Brad Land is the author of the best-selling memoir Goat and the novel Pilgrims Upon the Earth. His writing has appeared in GQ, Third Coast, Quarter After Eight, Ecotone, and Rivendell. He studied creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and at Western Michigan University, where he was an editor of Third Coast. He currently lives in North Carolina.

–from GOAT
This is how it goes:

We’re getting floored at a beginning-of-the-semester party. Me, my younger brother Brett, these three people we came with. At this old fraternity house. Two stories with a big front porch and a backyard with a chain-link fence.

Brett’s on the porch standing next to me. People moving all over the place. Like cells. Everything pulsing. All sweat and smoke. The house is breathing.

These two girls come up. Just stand there looking us over. One of the girls looks at Brett like she loves him already. She’s short and has long hair pulled into a ponytail. Legs all muscled like a soccer player’s. She’s wearing a Zeppelin T-shirt with a hole beneath the neck cuff. The other girl’s standing beside her all bucktoothed and shaky. Got a tattoo on her left shoulder blade. Something swirled and tribal. Her arms crossed. I give her a smoke and she nods, cups one hand around the lighter I hold out and I can tell she’s drunk by the way her eyes wobble, the way she squints them against the porch lights. The other girl rubs the shaky one’s back, runs her hand down and pauses in the bare patch of skin between her jeans and top. The shaky girl looks her over and smiles. Brett tells them to kiss. They look at each other and laugh and then the shaky girl moves toward the other one, puts a hand around her waist and holds the cigarette out to the side. Her tongue’s out and inside the other’s mouth and they lock together, wet cheeks pulsing with the overhead light. The shaky one steps back and pulls on the smoke, exhales and looks at Brett. I’m staring at the two girls and the shaky girl asks if that was okay, and Brett says yeah that was cool, and I nod, say yeah good, and then Brett says do it again and they just laugh. The short girl says you don’t even know us and Brett says so and cocks back his beer. When he brings it down, she takes the beer from Brett and drinks. Hands it back. And now the shaky girl looks at me like she knows something about me with my skinny arms and black hair all matted from the hot air outside. Brett’s talking to the short girl and I don’t know what to say with this shaky one staring at me. The short one leans, whispers in her friend’s ear. They turn and walk away.

Brett tells me they want us to come over later.

I nod like it’s standard.

“Incredible, riveting and relentless, shocking, brutal, just savagely good. And yet. Beautiful and brave”

–Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors

“Brad Land’s talent as a writer is his ability to be completely vulnerable on the page, yet command absolute control over his language. It is taut, lean, and suggestive of a highly refined intelligence grounded in instinct. He bears witness to the violence our culture enacts in the name of ritual. Through the strength of his storytelling, he shows that cruelty not only kills, but maims our souls, one victim at a time.”

–Terry Tempest Williams, author of
Leap and Red– Passion and Patience in the Desert