Dear Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Granddaughter, You probably don’t exist. I have never wanted to be a mother, and that will probably never change. Still, every time my tribe reaches out to those of us pursuing higher education, we are asked what we…
By Beth Kephart • All memoirists are ultimately marking time. They denounce or embrace chronology. They deploy fragments or amaranthine circles to supersede the clock. They suggest, by their very storytelling structures and frames, that the sequence of remembering…
0. For a while, it only amounts to simple things. Father plays practical jokes on daughter so often that daughter expects shit to happen at any given moment. For instance, father often kicks the back of girl’s knees when…
When we got to Kituwah it was dark. The mound-building ceremony was long over, the cars driven in and out of the field were gone, the little road empty and twisting through the mountains. Mom got out of the…
Abbreviated Since entering middle age, I sometimes fear my time is running short. I could use the word “manopause” to explain the changes men face at my age, but I need to save time so I just say…
In five years, on Space Mountain, we’ll blast asteroids to clear a path through the Milky Way, buckle up and hold our breath as we journey into the void of darkness. When we disembark through adverts of outer space…
Ben and I are sitting side by side in the very back of his mother’s station wagon. We face glowing white headlights of cars following us, our sneakers pressed against the back hatch door. This is our joy—his and…
They slept much better using a disc-shaped noise machine from which they could select a variety of soothing sounds: Ocean Waves, Birdsong, Tropical Breeze, Summer Night. They always chose Summer Night, so whatever season it was or should have…
By Ian Randall Wilson • When I wrote in third person, it was in third-person close. The concerns of simultaneity didn’t occupy much of my attention. There may be a flaw in my thinking here, but my reasoning was…
They staggered, stunned, into the fall, she and Teddy making giant vats of pasta and vegetarian burrito dinners to feed twenty-five, inviting home everyone they knew to eat, to drink, to stay over, please, we have a futon and…
“Epilogue” began more than a decade ago. I sat down intending to write about Teddy and Jane, but instead produced a two-page wall of text describing my own memories and impressions of living in lower Manhattan in the year after 9/11. I was a college sophomore at the time, and, together with friends, watched the attack on the World Trade Center from a dorm room balcony.
I revisited the piece a few years later, this time with enough distance to filter my own experiences through the lens of the characters. The events of the story haven’t changed much since that early draft, but I tinkered with the language—sentence by sentence, word by word—for a very long time. I wanted the language to reflect the characters’ disorientation as they attempted to understand an experience that was both intensely personally horrifying and also a national tragedy.
“Epilogue” became a piece I would turn to in between working on other projects, make a few changes, save, and put away. For a long time (years), the biggest problem was the ending; I tried concluding the piece in so many different ways, but nothing I tried felt authentic.
There’s no great turning point here, just an eventual realization: that the ending was giving me so much trouble because there is no ending. The deaths on 9/11 don’t make sense. They never have. They never will. Jane can never find a resolution; she just lives with the lack of it. That realization led me to the final few sentences, and those sentences, at long last, felt like an honest way to close the piece.
And yet, and yet. Even honesty can be slippery. I finished this piece in August 2019. Now it is April 2020, and the world is stumbling through a new tragedy, one both slower moving and wider spread than 9/11. Jane’s ending still feels honest to me, but it also feels very much of the time before COVID-19. If I were to write an ending for Jane today, I imagine that she’d be wrestling with a different kind of truth: that we never do know what’s going to happen next, and that uncertainty can be terrifying. But if we sit with it for a while, hold it up to the light at just the right angle, maybe there can be some hope in it, too.
CAROL M. QUINN’s fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Border Crossing, Painted Bride Quarterly, Joyland, Chicago Quarterly Review, and pacificREVIEW. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and often teaches first-year writing, most recently at Michigan State University. A native of Queens, New York, she lives in Michigan with her husband and sons.
