Ambitious, But Doable
For chaos, for unintended consequences
I’m two weeks into summer break and I am officially living my best life. I’m nannying my niece and nephew in Billings for most of the week all summer long, which means 450 miles of driving every week, but also means I am solidly immortalizing my role as the favorite aunt. Truly, I’m in my nanny era and I’m am so grateful to be able to spend my summer this way. I get to hang out with the coolest kids in the world (my sister’s kids and my own), the cousins get to play together all day, and I’m off the hook by 3pm. Amazing.
This week I found my new favorite writing spot, a little coffee shop slash brewery right down the street from my parents’ house with tons of sunshine, a sprawling patio, and a different food truck parked outside every day. I’m hopping on the 1000 Words of Summer train a little late, but this is the perfect environment in which to bang out my goal of 1000 words every afternoon. Doesn’t matter what, doesn’t matter why, doesn’t matter whether it’s good or purposeful or productive — just 1000 fucking words. It’s an ambitious pace and I don’t know how long it will last (I’m going on vacation to Mexico next week and don’t plan on doing a single productive thing besides soak up the equatorial sun and drink my weight in margaritas) but I’m gripping onto it fiercely. Ambitious, but doable.
Recommended Reading
“What Two Girls Can Do” by Elizabeth Endicott in Barrelhouse
This story requires a necessary second read-through. This isn’t because the first read is confusing or unenjoyable — Endicott’s character’s are intriguing, the tension is palpable, and it’s a master class in the use of metaphor. But it is only once you see the way this story ends that you can fully appreciate the subtle clues, the eerie foreshadowing and thought-provoking symbols and throughlines that string the piece together. It’s only when you know how damning and impactful the miniscule action captured in the “Let me tell you a bit about Tyler Durden”-ness of the first line — my arm shot out, knocking the milkshake we were sharing from its perch on the dash — will be that it truly punches you right in the gut. Once you get to this line on your second read-through, you’ll see how the crux of the story’s action was hiding in plain sight all along — It (the seatbelt) never buckled the same after that, only latching when it was wiggled just right.
There are three distinct relationships that constitute the braid of this story: the narrator with her dead, alcoholic mother; with my girl, her closeted love interest; and with her girl’s ex, who “held onto grudges like his dick depended on it,” and is the one thing standing between them and being free in their love for each other. The narrator sums up the central conflict of the story in this line, which brings all three tracts together: Just when you’re old enough to leave home, your mother gets sick and needs you; right when you find the girl of your dreams, you meet the awful ex-boyfriend who lords over her life. However, this line seems to lose its potency on subsequent read-throughs, not because it is a mediocre line, but because once you know the ending, you realize that the tension in this story is drawn from something much deeper and more sad.
Maybe it could even be said that this story is also about her relationship with her car, a shitty 1999 Honda Accord inherited from her mother. The story is set almost entirely within the confines of the car, from the fateful milkshake spill to the “plan” undertaken at the end, and is known intimately by the narrator in a way that makes all the action of the story possible — I knew that Honda Accord the way someone knows family. Of course, the fateful seatbelt itself is an essential element of the car, and by extension, a symbol of the inherent danger that lives within the narrator: her potential for chaos, for unintended consequences. And it is upon the second reading that the subtle callbacks to the seatbelt are especially satisfying, when we understand the red herring the author is sneakily dropping right in front of us. In the penultimate sentence in which that car finally felt like mine, we see her taking full ownership of not just the car, but of herself, as in her queer identity and her violent desperation to be with her girl, as well her inevitable connection to her equally destructive mother. In a way, the boy’s death is a culmination of all the things her mother taught her, the dark, unspoken lessons that some would call trauma:
My mother had taught me how to avoid men like him, how to discern if a door held open was a courtesy or a trap. She also taught me how to make morning beers, Budweiser mixed with Clamato, and that the darker the alcohol, the worse the hangover…I knew just what (the car) needed, and just how long. I’d been driving my mother to and from the bars since I was twelve; I’d spent the last two years driving her to and from the hospital.
