Mom says it’s my fault, because I insisted on taking the cat through the heavy twin doors, but who leaves a cat in a car in a parking lot on a seventy-nine degree day, with sun shining down and…
This isn’t the first time. Sometimes, it feels like she’s always climbing this tree: when her little brother betrays her; when her memory fails her; when she barely passes a test and her father tells her, “One more C…
A hunk of butter hits the fry pan. Then two pieces of bologna. Sparks of grease jump and sizzle. My dad’s hands—massive, oil-stained, almost old—slash tiny gashes into the bubbles of perfectly pink meat. White bread and yellow mustard…
I picked Jeff up from the airport. We’d met online and chatted for a few months. Newly divorced, he said, about fifteen years older than me. But he was normal, and he was from somewhere else. I’d spent hours…
But where exactly had it gone wrong this day? Probably when my brother-in-law-to-be, Ward DiBaptista, shouted at me to move the Tahoe so it wouldn’t rut the yard, or maybe just after that, when my fiancée’s entire family made…
“I wish she’d just hawk it up and spit it out. You know? Loogie-style.” That’s what I say to Dave in front of the Kwik Stop. We’re on our lunch, drinking off-brand iced tea in plastic bottles and as…
Inspired from a photo by Mary Ellen Mark Lisa’s sitting in the baby pool with chubby Annie even though they aren’t babies anymore. The plastic green pool is in the driveway of Annie’s Aunt Jean’s house. Lisa is nine…
I can’t wear my black V-neck to take yearbook pictures today because I wore it to a funeral last Friday, so now it’s my funeral shirt. Which is crazy, I know, because it’s not like I’ve worn it to…
Chesed shel emet they call it—the truest loving-kindness, preparing a body for burial. Truest, because it is done at inconvenient times, in harshly lit rooms. Truest, because touching dead people isn’t fun. Truest, because the kindness can never be…
The producer wanted wet hands. Sweaty and tense to where the sound really snapped. So my team detained the clappers in an overwarm anteroom beside the recording booth. Made them wait. Clammy, anxious, beating on the soundproof door: We’re…
The iceberg theory thrilled me in high school. You’re telling me the words on the page make up only a fraction of what the story is “about,” that stories are ninety percent hidden in subtext, waiting to be discovered and stumbled upon? Reading became a great mystery. I felt challenged to question my own confusion, consider details closely, and play around in the uncomfortable unknown.
Where I went wrong in this worship was in assuming that the writer knew everything about the piece, that he (and yes, it was almost always a he then) understood one hundred percent of all that mystifying stuff below the water. Adjacent to the document in which these masters typed their story was a separate document, an analytical term paper about their own work, describing how every single choice in the text bore out the secret of the subtext. Having this idea in my head made writers Gods, geniuses, untouchable—why even try? Luckily, I no longer believe this.
Instead (and this goes mostly for fiction under 2,500 words) I believe now in a breakdown like this: thirty-three percent of the iceberg is out of the water (the story’s text); thirty-three percent of the iceberg is under there, and I could describe it if asked (the story’s intended subtext); and thirty-three percent of it is unknown even to me. And I need that last thirty-three percent shrouded in darkness. Without it, I get bored—I get boring on the page.
In workshop a few years ago, I was challenged about the end of one of my stories. I couldn’t say whether or not a strange beast on the side of the road was real or imagined by the narrator.
“Seriously,” a classmate said. “Just tell us.”
“I really don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t figured it out. I can’t say what the animal is exactly.”
“Well, neither will your reader. You’re responsible for figuring this stuff out.”
The consensus was that if I didn’t know it all, the story wasn’t finished, and I hadn’t done enough work. This moment sticks with me more than any other workshop moment because I was forced to verbalize something I did not know about myself as a writer.
“I don’t want to know everything about my story.”
I felt like I had sinned in the name Fiction. I could hear Poe turning in his grave.
Every time I write a flash story that I love, the first draft is drenched in mystery. Each revision organizes, contextualizes, explains, tames, gives backstory, causes the draft to grow. I’m still learning when in that process to stop adding, stop smoothing, stop learning more about my own story, before it’s too late, before I color in all the lines, before the story becomes unwild to me.
I gave what I believe is the best reading I’ve ever given at AWP this year. It was a reading of this story, “The Skins.” The reason it worked (and I’m borrowing from something Angel Nafis said in a panel on giving good readings) was that the piece still held mystery to me. As I read it, even now, I am still actively wondering. I don’t know why the producer is the way she is. I’m not sure why Zeigler stays. The worldviews created by the snapping argument are hidden from me.
If I knew these things, I worry I’d begin to feel as if I were only tracing the sentences, traveling the same paths, instead of consistently happening upon some new unknown underneath.
TYLER BARTON is a cofounder of Fear No Lit, the organization responsible for the Submerging Writer Fellowship. His chapbook of flash fiction, The Quiet Part Loud (2019), won the Turnbuckle Chapbook contest from Split Lip Press. Find his stories in Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Subtropics, and forthcoming in The Iowa Review. Find him at @goftyler or tsbarton.com.
