This is a quick little flash piece because I’m still mired in moving, and also one that stays on the literary side of things, not wandering into the speculative. Nonetheless, I like it, and what it has to say about connection and communication in relationships.
Talking in the Night
It started like this: Mona turned over in the bed, trying to find the cool edge of sleep. She let out a little groan of frustration and her husband patted her shoulder, caught half-awake, half-asleep himself. She whimpered as though she’d awoken from nightmare and he pulled her close, buried her in his overflowing warmth.
After that sometimes she tested him with that little noise. Sometimes he was too asleep but sometimes he held her, reassuring as the shore holding a wave, feeling it leave and return, leave and return, regular as his breathing.
“You make noises in your sleep,” he said at breakfast. “Are you having nightmares?”
“Every once in a while,” she said. She studied him. How would he react if he thought she were suffering nightmares, that life was stressing her, eroding her, creeping into sleep to make it as uneasy as a coffee-less morning? “Often.”
He left before she did and when she went out through the frosty parking lot, she found he’d scraped the ice off her car for her.
Sometimes she woke and spoke words into the night, hoping he’d decipher them. “No” and “yes” and “please please please.” He slid his arms around her, stroked her back, but never replied. Sometimes later he slipped from bed and went to watch TV, sitting on the couch in his robe, lost and unknowable while the sports channel buzzed facts and figures while she lay in the other room wondering what he was thinking.
One night, she said, “Yes” and he repeated it, giving it a question’s inflection. She held her breath, didn’t answer and they both lay there, listening to each other pretend to dream.
He spoke first, the next night, and said, “Please.” It was her turn to repeat it, pitch it upward, trying to elicit the next word. This time it was his turn not to answer.
It could have laid quiet after that forever. She could have abandoned the night speech, he could have chosen in turn not to pick it up. Their horizons could have been sleepless and silent.
But the next night he spoke and told her about the time his father had taken him fishing and the hook had ripped into his thumb and his father had said men don’t cry. The story went out into the blackness and coiled near the ceiling, peering down at them as though they were dolls in a bed, plastic and supine.
She answered.
She answered with a story half-remembered of cigar ash and a grandfather and they went on telling memories they’d never spoken before to anyone, the things that they would have dreamed if they were sleeping.
And so they didn’t sleep. And so they talked till dawn and the day that was theirs as it had never been before.
In recent news, Rappacini’s Crow as well as All the Pretty Little Mermaids both made Ellen Datlow’s longlist for the year’s best horror and my collaboration with Mike Resnick, The Mermaid Club, will be appearing in Conspiracy. Other upcoming work includes appearances in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Abyss & Apex, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Great story. I had to repeat that last sentence to myself many times, and I still feel like something is missing. The whole story though, ace! I might even have done that when I was very young…
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Review: The Late American Novel
Will anything other than the words themselves survive?(Todd Vandemark passed this along in the hopes I’d have something to say about the book. I did.)
In The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, editors Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee have collected a number of new writers* talking about the future of books, and although the word has been interpreted quite differently by the different writers, there’s some insightful pieces included in the mix. Their introduction talks about the movement from printed page to the screen as a format change comparable to Gutenberg’s printing press. Like the printing press, the technology increases the accessibility of knowledge — though unfortunately that’s not a change tn which any of the essayists seem to be interested.
The truth about electronic publishing is that nobody is entirely sure what’s going on, and this book showcases that mix of cluelessness and well-educated guesses that seems to characterize these discussions. A phenomenon amplifying the scattershot approach of it all is that different essayists take the word “book” differently. In “A Book Is A Place,” Joe Meno talks about the book as an experience for the reader as he tries to define the word:
For me, a book, in whatever form it takes — hardbound copy, paperback, electronic version, online instrument, text downloaded on a cell phone, even a story read orally — a book is actually a place, a place where we, as adults, still have the chance to engage in active imagining, translating word to image, connecting these images to memories, dreams, and larger ideas.
