Earlier in the year, I wrote a part one about a short story I worked on years ago and why it failed. It was part of an effort to take the craft of writing more seriously by analyzing the structural ways a short story might not work. It was also a good way of me wrapping my head around future short stories and come up with a plan for the types of stories I wanted to write about.
Since then I’ve been working on another short story, tentatively titled Drought/Matryoshka and have had some epiphanies since then. Mainly, that I’ve been thinking too much about my past works as being completely irredeemable and incapable of fitting into the new-era of work I’m trying to produce.
But, looking at them holistically they all fit the same sort of theme I’m going for: stories about romance and relationships; stories about transitions; stories about journeys. If my latest short story idea, Wildfire represents Fire, and the one I’m currently working on represents Ice, than the past ones perhaps represent some sort of fundamental element too, underneath all of the other fluff.
That’s a more metaphorical way to look at a work, but I think it works for my brain. Another short story I worked on that I still really love, Please Hurry, Leave Me, clearly represents Water and phrasing it that way gives me a sort of entry point into reworking its overarching metaphor. Big Bend probably represents Earth right? It’s all about geographical time and the natural order of things?
Anyways, here are some more stray thoughts on it:
The core, pt 1.
We’re halfway through the hike, trampling through a mini forest of pine and oak, stone steps and wooden footholds that help keep traction during the rare long and muddy rains. Connor leads us and I keep a steady pace behind him, careful not to look back and anguish over how far we’ve come.
This is the real spiritual core of the story. It explains the entire plot and the dynamics between the characters in two sentences. They’re halfway through their relationship (more likely they’re already done) and one is always behind, the other leading the way. Neither of them wants to look back on the relationship because, doing so, would remind them of how much progress they’ve made.
I don’t hate this bit, I think this is one of the most honest parts of the story. Given how, in part one, I said this was too autobiographical, that’s probably because it accurately describes how I felt during that relationship: like I was being led by some powerful force. Not by design, mind you, rather because I was at that stage in my life where I felt so little about myself that I was mesmerized by anyone with a strong sense of character. I wanted to (and maybe still do) follow anyone around, be led by anyone who would give me the time of day.
Too much. Too many.
Our host has lived here for almost a decade. She has long graying hair and a thin frame coated with skin like leather left in the sun. She gets up early to hike the rim of the basin, always careful to get the best view of the sunrise. At nights, around a fire she tells us stories she learned from her past. She calls herself a storyteller and reenacts each line with perfect grace and concentrated form.
At the end of the night she looks to the stars and sighs with drama. She tells Connor and I that she sees something special in us, that we “get it” before heading back to sleep. He laughs it off and heads to bed alone.
A big problem with this short story is I’m trying to do too many things and introduce too many different story threads into the mix. The host is an amalgamation of two different real-world people: one an actual host of the house in Terilingua that pulled out maps and gave recommendations and two, a “story-teller” that was hired for my ex’s step mother’s birthday party.
I like to consider myself a person of strict logic and reason, but I’m an Aquarius who was raised on magical realism so a big part of me really wants to believe in the divine promise of mysticism and magic. I wanted, at the time, and perhaps still do, for there to be some outside force that picked up on the divinity of my relationship. Or, maybe I wanted someone to pick up on the divinity of myself. I wanted someone to see something special in me and voice it.
But, that’s not part of this story. The issue they’re facing isn’t a lack of specialness it’s a lack of a path forward. Perhaps this character does feel he isn’t viewed as special by his partner, but that’s not voiced anywhere in the actual story so this part falls flat.
a good bit.
The trail was simple: a small worn path through trees and dirt before opening out onto the Terilingua Creek. In the summer this river bed is dry and easy to cross. Now, the early rains of winter have started to fill the creek. Out here there is nothing but canyon and sky and tourists. The red rocks disappear into the distance mixing into the sounds of children screaming and wind against stone.
I just really like this bit of writing. It’s simple but it hits the point.
The core, pt 2.
From the top we look into the canyon and out across the Rio Grande to Mexico where the dark rocks and worn paths merge together. The separation is in name only. The two have existed throughout time, shaped by the same hands, weathered and eroded. When one rose so did the other. Years ago, before the river, the canyons were the same stone, towering high into the sky and overlooking the land they once knew as theirs. Connor howled into the canyon and listened as his voice bounced off the rock and disappeared. He invited me to howl with him, and so I did. We took turns howling into the canyon, laughing at our voices distorted by the rocks. Somewhere down the canyon our voices mix together, as if they never were apart, or never would be again.
