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…
By Peter Selgin • The older I get, the less interested I am as both reader and writer in things are that—or that feel—“made up.” Put in positive terms, the more attracted I am to stories and novels that…
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…
Everyone expected me to take my mother’s eyes. I had a right to take what I wanted, and her eyes were legendary. She’d taken them from her mother, and her mother had taken them from her mother. They were…
By Amber Wheeler Bacon • In the third draft of my novel, I’m still messing with structure. It feels like I’ll always be messing with structure. To experiment, I’ve tried copying the frameworks of different novels I love: Purity…
By Candace Walsh • In Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” the authors use intertextuality as a structural element: a rhythmic, outside-of-time interruption of the chronological main story. Simultaneously, each of the female narrators…
By Candace Walsh • In Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” the authors use intertextuality as a structural element: a rhythmic, outside-of-time interruption of the chronological main story. Simultaneously, each of the female narrators…
Essay by Melissa Benton Barker • In this cultural moment when bodies and embodied experiences that resist conforming to the cisgender, heterosexual male norm are increasingly marginalized and criminalized, Ariel Gore’s We Were Witches, feminist novel and anti-shame manifesto,…
Gökçe watches her younger brother stride up the street to her flower shop in his only suit coat, carrying a borrowed briefcase. The coat does not have holes yet, but the hem of the sleeve has come undone, and…
1 Work the cold meat from the last bone. Still numb from the fight, I eat Gil’s leftovers. He ordered his usual two dozen of Blazin’ Hot. Bastard. He knows habanero burns my gums. Lick the buffalo sauce off…
The seed for this story started while I was standing in a slow line at the grocery store. It’s such a wonderful place to glean story characters simply because spaces like that are life’s great equalizers. We all need to buy food and toilet paper and soap; none of us gets out of the tasks that come with those purchases. Not the disheveled senior citizen putzing down the aisle for a package of hot dogs. Not the rushed parent picking up cases of juice boxes for their child’s classroom. Not even the arrogant jerk discreetly scouring the shelf for Preparation H.
When I looked at the florist kiosk near the registers there were these glaring juxtapositions. Gorgeous orchids next to gaudy foil balloons. A man wearing an expensive suit selecting a ridiculously cheap bouquet. A demure employee in the most heinous shade of yellow that corporate headquarters could have chosen for a uniform. She was someone who obviously cared about her job by the way she fluffed the carnations and engaged with customers. Watching her got me wondering about the relative credentials and backstories we subconsciously ascribe to people in the world. Was she really all that different from some high-end florist with wealthy clients in the middle of an expensive city? My gut told me no. But if you look at the way people like her are often treated, it doesn’t seem like the grocery store florist is ever that highly regarded.
As I loaded my items on the conveyor belt, I grew curious about her story. Does she like this job? Is it her only job or does she work three? How does she get to work every day? Is she happy?
Finding the right medium to grow a story using a grocery store florist came much later after I’d been thinking about how so many of us (myself included) have different kinds of addictive behaviors. How easy it is to become addicted to a substance or activity or, in some cases, a whole life, even if it’s not good for us. And how hard it can be to quit. I thought of the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step program and how it’s helped so many to a better path because of its structure.
As someone who likes to play around with unusual structures in my writing, the twelve steps also struck me as an interesting way to tell a story (i.e. a hermit crab approach). Not only do the steps offer the kind of restraint and parameters that work well in flash fiction, the order of the individual steps also inherently lends itself to a subtle plot driver as well. But there’s also this: adhering to the twelve steps is not always a long-term guarantee of success, and in that way it leaves a story’s conclusion open-ended, just like sobriety. Will she permanently quit her life with Gil? We can only hope so. I certainly do.
KRISTEN M. PLOETZ (@KristenPloetz) lives in Massachusetts. Her recent short fiction has been published (or is forthcoming) with The Normal School, Atticus Review, Wigleaf, jmww, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and is Creative Nonfiction Editor for Atlas + Alice. You can find her on the web at www.kristenploetz.com