When we’re talking about books in this form, the possibilities that electronic publishing offer to a text are exciting, and several of the essayists wax rhapsodic about those possibilities. Michael Paul Moore, in “The Future of Writing is in My Jacket,” points not to just the audio and visual possibilities but the interactivity afforded by the medium, via authors’ blogs and social networks.
Rudolph Delson also points towards interactivity of a sort, predicting in “The Best Books Will Be Written Long After You Are Dead”:
Pay attention in 2014; that year will witness the publication of the first non-linear e-novel. it will appear on the internet, and it will advance the technique of Edward Packard in the rarest way imaginable. I said: Edward Packard. You have not read Edward Packard? But he invented Choose Your Own Adventures!
Many of the writers are optimistic — or somewhat so. Benjamin Kunkel examines the overtaking of the graphosphere by the videosphere, saying that it will actually become a digitosphere: while the novel as a form will perish, writing will survive in news articles, snippets, blog posts, and other brief writings. Ander Monson observes:
I wouldn’t worry about the future of story. Story is inescapable. We can’t not perceive our lives as stories, even if we know that stories — even the ones we tell ourselves about who we are — are fiction. That’s how the brain works. In this dissolving, data-fragmented world, we all desrire narrative (as opposed to the actual lived experience of unsatisfying fragments, random encounters, and passing glances.) We will continue to consume it.
Kyle Beachy reminds us, though, in “The Extent of Our Decline,” that we’re not the first generation to panic about literature and change, pointing to a letter from Horace to Augustus lamenting the decline of literature. And that’s a hopeful note, because while the material aspects of novels (the printed page, the binding, etc) may not last, the idea of novels will survive, no matter what. There’s something about the way text and your brain interact that ensures that survival — in my opinion, which I, as with every individual weighing in on this debate, am basing on guesses and experience and gut instinct.
I wrote a while back about electronic publishing and the future and got some flack from people who thought I wasn’t sad enough about what I saw as the disappearance of books as printed objects except for those that survive as art or collector’s items. The friends who have helped me carry box after box of books can testify that on my dying day in the nursing home, there will be an armload of paperbacks on the windowsill as well as the fully-loaded library biochip in my skull. But seriously, if you think that the neighborhood used paperback store is going to survive more than a few more decades…c’mon. Factor in a wave of nostalgia similar to the current LP craze and maybe it’ll stretch up to a century, but after that…nuh uh and yes, I weep for the children who won’t know the joy of browsing among the stacks too, but I also know they’re coming.
But the core experience of reading will remain. Joshua Gaylord speaks to a very specific subset of the novel experience in “Enduring Literature,” when he talks about reading difficult books:
The books that have had the greatest impact on my life are not the ones that entertained me the most — rather, they’re the ones I’ve had to endure. Ulysses wasn’t a “good read” — it was a project, a mission, a brief military stint undertaken by a strong-willed idealistic youth. It was a labor to carry it, it required innumerable accouterments to be read (not just the two other texts but also a notebook and a pen, a highlighter, slips of scrap paper to mark particular pages.) Even the page design was more an opponent than a partner: There were line numbers on each page. Line numbers! This book wasn’t kidding around. Reading it, you felt you were staring down the business end of Literature.
That’s exactly why I took a summer class one year in grad school that involved reading Finnegan’s Wake. I may not understand more than a scanty scanty number of those words but by god every single one of them passed under my eyes and I consider that as much an achievement as I do any publication or quitting smoking or the terrifying time I ziplined. And I enjoyed the heck out of the book. If I got a tattoo with words in it, it might well be this: A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s…
But I digress. And it’s passion for books that makes me do so, which is one of the pleasures of these essays, because many of the writers share this passion. Some pieces are full of clever prose and little heart, but at the moments when an essayist admits their unabashed and honest love for text and page that they become moving and interesting. It’s both charming and touching, for example, how many writers wax rhapsodic about books as physical objects. In “Home Word Bound,” Nancy Jo Sales talks about books as a source of identity:
I can’t think of myself without them. …The older I get, the more boxes there are — on my last move, the grumbling moving men counted close to seventy cartons. My books have accumulated around me like a kind of history of my mind, of my experience and knowledge, however limited. Having them near me in a physical way serves as a reminder of who I am — like old photographs that you actually re-enter, reliving the moment captured in the images.
