We strive to slide and glide but list from side to side, bob up, bob down, settle for a sec or a minute. We shake our balding heads in minute arcs, lest we fall and fracture. We slake worries,…
I envy fellow writers who think about stories on their own, mull over the bones of them, and then put pen to paper. There doesn’t seem to be space for story seeds to sprout in the crowd of my head. From time to time, something might surprise me and knock at my door, unbidden and unplotted. But something magic happens when I’m spoon-fed a prompt—a theme, a form, a word count, some random words. The trap springs open and my wild animal mind runs out and feels its way into a story, bumbling as it goes. I try to make sense of it later, when I obsessively revise.
I wrote “Settle and Slake” in a SmokeLong workshop—a story a day for three weeks. The day I wrote it, we were asked to use a crescendo, to repeat phrases, to use “a line that surprises,” and to circle back to a previous important image. I’d just learned and loved the word “lour” and was driven to use it. Twice. The second time, I dared to make an adjective of it.
Surely, I wobbled during my morning stretches that morning. Extrapolating my concerns about my balance to an unlikely conclusion gave me something to write about. I intertwined pop culture references to aging like Golden Girls with images of how I personally might respond to my decline (flirting with assisted living staff, fear of croaking with chin hairs sprouting Medusa-like, cocking a finger-pistol at my forehead…).
A while back, I stumbled and fractured a vertebra. It was excruciatingly painful and disabling for months, but not enough for me to relinquish my independence. The anxiety over that happening again, with more disastrous results, magnifies as I age. My brain easily rushes to a perceived inevitable dark side, (I can go from a hangnail to gasping on my death bed in a split second!), but after I have a story to share, there is some relief, although my psyche’s splayed out for all to see—horror!
“We” seems to be my default POV when dealing with difficult topics. I think by engaging the first-person-plural vantage point, I’m guaranteeing myself company when or should I ever find myself in a certain situation! The “We” point of view also provides a protective distancing when I write fiction that contains elements of CNF. But life is sneaky and insinuates itself into my work often. The older I get, the more this theme of the slippery slope shows up in my writing. I deal with that by using humor, because humor, to me, means hope.
MIKKI ARONOFF writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. Her work has been longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Best American Short Stories, and Best Microfiction. Mikki has stories in Best Microfiction 2024 and in Best Small Fictions 2024 and forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2025. She lives in New Mexico. She can be found on Facebook @mikki.aronoff.