Connor stops and turns to me. “Do you mind if we take a break, just for a moment?”
“No,” I say. “Not at all.”
If the earlier paragraph was the spiritual core, this is perhaps the secondary spiritual core of the story. I think, earnestly, this could be the end of the story. It’s a good ending isn’t it? Can we take a break, just for a moment. We know they’re going to break up right? We don’t need to see it happen.
Having the two main characters speak to each other and the main-main character voice his agreement as an ending could work really well.
I don’t know if this is based on a real experience. I don’t think it is. I doubt I had the actual courage to scream into a canyon surrounded by lots of people. I do remember that the canyon did echo and people did scream into it (mostly kids) and I do remember thinking about how the distinctive line between Mexico and Texas that cuts through Big Bend is silly. We create these boundaries and borders in our head but the land doesn’t agree, it works on its own timeline.
That was really the entire impetuous for creating this story at the time. I liked the idea that, over geographical time, the separations we see between land masses were naturally created. There’s something poetic, in my mind at least, about the notion of two landmasses being torn apart by wind and water but still being connected. Texas and Mexico were once joined, are still joined. The metaphor or simile is natural: once connected by a relationship we stay connected, even if things tear us apart, we still create that landmass together, we still existed as that thing before.
Past not present
There’s an importance to tracing the past. If you find the right thread you can grasp hold of it and shake things loose. His family was founded on matriarchs, who, within them contained kingdoms of experience. What did this say about him? The cross between the two: not man but not yet woman? Or was that superficial, to be gay was not to be feminine, but it wasn’t the opposite either. Right?
I had this idea of connecting the past to the present, making this short story about the past catching up to the present or something like that. It makes sense if you consider the geographical timeline aspect of things; I’m talking about time so shouldn’t time come into it somehow? But, again, it’s doing too much. I’m bringing too many factors into the story.
This paragraph poses a question but not a relevant one for the reader. It poses a relevant one for me, the writer: what does it say about him as a character that his family was founded on matriarchs? Does that change anything about his experience to a relationship?
Exploration.
The fourth happened one night after too much beer. We were laying on his bed, drunk while watching a documentary about wild monkeys.
We were laughing and kissing and scratching each others heads with glee and then, I let slip that I wanted to die. It didn’t feel serious but he took it that way. I could see how it could hurt someone: you spend all night with them, you have a romantic time and then they turn around and tell you that they want to die. What did you do wrong? Nothing.
Everyone always does something wrong if you give them enough time. Connor cheated on me and I couldn’t blame him. It was with one of our friends. He was burly and broad, and covered in hair.
Again, I think sprinkling the bits of their relationship into this story is good. This is a good experience to explore: the idea of replicating the motion of monkeys and how that can lead to a downfall.1 But, it doesn’t feel cohesive here.
Still I love the sentence “I could see how it could hurt someone: you spend all night with them, you have a romantic time and then they turn around and tell you they want to die”
And the sentence “Everyone always does something wrong if you give them enough time.”
Those both feel like true kernels of this story to explore more.
An ending. A beginning.
And perhaps, years later, we would find ourselves here again. We would drive without thinking. We would take a trip with family or new friends, with a partner who loved to hike. We would make the ascent: climbing the switchbacks through muscle memory. We would feel each rock as if it were our own, as if it contained within it the complete history of our love. And we would reach the top, and maybe make the climb towards the peak. From there we could see the whole thing for what it was. From there we could trace the geography of our love as it dipped and tangled; as canyons grew and valleys opened up, as rivers dried and burst and cut new grooves into the areas we once thought we knew. And maybe we could jump, or walk, or run, or fly. Find some new way of doing what we had done before. But for now, we couldn’t, for now we could only do what we had to do: turn around and make the descent.
I’ve got nothing real to say about this. I think it works, I think it’s true and it’s good and it’s honest writing and it convinces me that there’s still a story here, buried under something else, waiting to be told.
I’ve got one more thing to say about this story and it’s really a quote: “I took my time, I put the raisins in my mouth one by one, thinking a wish for each, though all my wishes were the same wish.”
1 Earnestly I don’t believe I ever told anyone that I had suicidal thoughts before my current relationship. So, if we’re analyzing this as a piece of autofic this isn’t really true which is probably why it doesn’t work.