Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2025

Document Type

MFA Creative Writing Thesis (Campus Access)

Degree Type

MFA

College

Eberly College of Arts and Sciences

Department

English

Committee Chair

Mark Brazaitis

Committee Co-Chair

Mary Ann Samyn

Committee Member

Mary Ann Samyn

Committee Member

Amanda Berardi Tennant

Abstract

In Rita Mae’s green-thumbed world, anything with roots can grow—including the teeth she steals from lascivious men, which she grows into potted, sadomasochistic creatures called “sweetings.” By day, Rita Mae works a corporate job in Chicago, where she meticulously flirts with a married coworker and subscribes to her boss’s OnlyFans account for future blackmail. By night, Rita Mae mothers her sweetings, bathing them in mouthwash and toothpaste and pruning their limbs to keep them from growing feet and leaving her. But when she isn’t preoccupied with her sweetings, Rita Mae moonlights as a sex-fiend and seduces random men for their teeth—while she struggles with her own loneliness and continues to harbor an unhealthy obsession and lust for her estranged twin brother. As Rita Mae’s new life in Chicago straddles the line between fantasy and reality, danger and normalcy become synonymous when Rita Mae’s fragile hold over her job, sweetings, and world shatters when a homegrown, nightmarish version of her twin returns to claim what was once his, threatening her with the horrors and heartbreak of her past she desperately fled from a year ago in rural Kentucky. While Rita Mae’s grip over her reality spirals out of control, her orchestrated identities dissolve in the face of her own mistakes, threatening every connection she has in her life, human or not. Rita Mae must reckon with the consequences of what can and should grow from the dark, and whether or not she can return to a life made for herself, or if she belongs in the same dark where her own roots grow… and rot. Return to Me is a modern-day gothic tale cast against a backdrop of obsession, possession, fractured self-identity, and misplaced love, about a mentally disturbed young woman trying to find herself in the world—with a sweet tooth for revenge.

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