We were agents of change. We wrote about how hugging, laughter, and kissing can lengthen your life. Warned that toxins in commercial cosmetics seep surreptitiously through nails and pores. We advocated ditching pesticides and gardening with beneficial nematodes instead.…
Later, you’ll claim there were warnings. Unusual bird calls. That double rainbow you snapped for Instagram. A knowing gleam in the eyes of the hibachi waitress. To make sense of a thing is to make it your own, and…
The monsoon our mother delivers a boy, we’re saved from our father’s anger. Our hands are raw, unrecognizable, carrying hot water, tugging clean sheets beneath our mother’s heels, taut like our names. The baby looks whittled out of a…
When we were twelve, we taught ourselves to fly. —John Murillo, from “Renegades of Funk” All of us girls, now women. —T Kira Madden, from “The Feels of Love” That winter, we watched New York Undercover on group phone calls,…
“We want you to know how we lived. That we lived. That we were girls before we were game. That we were alive.” Essay by Melissa Benton Barker • Gayle Brandeis’s recent novel-in-verse, Many Restless Concerns (a testimony):…
They taught us how to kill with assault weapons, bayonets, bare hands. They taught us the lay of the land, how to navigate by rivers and stars, how to use cover to outflank enemy operatives, how to make a…
We make a ton of money off Christmas in July, because customers have too much hope. It’s not their fault. Me and Rubina feed it to them. We decorate Paradise Pawn with tinsel and lights. We smile and hold…
By Jesse Motte • When I read Dustin M. Hoffman’s first collection, One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist, during undergrad, it felt like I’d been suddenly gut-shot by some invisible, benevolent entity. The shock excited me. I prefer my writing like that: unforgiving…
After Dinner A woman sits at a kitchen table, sipping chamomile tea and reading a book. The dishes have been rinsed, the counters and sink cleared, the dishwasher hums. Outside the window over the sink, the night is…
The approach is by boat—the passage is narrow. Our steamer slipped through the still, dark water. Us passengers, bewitched, red-eyed and scorch-lunged refugees from the burning south, reached out to touch the icy granite, scraped clean as a birth…
This story started with an image and an affect. I came across the image a couple of years ago while on a road trip through wild country. I won’t describe it. I found it deeply troubling: impressive, grotesque, and sublime in scope. It ached and continues to ache. It is horror and grief. I wanted to hold on very tightly to this emotional register. I wanted to write a version of its story.
When I started writing this piece, I set myself the challenge of writing a plotless story. The older that I get, the less interested I am in traditional plot or character development. What happens when you attempt to write a narrative devoid of sequential events, cause and effect, characters changing for the better (or worse)? You need to find other ways to provide that narrative structure and support.
There’s a “why” behind this challenge. Living in the Anthropocene and on the Northern California coast, I return again and again to the following questions in my work: how do we write trauma? How do we communicate with the written word that which cannot be spoken? I increasingly experience the world in what feminist theorist Toril Moi calls cyclical time: a spiralic repetition of seasons, reflexes, relationships. Playing further with epistemologies of time, I meditate on holographic time: time that flows, but with all objects and their quantum information staying imprinted on the event horizon of our lives. My original questions lead me to these: how do we capture a rupture in the monolithic, linear time of history? How do we nurture it? Make it a friend? And here I return to the challenge of plotlessness: I want to contemplate the unexplainable, the unnarratable.
Did I succeed in writing my story with no plot? No, but I’ll continue working through this challenge of plotlessness elsewhere. I’m happy that this piece found a home with readers and writers excited to engage in this exercise with me.
We find ourselves on the brink of geologic time in ellipsis. I end on another image, and I’ll describe it to you since I imagine it often: We are skiers on the verge of lifting off the ramp of the long jump, in the moment that the blades of our skis leave the snow and ice and kiss the air. This story continues to live, breathe, grow inside of me. I hope it blooms in you, too.
SARAH ARANTZA AMADOR lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California and writes about longing, ghost-making, and the endearment of monsters. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2019 and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Sarah is currently writing a novel based on the above story. She tweets @ArantzaSarah and sometimes blogs from saraharantzaamador.com.