Katherine Taylor notes in “Survival Tips For Writers (And Books In General): A List”, “You’re not home until you unpack your books.” while in “Scribble,” Victor LaVelle touches on this theme as well:
If you pull down the books that are mine, meaning the ones that I brought with me from my single life, you can open more than half and find handwritten notes, sometimes whole paragraphs, scribbled on the end pages, or in the margins of the text. I’ve got a copy of Butterfly Stories, in hardcover, and when I opened the back cover while working on this essay I found one word written at the bottom of the very last page of the story. I wrote, “Yikes!”
But for many there’s a pragmatism about it all. Deb Olin Unferth sums it up in “The Book”:
With regard to the object itself, there does seem to be the danger that the bound book could go the way of other dated and diminished civil objects: matchbooks, hair culrler,s drive-in movies — things that still exist, but thinly. There’ll probably be fewer books in people’s houses, fewert in backpacks and briefcases, fewer bookstores. And, yes, that’s sad, because we like bookstores and backpacks full of books (even the drive-in movie still holds a place in our hearts), but you can’t hold onto something out of sheer sentimentality — or you can, but it won’t work. Besides, a lot of people never had any books in their briefcases to begin with. So in the long run I don’t think it will matter much.
Which seems on track to me, because there are things vanishing from this world that I will mourn as much as the book: blue whales, for one, and places for solitude in nature, and unsupervised trick-or-treating. Things come and go, which is what makes the world interesting, and I, like most of the writers in this book, believe that narrative itself will endure, much like gravity or our dependence on oxygen.
Towards the end of the book, we comes to an essay in the form of e-mails between David Gates and Jonathan Lethem, “A Kind Of Vast Fiction,” which originally appeared in PEN America 12: Correspondances, which sums up so much of the things touched upon by other essays, and in which Lethem asks what is, I think, the core question of this collection:
How is it, and how does it feel (if it’s true), that we happen to occupy the most completely postmodernism-resistant art form, after all? I mean, I’m no David Shields, but I’ve made my own passing gestures at appropriation, and yet fiction — the old transaction, the old transmission — just seems to springily retake the basic shape that it was put in by Austen and Dickens (a shape only mildly deformed, in the end, by your Becketts and Barthelmes), time and time again.
Regardless of any boundaries or distinctions between genre and “literary” fiction we choose to draw, what is happening to the book — to the novel” is the sort of thing that worries anyone who writes. Some crucial core will survive, most of us agree, but what strange sea changes will happen? We book-lovers are seeing our partners transform even as we daily make love to them. Who is that future stranger they’re becoming — and will we love them just as well?
*A couple of caveats — My take on this book may not be that of the average publishing professional, particularly since I used to edit an online magazine and prefer publishing online to in-print . Furthermore, as a spec-fic writer, any title with “Writers of the Future” takes on weird dimensions, because I always imagine Jay Lake and Ken Scholes speaking the words. (I’m also irritated by views of the future like Sonya Chung’s piece, “In The Corporeal Age, We Will Know the Names of Trees,” where gender-exclusive language is a given, but I know that’s just me.)
As I said in class, no one knows yet what will happen with Google+, but it’s off to a very strong start, and the responsiveness of the Google team to feedback and suggestions has been remarkable. For those of us already using Google products like Gmail, Google docs, and Google Analytics, it’s looking pretty promising. Here’s links mentioned in class along with some other links to useful Google+ information.
This is a quick little flash piece because I’m still mired in moving, and also one that stays on the literary side of things, not wandering into the speculative. Nonetheless, I like it, and what it has to say about connection and communication in relationships.
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Recent flash fiction – http://t.co/CbhJKmw76D
@Catrambo I love when the story coils near the ceiling and watches them like plastic dolls. 💚
RT @Catrambo: Recent flash fiction – http://t.co/CbhJKmw76D
Great story. I had to repeat that last sentence to myself many times, and I still feel like something is missing. The whole story though, ace! I might even have done that when I was very young…