, but it was the afternoon, and evening followed the afternoon, and she was going to drink. She was going to drink well into the evening, she believed. She asked for and received a glass of gin, no ice, no mixers, no olive. She brought it back to the table and took a get-to-know-you sip that got the ball rolling.
    “What I meant,” Eric continued, as if he had been waiting to say this all day, “is that there is such a wealth of complexity in those performances. Underneath the initial shock of the act, there’s something that, if you watch closely, becomes apparent.”
    “And what’s that?” she asked, another sip, so clean and medicinal it felt not unlike surgery under light anesthetic.
    “There’s sorrow, a sadness from knowing that you are forcing these events on unknowing people.”
    How many times had he watched those videos? What had he been looking for? She had never, if she could help it, viewed a single one of the Fang pieces after it had been edited and completed, the finished product. When she remembered certain events, they were unconnected and random, a flash of color spilling out of her mother’s body, a broken string on a guitar. They came back to her in waves and then receded for months or even years before they would return.
    She looked up from her drink and Eric was staring at her, his face calm and radiant.
    “You were always the best Fang,” he said, “at least I think so.”
    “There’s no best Fang,” she said, “we’re all exactly the same.”
    A few weeks earlier, just as the naked pictures fiasco had begun to subside, Annie’s parents had called, ecstatic. Annie was reading a four-page note from Minda, two pages of which were a sestina that used the repeating words Fang, blossom, locomotive, tongue, movie, and bi-curious . She was happy to put the note down.
    “Excellent news,” her father said, and Annie could hear her mother in the background saying, “Excellent news.”
    “What’s that?” Annie said.
    “We got an e-mail from the