While we’re talking symbols, I’d argue that the fateful milkshake is a symbol of her girl, in two ways. First, as physicality, a sense memory that kickstarts her carnal desires. Check the undeniable eroticism in this sentence: The milkshake splashed across our laps but I was still trembling from our collision of lip and spit and tit, and barely noticed the thick cream oozing cold between our legs, down the crevices of the console, penetrating the seatbelt. Trembling? Cream? Crevices and penetrating? HOT. All it takes is just the occasional whiff of strawberries to bring all of the two girls had done to a horny, overwhelming head. Secondly, it’s a symbol of unintended consequences, of something innocent becoming a big fucking oopsie. The seatbelt was never broken until the milkshake was introduced. If we want to blame the boyfriend’s death on anything, we can’t necessarily pin it on the girls, their kiss, their attraction to each other, or even their plan to scare him with their erratic behavior and dangerous driving — murder wasn’t their intention. But that pesky milkshake — if it had never been spilled in the first place, if it weren’t for its inherent stickiness, the seatbelt would have caught, he wouldn’t have flown out the windshield, and the situation would have ended entirely differently.
One last thing I have to point out is the brilliance of Endicott’s use of metaphor throughout this story. From the cartoonish — She told me about the ex and the meanness broiling inside him, like he had one of those heat lamps that kept fries hot inside his head. He never hit her, but he yelled, and I understood that a shouting man could shrink you down until he stuffed you in his back pocket — to the bodily and visceral — Hurtling along that tongue of road, disappearing down the night’s throat, the car whined before downshifting — to the effectively succinct — I opened them to a new world, where the windshield was half gone, caving in with a sheet of wet-eyed crystals, and the headlights had gone out too, or no, they were flickering, revealing the pond before us in slow strobes, like God was blinking — the level of exacting specificity on the sentence level is gloriously satisfying. Every image, action, and word choice is intentional and in clear service of the story, which is exactly what a good short story should aim to do. There is no waste or fluff here. Endicott wields the weaponry of her storytelling with an expert hand, excising every molecule of the unnecessary to leave a lean, mean, meaty hunk of a story.
What I’m Consuming, Micro Book Review Edition
The Bombshell by Darrow Farr — Totally unexpected like. Girl is kidnapped by a Corsican rebel group in the nineties and ends up becoming the face of the organization. Satisfying payoff, quality sex scenes.
Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley — Hated it. Obnoxious characters, atrocious character development, weak structure, and couldn’t be more predictable. Does indie sleaze dirty. Don’t bother.
Fahrenheit-182: A Memoir by Mark Hoppus — Couldn’t put it down. A surprisingly emotional story that maintains Mark’s hilarious absurd humor in its voice, while the influence of Dan Ozzi’s writing style was also very strong.
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller — Probably wouldn’t have picked up this retelling of Trojan War if it wasn’t the June selection for my queer book club, but ended up liking it. Not a breezy read by any means, and definitely devastating, but well worth it.
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert — I’ve been on a kick with the 2000s pop-culture history books, especially ones that reexamine this period through a post-9/11 feminist lens. This one was especially great.
Prompt
I tried my hand at writing a sex scene this week. Not a sexy one, but a situation full of apprehension and awkwardness, of a complete emotional mismatch between partners. A hot sex scene isn’t necessarily easy to write, but like in real life (or fantasy), it’s much simpler when the desires, attraction, and implications for all participants are on the same page. It’s a heftier task when you introduce the nuance and subtext of individual (and realistic) idiosyncrasies and motivations.
For this prompt, choose one “phase” (to put it simply) of a sexual encounter — ie flirtation, foreplay, peak, post, etc. — to focus on. In this scene, the characters (two might be simpler, but include as many participants as you want!) are not on the same page. Maybe one is super into it and the other is indifferent, or one feels an emotional attraction while for the other it is purely physical. Maybe there is a misunderstanding about the status of the relationship or the implications of the act, or maybe there is an experiential mismatch. Dig into how these differences complicate sex for these characters in a way that leaves them in a state of uncomfortable misalignment.
Writing Update and Excerpt
This week I’ve been focusing my efforts on finishing a story I started over almost two years ago and have excerpted on this Substack that is tentatively titled “Halloween in Buffalo”. I’ve wanted to finish this story for a long time and finally the other day, as I was zoning out while driving down the highway, the missing piece I needed to tie it all together came to me. Now the task is to write my way towards this piece and smooth out the edges so it is all one cohesive story. At 1000 words a day, completing a draft in the next few sessions seems entirely doable. Ambitious, but doable.
