It’s Inventory Week at Baumgartner Plumbing Supply. Their parents are gone and, for five nights, won’t be home until morning. At nearly sixteen, Heidi has been told she is no longer a child and is therefore old enough to…
When I was growing up in a small Wisconsin town, the traveling fair offered an escape from the ordinary. Empty fields were converted to makeshift midways. Strangers arrived and disappeared just as quickly. The fair’s transience carried the promise of excitement and danger, a potent mix for a girl who imagines becoming someone else. I wanted to set those youthful emotions against the backdrop of a very different kind of American experience happening at the same time: a family reckoning with the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
The story unfolds over five consecutive nights. That structure gave me a natural way to ratchet up tension slowly, allowing dread to accumulate in small bites rather than through major revelations. Each night follows a general pattern: Heidi checks on her brother, Richie; she leaves the house; she heads to the carnival. But the emotional stakes begin to subtly shift. By the final night, the carnival and the home begin to collapse into one another, and the story’s ultimate breaking point finally has somewhere to land.
I was interested in exploring the contrast between performance and authenticity, illustrated through the characters of Richie and Rory, a boy Heidi meets. The carnival is a temporary world built on illusion and practiced charm. Rory himself exists in this glittering world, and Heidi projects meaning onto him because she is desperate for connection and escape. Meanwhile, Richie, who has returned from a very real war, can no longer participate in ordinary performance at all. He becomes a destabilizing force in the household. Heidi stands between those two male figures, trying to understand adulthood through fragments, misread signals, and sensory impressions.
In many ways, Heidi tells the story exclusively through what she sees, hears, and feels rather than what she can articulate directly. The hum of neon lights, the strip of light beneath Richie’s bedroom door, the touch of Rory’s shirt against her bare arm, the smell of fried dough, the sound of guitar strings and crackling tar paper—Heidi notices these physical details before she’s able to understand the emotional ones, so the story became grounded in sensorial observation.
I toyed with using the first-person POV in present tense, which was a departure for me as a writer. Eventually, I restored the piece to where it had always been most at home with close third-person. It was imperative that readers feel as trapped as Heidi is in her immediate circumstances. Events needed to unfold in real time, experienced as Heidi experiences them. She’s a perceptive girl, but still young enough that she cannot fully interpret what she’s witnessing, especially where Richie is concerned. Ultimately, “Inventory Week” aims to capture the moment when a young girl begins to recognize both the fragility of the people she loves and the instability of the stories she tells herself about them.
KAREN MULTER is a Chicago-based writer, though she’s never been able to shake her Wisconsin roots growing up on the back waters of the Mississippi River. Something about ice fishing in a onesie changes a person. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Cutleaf, Fahmidan Journal, Open Minds Quarterly, Black Fork Review, Great Lakes Review, and River and South Review, among others. She’s been a featured writer at the Writers Read live podcast recordings in New York City. A former Dramatists Guild Fellow, her work has twice been featured at the Kennedy Center Page-to-Stage Festival. She’s also an accomplished composer who licenses her original music for TV and film including HBO, Netflix, and Amazon Originals. Find her on Instagram @karenmulter and on Bluesky @karenmulter.bsky.social.
