In May 1939, Adolf Hitler received a request from the parents of Gerhard Kretschmar, who was born blind and missing limbs. The Kretschmars wanted to kill their child. Hitler authorized his personal physician, SS officer Dr. Karl Brandt, to…
Essay by Sam Risak • “Florida man arrested for calling 911 after kitten denied entry into strip club.” “Florida man once arrested for fighting drag queen with tiki torch runs for mayor.” “Florida man killed by alligator while hiding…
The day you killed your mother, you wished your father dead. A whole life of could-bes glittered in your mind. A beauty parlour for your mother, reams of thread and pots of sticky wax. A lunchbox business, stacks of…
On the Big Island of Hawai‘i, Honokaa is the town tourists drive through to get to Waipi‘o Valley. At the top of the valley is a scenic overlook, which provides an unobstructed view to the black sand beach, river,…
By Mark David Kaufman • James Joyce once observed that he had included so many “enigmas and puzzles” in Ulysses that professors would be preoccupied with the book “for centuries”—an effective way, he added, of “insuring one’s immortality.” Such…
Inspired by Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino—a story of my life Perhaps the farmland becomes industrial yards with barbed wire fences, and then the barbed wire fences become concrete retaining walls covered in graffiti, and you are there.…
Memories Have No Expiration Date Eric Nguyen’s Things We Lost to the Water ruminates on the constant disruptive sounds of waves regardless of which shore we land on, and on how the past echoes. “New Orleans is at war”…
That Friday night, on her way back from the library, Jia saw a boy in a baseball cap coming toward her. She listed to the side, knelt to tie one shoe, then the other, hoping he’d walk past. But…
BOARDING The thing about los Hondureños, es que como dice mi abuela, hablan hasta por los codos. They talk even out of their elbows. I will never get through a Tegus-bound plane ride without holding an…
rock verb \ ˈräk \ rocked; rocking; rocks transitive verb 1 : to move back and forth in or as if in a cradle Every ten years the Arkansas catfish woman emerges from her riverbed and rocks to-and-fro, lets…
I wrote this story because I was homesick for Little Rock. I had just moved to Michigan, where in the winter the sun set at 5:00 p.m. and the snow banks climbed two or three feet high by February. I missed wide rivers, muggy heat, stormy nights. I wanted to write something that captured a piece of Arkansas, something of its magic, and I especially wanted to write a fairy tale.
Around this time I had just read Kate Bernheimer’s “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale,” published in The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. In the essay, Bernheimer identifies “flatness, abstraction, intuitive logic, and normalized magic” as four elements that characterize the fairy tale form. A longtime writer and admirer of speculative fiction, I was already familiar with the concept of normalized magic—where magical happenings are simply understood by characters and readers—but I was intrigued by the idea of painting characters in very broad strokes and telling a story in associative leaps from image to image, rather than in the more familiar cause-effect plot. The fairy tale form seemed like the perfect way to explore the things that drew me to writing—images, situations, and atmosphere, not necessarily well-rounded characters or intricate storylines. It also seemed like a form particularly suited to flash fiction. I was (and still am) interested in flash fiction, its ability to communicate entire worlds in a tiny space. I’m also frequently challenged by the different set of concerns it brings, often more on the line-level than in terms of overall structure.
All these ideas contributed to the story’s creation, but the more specific shape of the story, a dictionary definition, emerged from a prompt: “use the same word to mean as many different things as possible.” I chose the word rock because it’s a verb and a noun, and because it appears in the name “Little Rock.” Thus, the story’s setting and initial inspiration would also shape its structure. Building the story around sample sentences for a definition meant that each part of the story had to be somewhat self-contained, short, and evocative, but the parts also had to collectively build to a satisfying conclusion. It was a fun challenge, especially to play with language so the repetition of rock didn’t become too tiresome. It was also fun to discover the different places one could find the word rock—at a concert, on a boat, by a river, etc.
Finally, the catfish woman. Why her? Because catfish are significant to popular culture in Arkansas, and a mermaid from Arkansas would probably look something like a catfish. And because mermaids are emblematic of the liminal, the in-between, where the magical meets the more familiar. She always stood for the particular kind of magic I sought to create with this piece.
AUDREY BAUMAN is an MFA student at Northern Michigan University and Managing Editor of Passages North. She has been published in Paper Darts, Jellyfish Review, and HAD. Her tweets can be found @haylin42.
