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The Vibe Tonight by Kim Magowan

We’re thrilled to kick off CRAFT’s 2020 all-flash November with Kim Magowan’s fast-paced breathless paragraph, “The Vibe Tonight.” Comprised of only three sentences, the piece opens with the narrator and her husband, Carl, hosting dinner for their recently single friend, Louisa. The narrator soon notices a strange uneasiness filling the room, but can’t quite explain what, if anything, has changed the dynamic. Magowan says in her author’s note: “The breathless sentence is propulsive: there’s an urgency about it, a tidal effect, an accumulation of data the narrator doesn’t yet have time to process.” In “The Vibe Tonight,” the narrator’s desire to comprehend what is unfolding around her not only propels the narrative, it also amplifies the arc’s tension by juxtaposing her stream of consciousness full force against the active scene. This frenetic back and forth coupled with a strong, resonant voice results in a piece (again echoing Magowan’s author’s note) that is both “emotional and unruly.” We hope you enjoy reading “The Vibe Tonight,” and hope you’ll return again next week as we continue our flash celebration.  —CRAFT

 

Louisa and I are drinking wine while my husband Carl, who is the cook (I used to think I could cook but that’s before I met Carl, who is a much better cook, picky about his food and opinionated about how it’s seasoned, and furthermore harsh, though he’d describe himself as honest; so after a couple of times of getting my feelings hurt I just gave up), has his back to us, because he’s sautéing three different kinds of mushrooms, and the kids are downstairs watching Frozen 2, and I’m trying to figure out why the vibe is so weird, attributing it to the fact that ever since Louisa and her husband Matthew split up there’s been something lopsided and awkward about the three of us together, which is partly because Louisa says such cruel and TMI and frankly false things about Matthew, like telling us that she’s pretty sure Matthew is addicted to cocaine, when we know Matthew well, (if he were addicted to coke that’s something we would know), and it’s gotten to the point that Carl, who has always gotten along with Louisa, will say things like, “Louisa is fucking crazy,” and I’ll say, “She’s hurting, she’s not herself.” Anyway, the vibe tonight is weird but that’s what I attribute it to, even though so far Louisa has said nothing outrageous or false or in fact anything at all about Matthew, but I think Carl is steeling himself in advance, and that’s why he says to her a little sharply, though he’s obviously trying to be light, “So you’re really not going to support me for Sports Editor?” (that’s how we know Louisa, Louisa and Carl work at The Mercury News together; when Louisa first started there ten years ago, Carl said to me, “Hey, there’s a new journalist who’s really cool, I know you would like her, we should have her and her husband over”), and Louisa says, “Actually, I think it’s time we had a female Sports Editor,” and Carl still has his back to us and he’s getting pretty aggressive with the mushrooms, and he says, “You don’t even like Amy Sutherland,” and Louisa says, “I don’t need to be friends with my boss,” and Carl turns off the flame and throws down the spatula and says, “I don’t know why you’re being such a bitch” and stomps away and I’m like, what the hell is going on here? I say to Louisa, “Why are you being so rude to Carl?” and Louisa grips her wine glass like she’s going to snap the stem and says, “I am so sick of men bullying me,” and I say, “What are you talking about? You’re our best friend,” and she shakes her head in disbelief, and I say, “I know splitting up with Matthew has been really hard, but I don’t know why you have to take it out on Carl. We love you,” and she looks at me like her eyes are lasers, like she hates me and she wants to zap me into a pile of carbonized dust, and she says, “Grace, the things I could tell you about your husband…” and I wait, not saying anything, and Louisa just stares at me, and in the background some Frozen 2 ballad about being brave and staying true to yourself swells, filling every corner of our house with sound.

 

KIM MAGOWAN lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. 

 

By | Flash Fiction, Fiction | November 6, 2020

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Author’s Note

Back in May, a few writer friends and I were struggling to get writing done during the malaise of shelter-at-home quarantine with children underfoot. Michelle Ross, Yasmina Din Madden, Elizabeth Brinsfield, and I decided to jumpstart ourselves by participating in a flashathon. Starting at 6 a.m. PST, we would write for six straight hours, taking turns sending each other prompts every hour on the hour. “The Vibe Tonight” germinated from my prompt: “Write a one paragraph ‘breathless sentence’ story.” I’d recently read a story by Jen Todhunter in The Forge Literary Magazine, “The Levitation,” that unrolls as one sentence. It reminded me of a similar single sentence story in Wigleaf by Gwen Kirby. So I sent Michelle, Yasmina, and Beth links to these stories (which I urge everyone to read, they are both wonderful), reread them myself, and drafted “The Vibe Tonight.”

I love experimental forms, but there must be a good reason for the form: it can’t just be window dressing. The breathless sentence is propulsive: there’s an urgency about it, a tidal wave effect, an accumulation of data that the narrator doesn’t yet have time to process. There’s a built-in delay, that is, between observation and interpretation, since interpretation requires reflective distance. So in “The Vibe Tonight” (which is three sentences), my narrator is watching a scene unfold that makes her feel anxious and uncomfortable, but she doesn’t understand why. Her husband Carl is cooking, their recently single friend Louisa is present, and there’s a murky tension in the air (“the vibe tonight”) that the narrator can’t explain. The content of the story consists of her observing, first action (Carl cooking mushrooms) and then this opaque tension, and trying to account for it. Things have been “lopsided and awkward” with Louisa since she separated from their friend Matthew: does this account for the vibe tonight? It doesn’t. The breathless syntax pitches the narrator forward, as she keeps trying to comprehend what she’s seeing, and discards various explanations as inadequate.

I picture the breathless-sentence form as the syntactic equivalent of the sensory overload someone might experience during an acid trip. What the form captures best—what it is built for—is when our adrenalin races ahead of our brains. You can’t stop reading if there is no pause. There are famous examples of breathless sentences in essays, for instance the standout paragraph in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which MLK finally takes off the gloves and chastises his intended audience of white moderates for their callous neutrality. His syntax shifts: King makes his audience feel how overwhelming, oppressive, and unending racism is, as experienced by people of color in America. The breathless sentence is a form that calls attention to its own urgency and avalanche pace; it’s emotional and unruly. By the end of my story, the narrator is just starting to understand what is generating all the tension in her kitchen. The story concludes without spelling it out: Louisa’s answer terminates in an ellipses.

 

KIM MAGOWAN lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel.