Snap, Stacked, & Night Sky with Generations by Rebe Huntman
In her November 2020 essay in CRAFT about writing micromemoir, Deirdre Danklin writes: “There must be something small that can help carry the heavy things.” In her three creative nonfiction micros, “Snap,” “Stacked,” and “Night Sky with Generations,” Rebe Huntman elegantly manages to carry the heavy things in small containers shaped of words and images that, as she says in her author’s note, “anchor the essays in the physical details of the past while simultaneously transcending corporeality.” In these micros, Huntman moves the reader through time and space using well-crafted language and detail, compressing without omitting essential information.
In “Snap,” Huntman writes about being a girl in a world where girls are regularly harassed by their male peers. Using the repeated phrase, “Not when,” Huntman moves the narrator (and the reader) through a frustrating day to its inevitable conclusion, when all the anger from that harassment is released in a moment that startles and stuns. However, while the action of “Snap” takes place during a single day, “Stacked” races through time from the sensual joys of childhood to long years during which the narrator says yes when she means no, a stark contrast to the resounding final NO of “Snap.” The weight of more than half a lifetime of female acquiescence is compressed into fewer than four hundred words.
In the third micro, “Night Sky with Generations,” Huntman’s vision is even more expansive, moving in time from a summer night to the lives of earlier generations. The author’s rapid adjustment of focus is reminiscent of the 1977 educational short film Powers of Ten, frequently shown to school children, in which the camera image moves from picnic to planet to constellations in barely more than three minutes. Like the receding vision in the movie, “Night Sky” pans from two children in a playhouse to their parents/all parents working on their projects and chores and finally proceeds to the “canopy of constellations that hold us as they have for generations.” Such a grand vision communicated in a tiny literary form.
The strength of these small pieces is in the specificity of the details, the powerful emotions, the range of time and place. As readers, we can join the children in “Night Sky,” and “squint our eyes as the world makes & remakes itself.” —CRAFT
Snap
Not when your mother makes you go to the dance. You tell her you’re sick. Really sick this time. See? You’ve broken out in hives. Not when she slathers you in calamine lotion & stuffs you into tights & the dress with the long sleeves. Still, you can’t tell her. How could you? You’re too ashamed. How the boys race each month across the church basement floor to pick the popular girls—Pam with her red patent leather shoes; Holly with her blonde curls & dresses newly bought from Neiman & Saks. How at 5’6” you’re a sixth-grade Amazon towering over all the boys—always the last one picked. Not when the boys start calling you Too Tall Jones, after Dallas Cowboys’ defensive end Ed “Too Tall” Jones, or when the one you like asks you to dance only so he can pin Too Tall’s jersey number 72 to your back. Not when That’s the way uh huh uh huh I like it starts blaring through the speakers for the millionth time, or when the boys decide that Mile High Moose & Meter Long Face are funny too. Not until you are almost home, riding in the back of Brian Oakley’s mother’s wood-paneled station wagon, sandwiched between these boys who your mothers have arranged to carpool with you, Brian still whispering in your ear: Too Tall Jones. Meter Long Face. Mile High Moose—so close you can almost see the light on in the den where your mother waits to hear how it all went, & he says it one too many times. It is then that you notice his hands, small & white beneath the glow of street lamps & passing cars. You don’t know what gets into you, your fingers reaching for his. Time stopping for this moment when you grab his pinky finger & bend the bones back—s-l-o-w-l-y—the way they were never designed to bend. & you wonder why it took so long. The body such a fragile thing—so easy to snap.
Stacked
Everything I know about the body I learned at the limits of those early summers: My love for Jeff, the boy next door. My love for the world that called us, barefoot, through the freshly cut tracts of our suburban lives. Still teeming with the orchards & prairie that came before we carved our way into them, it was there, in that unbroken kingdom where lawn gave way to milkweed & thistle, that we chased tree frogs & wild rabbits, wandered the creek that fed into a pond chiseled from an abandoned quarry & circled with trees. We claimed those waters as our own, stretching across the limestone slab that rose from the pond’s center, & baring our limbs to the sun.
The day Jeff brought his friend Scott along to fish, we carried our equipment with the expectancy & ambition of our mission—poles slung over shoulders, tackle boxes loaded with hooks & worms. I remember the shimmer of bluegill beneath the surface of the water. The ease with which we pulled our catch. I’m less certain how it was that the boys decided I should clean the fish, or how the knife must have felt in my hand as I slit them open. Years later, a Jungian therapist will tell me that fish represent our most primitive instincts. A woman who guts a fish slices her own entrails, bisects her intuition. Did I do it because the boys were older? Because I was a girl? Because I felt grateful they included me at all?
I will spend the next decades saying yes when I mean no—when at thirteen, a boy I don’t even like suggests we go to second base. When at twenty-eight, a man I’ve just started dating asks me to iron his shirts. When at thirty-five, a husband asks if I’ll support him while he searches for his bliss. I will volunteer for these tasks with the same blade I held to those fish—a hope that I might be part of something, that the gratitude I might receive might make up for my dis-ease. It’s been nearly fifty years since that day at the pond, but I remember how proud we felt as we carried home our haul. All those fish stacked neatly in the pail. Mouths open, still gasping for air.
Night Sky with Generations
The playhouse is a solid thing, built over a slab of concrete my father poured himself. Windows—real glass. Walls fashioned from the boards of a box that carried my blind grandfather’s piano a half century before. It is outside these walls that my best friend & I plant ourselves on summer nights, our backs pressed against the past. Through the lighted windows of the cul-de-sac, our mothers are setting or putting away dinner dishes. Our fathers work on projects they assemble & disassemble in offices & basements & garages. Soon they will call us to the lives they are patterning for us. For now, we sit beneath a canopy of constellations that hold us as they have for generations. There, where Orion & Cassiopeia light the way for our great-grandparents as they make their way from Germany to the farms & coal mines of the Midwest. & there, where my mother’s father waits for a treasured piano to arrive in a box that will become our playhouse walls. We squint our eyes as the world makes & remakes itself. Lose ourselves in a silence thick with sound: chirp of cricket & tree frog. Rattle of cooking pans calling us home. Rustle of breath & sleeve as a blind man sits down to his piano, raises his hands to its keys.
REBE HUNTMAN is the author of My Mother in Havana (February 2025, Monkfish Books), a memoir that traces her search to connect with her mother—thirty years after her death—among the gods and saints of Cuba. A former professional Latin and Afro-Cuban dancer and choreographer, for over a decade Rebe directed Chicago’s award-winning Danza Viva Center for World Dance, Art & Music and its dance company, One World Dance Theater. She collaborates with native artists in Cuba and South America, and has been featured in LATINA Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune, and on Fox and ABC News. Rebe’s essays, stories, and poems appear in such places as The Southern Review, Ninth Letter, Sonora Review, Tampa Review, and the PINCH, and have earned her an Ohio Individual Excellence Award as well as fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, PLAYA Residency, Hambidge Center, and Brush Creek Foundation. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from The Ohio State University and lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Delaware, Ohio. Both e’s in her name are long. Find her on Instagram at @rebehuntman.
Featured image by Simon Berger, courtesy of Unsplash.
