"Now I Got to moon the Universe Alone" by Barbra Meri Frey

4/2/2022

Barbra Meri Frey grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BA in English from SUNY-Binghamton in Binghamton, New York. She worked various jobs in publishing and public relations before receiving her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where her innovative style and polished prose distinguished her. Her creative work has been published in Pipe Dream, SPIN, New Virginia Review, and the 2018 anthology, Triumph: Stories of Victories Great and Small. Barbra died in 1994 at age 27.

Micaela Burgess is a teacher, filmmaker, and emerging writer from El Paso, Texas. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at The American University. In her work, Burgess seeks to shed light on the invisible intersections of identity that most have to squint to see. Stemming from identities of her own, Burgess often blends characters of Mexican heritage with queerness and a certain bordertown mentality, characters who are born into the in-between, the hyphen of Mexican-American, and the silence that comes with a forgotten ancestry. Burgess currently resides in Alexandria, Virginia with her two cats.

Introduction to "Now I Got to moon the Universe Alone"
by Micaela Burgess

It starts with a bang. Literally. Barbra Meri Frey’s short story, Now I Got to Moon the Universe Alone, opens with a gun blast to the head. This story takes on a unique structure as it is a narrative within a narrative. We have two characters, Therese and Miriam, giving us context to the violent death of their friend and coworker, Ethel, all through dialogue. Throughout their discourse, we learn about the fast-paced world these characters inhabit, question the motives and truths behind Ethel’s brutal death, and gain an intimacy with our facetious, stubborn, and lovable protagonist, Therese.

One aspect of Now I Got to Moon the Universe Alone that I admire is that it breaks all the rules of fiction writing and does so unabashedly. As writers, the quality of our work is largely based upon how well we can follow these rules. We quickly learn the dos and don’ts of craft:

DO put all dialogue in quotation marks. DO include speaker tags, so as not to confuse your reader.
DON’T switch point-of-views. You must select ONE. You CANNOT switch from first person to second person.
And on that note, DON’T write anything in second person. It’s a gimmick. Only seasoned authors may attempt and succeed.
DO show, DON’T tell. Your story will get boring if you tell too much. You don’t want to lose your reader.

These standards continue into a non-exhaustive list of what fiction should and shouldn’t be. As a fiction MFA alum of George Mason University, I’m sure that Frey was familiar with these rules, yet in this story, she topples them with confidence. If the rules of fiction are a Jenga tower, Frey pulls out a lone middle piece knowingly and with a smile on her face. Let the pieces fall. And they do, and they create something altogether new and beautiful, scattered on the table in a formation that would make traditional authors squirm.

Now I Got to Moon the Universe Alone simultaneously uses an intimate first-person point-of-view and yanks the audience in straightway with a bold second-person point-of-view. This blending of POVs is uncommon and typically frowned upon in fiction. Miriam tells Therese to “just tell them the story,” thus breaking the fourth wall and making the audience an active participant. This demand moves us into the meat of the story which consists only of dialogue and narration of events. Their banter is also so informal that we feel as if we are sitting with them at Two Friends, splitting that yogurt with them. At one point, Therese goes so far as to tell us, “Note my good friend Miriam has alluded to my stupidity three times in three pages. Now the piglet is eating all my yogurt. Excuse us please…” This direct address of us as readers is followed by an aside, a minor argument between the two women about telling us Ethel’s story. In this way, Frey has established an intimacy with the reader. We are being discussed within the pages of the story. We are characters in this world. While I often see a general dissuasion of using the second-person in fiction, Frey gracefully vaults this hurdle. Not only did the second-person point-of-view succeed, but it brought me into the fold, wrapped its arms around me, offered me some yogurt and told me to stay awhile.

The energy of Now I Got to Moon the Universe Alone is that of a one-act play. This unorthodox fiction structure made even more sense once I learned that Frey dabbled in performance arts and theater throughout her high school and undergraduate experience. Furthermore, Now I Got to Moon the Universe Alone was performed during a virtual event with The Montgomery County (MoCo) Underground Writer’s Showcase in late 2020. Frey was intentional with her storytelling format and sought to blend the lines between literature and performance. As readers, we don’t actually witness any of the action; we are told about it through Therese’s eyes. This dialogue-heavy format is perfect for a spoken performance and although it breaks the age-old mantra of “show, don’t tell,” the readers still obtain a whole sense of the characters’ world. It is through Therese’s voice that we hear of Ethel’s death, truly understand the relationships between the three women, and ultimately learn we are more like one another than we think.

Cathy Cruise, friend and former classmate of Frey, is the reason we are able to read Now I Got to Moon the Universe Alone today. Cruise has been sending out Frey’s work since her death twenty-eight years ago. When she saw the call for submissions for “Furious Gravity,” she knew it was the perfect home for this story. As a magazine that was looking for “bad-ass women with a fire inside them,” both Therese as a character and Frey as an author fit the bill. Cruise reminisced about Frey and about how “Barb was the life of the party—the brightest light in the room, one of the funniest, silliest, most special people I’ve known… Barb loved Seinfeld… and poetry and art. She was very spiritual… Above all, she was fiercely devoted to her family… I have no doubt she would have gone on to achieve true success in her writing… She was so very passionate about so many things. A true presence in the world that has left such a space behind.”

Barbra Meri Frey succeeded at writing an experimental, genre-bending, rule-breaking, and confident narrative. Frey has achieved what many authors are constantly pursuing: a finely balanced authoritative narrative voice with a coinciding casual tone. The story thrives on its eccentricity in form, multidimensional and flawed characters, and its complex themes of friendship, agency, and both overt and subtle gendered violence. Now I Got to Moon the Universe Alone was published posthumously in Grace and Gravity’s ninth volume, “Furious Gravity.” Although Barbra Meri Frey is not here to rejoice in her story’s success, I hope that as readers, writers, and rule-breakers, we will continue to rejoice in it for her.