Good Expectations #5
On the origin of stories, accepting change, and doing the work.
This was years ago. 2010, to be specific.
My wife and I were living in Salem, and in the middle of the night, we heard a pounding on the door. It was one of our neighbors, telling us that the street was flooding and that our curb-parked car was about to be flooded as well. Without thinking, I pulled on pants and slipped on shoes and grabbed the keys and went down to the street and opened the door, which made rainwater flood into the car, and I gunned it in reverse to the end of the street, where there was higher ground. (In retrospect, I should have let the car just get totaled. As a result of my actions, it ended up needing to go into the shop.) I waded back down the sidewalk (in what was truly waist-high water) to the house (a condo, the middle unit of a triple decker) and discovered that our basement was flooded. What had happened was a confluence of three things: heavy rains, high tide (we lived near the harbor), and at the time, Salem’s town water happened to run below our street and into the harbor. Essentially, water had nowhere to go but up, through the drains, and into a lot of our basements. Our water heater, washer, dryer, and most of our belongings in the basement were ruined and had to be replaced. We didn’t have hot water or laundry for a week or two, and overall it took a long time to recover.
That is essentially the basis for this month’s story, ‘Still Life With Red Dragon,’ But in this story, a character dives into the floodwater and it takes a fantastical, horrific turn. The reason I am telling you all of this is that I didn’t attempt to write this story until 2021. I’d never forgot those events for personal reasons, but because I’m a writer, I always thought that it would make a great opening for a story. Finally, eleven years after it happened, I started working on it — for months. But it didn’t come together right away. I kept running away from it because the events of the story became too horrible. I was facing down a monster within the story, and I backed off. It made me uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to do with it, and so, like a lot of stories I’ve begun, I abandoned it. But the thing about abandoned stories is that they never really leave you. They’re always going to be knocking around in your head somewhere.
What I’ve discovered since then is that when I back off a story or find something about the content difficult to face, it’s never really about the content. I just didn’t know how to approach the story, hadn’t yet discovered its unique, internal mechanism. I didn’t know what the emotional core of it was. Not until this month, when, rifling through old notes on my desk, I found a note, scrawled, from who-knows-when, that was a snippet of dialogue, and I immediately knew who was saying it, and in what story it was being said. It ultimately became something that the main character’s mother says to her.
‘I don’t think I understand exactly what you’re trying to say is happening, but I’ll tell you what I wish someone had told me, and it’s that marriage is like anything else difficult. You just figure it out in the short term, over and over. It’s like a task that you never finish. You just keep on doin’ it.’
That was the beating heart of the story. That made me excited to write it. It was when I believed I could write it. From there, everything else fell into place. Once I know how a story is going to be written and once I know my characters on an emotional level, everything else comes easily. It’s as though, even when a story is removed from reality, it already happened to me, and my writing of it as a re-counting, a re-telling, for anyone who will listen to the truth. I’m relieved and grateful that my subconscious and conscious minds eventually figured out this story, and that I’m free of it, and that I’m no longer left wondering if and how and if I ever will figure it out. And for those of you who are paid subscribers, thank you, and I hope you like this one.
Also, a couple of good updates: Two weeks ago, my story ‘A Rescue’ was published at Terrazzo Mag, along with a short interview about the origin of that story. And in a little less than a month, my story ‘Togetherness’ will be published at Fractured Lit.
And last but not least, for all to enjoy, is this month’s mixtape, which is in
Until next month.
— T