Rumors swirled around Mari like a second shadow. Rumors that her mother had abandoned her at a gas station, left her strapped in a booster seat in the back of the car with the keys in the ignition. That…
Exploring bodies, girlhood, and belonging is often my way into a story. What are the risks when you’re the odd one out, the one watching what’s unfolding instead of participating? What does it take to be part of a group? It was important to me to tell this story through three layers: the first person plural or collective “we” of the teenage girl gang, the relationship dynamic between the narrator and Mari, and the removed/adult narrator looking back at a moment of naiveté—perhaps with some longing and regret that she can only experience now that she’s grown up. I didn’t want this story to hinge on nostalgia alone even as temporary tattoos and stolen box wine and birthday slumber parties on someone’s living room floor feel like a time capsule.
Sad girl lit (complimentary!) has been having a moment (remember when everyone on Twitter had Big Feelings about My Year of Rest and Relaxation?). But grief and sadness often sit side by side with loneliness, longing, and rage. I sat down to show the kaleidoscope of these emotions in a single paragraph, in a single sentence, even if I didn’t realize what I was doing at the time. For the narrator and the reader, there’s the story of Mari and then there’s who she actually is. There’s what happened then and how the narrator remembers it now and the messy truth in the middle.
This story started in a SmokeLong Fitness workshop with the prompt “Roof as setting and metaphor” and the earlier draft scribbled into my notebook had a much more obvious approach involving someone falling off a roof. Was she pushed? Did she trip? Did she jump? But ambiguity and vagueness rarely work well in flash fiction. The first draft was very zoomed out and more about the town as a whole and their reactions to Mari’s mother’s death. Later on, I brought the story into focus by putting the narrator and Mari at the center. I also feel like it was a common plot point in 2000s TV and movies for the teenage girl main character to hang out on the roof outside her bedroom window, her knees pulled up to her chest, her hair whipping around in the wind. No one else in the world but her and the stars, almost like there was a safety to being alone, high up, and looking down at the world below.
I loved making our narrator try to climb into Mari’s secret world. Being a teenage girl can be so weird, embarrassing, and disempowering. You can be the same age as someone else and have wildly different bodies and life experiences. Both of them are just trying their best. Dare I say that there’s something so deeply human about that?
CHRISTINA TUDOR is a writer living in Washington, DC. Her fiction has been featured in SmokeLong Quarterly, matchbook, HAD, Flash Frog, The Citron Review, Best Small Fictions 2024, and more. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and was a 2022 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow in fiction. Her debut chapbook, CALL MY BODY A CAUTIONARY TALE, will be published by Thirty West this fall. Find her on Instagram @christinaltudor and Bluesky @christinaltudor.bsky.social.