Here’s an excerpt from what I’ve written this week, so it’s super fresh/a little messy:
The National Day of Truth and Reconciliation was some distinctly Canadian federal holiday at the end of September and was the last time I’d seen Erin. Campus was closed for the holiday so she took the train down from Toronto and I called in sick to work, even though I’d told Edgar about Erin’s visit the day before and he knew I was full of shit. I’d missed her immensely, trying not to grow jealous of her burgeoning grad school successes and world-expanding experiences while I was stuck in an unfamiliar shithole city loathing my job and struggling to breathe in the smoggy air. Even though I understood she was busy with school, and I knew her lack of visits wasn’t her intentionally ignoring me, I wanted a chance to be romantic, a chance to be a boyfriend. I wanted to show her my love, though underneath I was looking for some acknowledgement. I wanted a thank-you, however small, for the move, for changing my entire life to be closer to her. So I took advantage of this time together and my desperate yearning and planned us a getaway to the city, the big one, booking an Airbnb on a credit card and hoping my truck would make it the whole way. Thankfully it did, and suddenly, finally, we were together, doing all the cheesy romantic shit I pretended to hate and Erin pretended to be indifferent about but that we both secretly longed for — holding hands in Central Park, sharing a mustard-slathered soft pretzel as big as my head, drinking bodega malt liquor out of paper bags. On the subway to the East Village, we came upon an empty subway car despite it being the middle of the afternoon, like a miracle just for us, where we stuck tabs of acid on our tongues and Erin let me finger her quickly between stops, germs and dignity be damned. We explored the street vendors on St. Mark’s and I bought her a rose and a knockoff Prada purse she’d never use and we both got cheap, silly wigs, mine a jet black mullet and hers a baby blue bob. “Let’s change our names,” she said. “Just for tonight. I’ll be Blue Raspberry and you can be Joe Dirt.” She’d never looked more beautiful, in that shitty off-kilter wig, its plasticy hairs getting stuck in her chapstick, her pupils and her smile as wide as the Hudson. Finally, it felt like everything was going to be fine. The tension of the distance, the jealousy over her burgeoning worldly life, the resentment for ripping my own roots out of the ground just so they could wither and die in fucking Buffalo, none of it mattered, because Blue Raspberry was the most brilliant, driven, arresting being to have ever graced the scum of this earth, and by some insane miracle, she was mine. I wasn’t a piece of shit — I was Joe Dirt, and I’d won the fucking life lottery.
“We should get married,” I said at some point, on some street, hours later. We’d been wandering for hours, letting the fate of New York City tell us to turn on this street and that, tangle us up in its streets. The acid was really doing work at this point, both of us absolutely rolling. Yet, even when we were high on the most terrifying of drugs, Erin always held it together. I could always count on her to tether me back to Earth. She walked a few paces ahead of me with those wide, authoritative steps she always took, and my words got lost in the ambient noise of the street. She turned to me but continued to walk. “What?”
I swallowed. My tongue felt like it was made of the same shit as gummy worms and tasted like I’d just licked a dirty dollar bill. Ahead of me, Erin’s blue hair looked like it was an animation, drawn in with colored pencils by a preschooler. I said it louder this time, the words catching in my ever-uncooperative throat. “We should get married.”
Erin didn’t stop. She kept walking, as if she hadn’t heard me at all. The moment stretched — ten paces, fifty paces, a block, several — until it became clear that she wasn’t going to answer. Maybe I hadn’t actually said it. Maybe the words had come out as something else, morphed into anything that wasn’t as absolutely terrifying as what I thought I’d just said. Maybe she didn’t want this the way I did. Maybe this trip, this night, wasn’t as monumental for her as it was for me. Maybe I actually was a fucking fool, a piece of shit in a Joe Dirt wig who was shooting for the moon and getting lost in outer space.
Thank you so much, as always, for giving my words your attention. Heads up — I’ll be out of the country next week, so I may or may not post next Sunday. Regardless, I’ll be back in 2 weeks with something good!
xoxo,
brit