Overview
Molly moves between David and Lee, each of whom carries a different fantasy of provision, discipline and permanence. Her dissatisfaction with gallery work and stalled identity as an artist changes materially after an inheritance gives her resources that do not originate with either man.
Form and structure
The work is organized in 51 numbered sections, moving through short scenes, dialogue, interior narration, sexual episodes, memory and domestic detail. The title's idea of “retirement” can read as care, possession, rescue, economic liberation or an attempt to define another person's future.
Connections
Selected quotations
“Couldn’t tell if she wanted to get off or just wanted to want to get off.”
— RETIRE HER, 2025 [fiction / narration]“She denied time but still it ticked.”
— RETIRE HER, 2025 [additional portable selection]
Corpus fingerprint
Source footprint: approximately 8,999 words · 1 image element · 0 embedded-media elements · 55 heading elements.
Strong lexical motifs: Children, Parents & Inheritance · Eyes, Looking & Witness · Rooms, Doors, Windows & Thresholds · Mouth, Voice & Utterance · Gods, Devils, Ritual & Magic.
Nearby publications: ← HOLY ✞ NIGHT · ONE ONE →
Inside the work
RETIRE HER is much larger and stranger than its central triangle suggests. Across fifty-one numbered sections it keeps changing the scale at which Molly's life can be understood: bedroom comedy becomes economics; economics becomes romantic dependency; romantic dependency becomes the question of whether provision is care or possession; a stalled painting practice becomes a problem of permission, money and self-worth. David and Lee are not simply two suitors. They embody different fantasies of adulthood, competence, taste, access and rescue, while Molly keeps discovering that being taken care of can resemble being defined.
The Los Angeles around her is unusually material. Rooftops, traffic, gallery labor, North of Montana status language, rare rain, a beach cottage, estate-sale detritus, restaurants, sound baths and other people's expensive houses keep the story anchored in a city where class is continuously visible without always being spoken plainly. The old porn magazine BIG BUTT SLUTTZ VOL. 17: AUTO SHOW HOEZ '92, supposedly recovered from the filing cabinet of a deceased costume professional, is typical of the work's object-world: funny, tacky, historical, erotic and faintly archaeological at once.
The supporting cast matters. Sarah Jane serves as Molly's oldest social mirror; Aunt Maggie supplies an alternate model of female adulthood organized around money, pleasure and a long marriage; Muggsly turns domestic disorder into recurring physical comedy; forgotten or half-remembered acquaintances drift in through sound baths, parties and media work. The work repeatedly asks who gets to diagnose whom, who gets to call another person toxic, autistic, lazy, talented, rescued or retired, and what material conditions allow a person to refuse those descriptions.
The inheritance is therefore not merely a plot solution. It changes the geometry of the relationships. Resources arrive from outside the romantic pairings, making it possible to imagine a future that is not purchased by pleasing David, accepting Lee's interpretation of her, or succeeding in the gallery economy. The title remains productively unstable to the end: to "retire her" can sound tender, proprietary, erotic, economic, murderous, managerial or liberating depending on who gets to perform the verb.
Structure and contents
Publication footprint: approximately 9,544 words · 1 image element · 0 embedded-media elements · 45 distinct heading markers.
Visible structural markers
- BIG BUTT SLUTTZ VOL. 17: AUTO SHOW HOEZ ‘92
- 11.
- 15.
- 18.
- 22.
- 25.
- 28.
- 32.
- 35.
- 38.
- 42.
- 45.
- 49.
- 51.
- …and 31 further heading-marked turns.
Named material with encyclopedia nodes
James Quentin Devine · Aunt Maggie · San Lucero · Sarah Jane · Echo Park · The Kid
Disturbance profile
sex / erotic · violence / death · crime / drugs · sacred / profane · grotesque body · psychic instability · verbal abrasion
This profile marks formal pressure points rather than moral positions. Context matters: hits may come from narration, dialogue, quotation, parody, self-description or fictional documents. See Transgression & Disturbance.
Publication
Published 2025-12-30. Read the original publication ↗
Recurring subjects
Death, Mortality & Posthumousness · Money, Work, Class & Value · Love, Sex, Desire & Intimacy · Childhood, Youth, Family & Generations · Memory, Time, History & Forgetting