Keep. Keep? I said keep. Sure, all right. These too. Keep? Keep. Okay. And—keep. There’s still nothing in the donate pile. Keep it. Anyway some of this stuff we might use later. Hon. We might. Well. Sure. But someone else probably needs…
When I was asked to provide a short craft essay to accompany “Sleeping Arrangements,” I have to admit that my first reaction was a rush of mild panic. What could I possibly say about a 200-word, all-dialogue story? Or, more specifically, what could I possibly say about a 200-word, all-dialogue story that wouldn’t cheapen its effect? That wouldn’t render me a sort of shabby stage magician, flooding the room with fluorescents and pulling back the sooty curtain to reveal the mundane physics behind her trick?
I suppose I can say that my only goal, in writing this little story, was to make the reader feel. Stripped of all other artistic and intellectual pretense, this strikes me as perhaps the primal impulse behind most literature: to make someone feel something that they otherwise wouldn’t. To affect. In a story so short, there is room for little else. I chose the characters’ circumstance primarily because I could convey it—in all its middle-class mundanity and shattering, private magnitude—very quickly, and could reveal it naturally over the course of a single conversation.
Interestingly, and perhaps ironically (because I truly did write this story with an eye toward broad relatability), I think the dilemma faced by the unnamed couple in “Sleeping Arrangements” has been turned sideways, or even upside-down. What I mean is that, at least here in America, the apparent barriers to childbearing and rearing have radically shifted over the past few decades. Although fertility interventions have grown increasingly advanced, the birthrate has continued to drop (a statistic about which I, personally, could hardly care less, but alas!); the primary obstacles for today’s would-be parents are not rooted in biology, but in economics. Young Americans face stagnant wages, high costs-of-living, and few or no affordable housing options, and those who choose to become parents in spite of this bleak landscape can count on almost no social safety nets—e.g. paid maternity/paternity leave, universal healthcare, universal free childcare, tuition-free public college—to protect their families from debt accumulation and outright poverty. More and more people who want children simply can’t afford to have them. And, disturbingly, quite a few men in power seem to think that the best solution to this dilemma is to simply force women into pregnancy and childbirth. But I guess that’s a weedier sort of story—one I couldn’t quite manage in 200 words.
ALICE ASHE is a writer of poetry and prose whose work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Hawai’i Pacific Review, december, and other journals. She lives in Atlanta with her partner and son.
