Max was two. Zoe, seven. I was forty, when the nurse called and told me I needed to come in for a follow-up mammogram and ultrasound. My manners couldn’t catch up with my physical reaction. I started yelling why…
Essay by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif • What do short stories have in common with jazz? Like the innately improvisational quality of jazz, the nature of the short story genre—constrained by the need for a high amount of drama in a…
I told my mom I loved her at a gas station in Minnesota but I’m not sure she heard. The cashier must’ve been stocking drinks or something so it felt like it was just me and her in there.…
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…
I go to churches because they’re quiet. The world is too loud. The first time I went, I was hiding. I’d been paying for a flat white at the café near my old office when my ex-fiancé and his…
Gordon Bishop, fifty-six, is a one-eyed, one-legged, one-breasted single father. He is a native New Yorker who shares an antique-filled one-bedroom apartment in Hell’s Kitchen with his teenage daughter. Every night, Gordon sits at his desk wearing tighty-whities and…
BAŅUTA RUBESS pioneered feminist theatre and contemporary opera to national renown in Canada and Latvia. She has lived in four countries and writes in two languages. She has written plays, libretti, radio drama, television biopics, stories, and…
It’s all a blur. It can be separated into two five-year periods: using alone and using with Haley. Haley had piercings everywhere: the bridge of her nose, her septum, her nipples, her belly button. She had stretched lobes—one had…
By Daniel Abiva Hunt • When I first began writing seriously, I was obsessed with character histories. Nothing would make my character feel more real and fully formed than a detail-oriented past, I felt, and I would turn over…
I was a lucky little kid, and I’m a luckier little whatever this is now. —Mom, Diary (January 2021) Not sharing is what they call it when one puppy eats another’s dinner, drawing blood from anything that tries to…
This story’s about where inspiration comes from and how we value it, so I want to explore a few inspired moves I’ve made that have clear precedents.
The epigraph is made of language that exists only in the story’s world, not the real world. I found this trick first at around age fifteen with Kurt Vonnegut, how he opens each chapter of The Sirens of Titan by quoting one of that book’s characters. The writers of The Wire also did this for each of the show’s sixty episodes. The intention is the same in either example: to point to the largeness of the story’s world, and to draw attention to the narrator’s lens, their omniscience, control, and taste. The narrator knows enough about their own story to give it not only a title but also a fitting, clever, self-referential entrée. An epigraph of this kind adds mystery and can help a reader to ask the question that is my favorite question to ask myself when reading a book: what is this thing I’m holding? Finally, on a simpler, more surface level, this epigraph was a line I loved, couldn’t let go of, and ultimately found the perfect place for.
Inspiration comes too from Ottessa Moshfegh’s “The Locked Room” and Madeline ffitch’s “Valparaiso, Round the Horn.” Both short stories are favorites for many reasons, but they each contain a particular and enthralling move. It’s something I call the “lurking first person.” In “The Locked Room,” Moshfegh opens by describing a character in lurid detail for about a paragraph before revealing that what might sound like a third-person narrator is in fact a first-person “I”: “He used scissors to cut off all his eyelashes. Sometimes he drew a French mustache on with black felt pen. He was very intelligent and preoccupied with death and suffering. He had a way about him I really liked.”
To avoid spoilers, I’ll just say ffitch saves her reveal for the final sentence.
In my story, I knew I was in a similar place. I wanted to talk about Laurel with both distance and intimacy. She’s called “Mom” by the narrator in the second sentence, but it’s not until the last line of the first section that the narrator steps out as the “I.” This move allows the world to feel more matter of fact when it opens—the narrative camera is in the car watching the character of Mom as she drives the dog home. However, the camera is actually in the narrator’s—her son’s—head as he imagines a story behind the whimsical but ultimately heartbreaking voicemail she leaves him one evening.
I think I write stories backward. “Wouldn’t it be cool to do X in a story?” I often ask as I begin a project. It’s a recipe that leads to a lot of unfinished experiments, but when it works, these “meta” or “autofictional” moves also tell the reader what the story is trying to say. As much as it’s a meditation on inspiration, this story is also about all the ways that distance wards off (and cheapens) intimacy—yet humans continue to search for ways to be close to one another, even as we become more physically, culturally, and spiritually siloed. Simply thinking about your mom, singing her song for no one, is a way to feel close to her. At least I think that’s what I—I mean, my narrator—discovers at the end.
TYLER BARTON is the author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum (Sarabande Books, 2021) and The Quiet Part Loud (Split/Lip Press, 2019). His stories have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Electric Literature, Subtropics, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. His work has been included in The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and twice listed as “Distinguished” in The Best American Short Stories. He lives in Saranac Lake, New York, where he works for the Adirondack Center for Writing. Find him on Instagram at @tylerbartonlol.
