When we think of teachable stories, we often reach deep into the rucksack of the literary past, pulling out classroom-tested stories that have worked their way into the canon. While there is obviously a ton to learn from these pieces, contemporary short story writers are also completing strong work built upon teachable literary foundations, while also finding fascinating ways to advance the form. In this space, we’ll highlight some of these more modern stories and explore a bit of what they have to teach us as we continue to do our part to push literature forward.
Introduction
In “Terraforming Mars” by Emmett Knowlton, an honorable mention in our 2019 Summer Short Story Award for New Writers, we meet Sebastian, a seventh-grader whose father is killed in the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers. This story is written in first person past tense, beginning at the moment Sebastian learns something is wrong, as his mother picks him up from school. We follow him through a full year, up until Labor Day and the start of his next school year, as he goes through the motions of continuing to live while grieving.
The Inciting Incident
I like to argue that inciting incidents can be somewhat malleable, that they differ depending on what particular thematic or physical arc you as reader are giving the most importance in any particular reading of a piece. This story disagrees with me quite heavily; there is only one possible inciting incident here, whether you’re considering the internal conflict of the story, the external conflict, the thematic arc, or any other way you want to break down this story. When it happens, that thing that overshadows this entire piece, there is nothing else that can so much as pretend to take precedence.
All of his life circles around this moment. Because of that, we use the thematic resonance of the event to explore both his memories and his near future. This creates a fascinating sort of gravity in the piece where everything feels like it’s moving incredibly slowly; we’re jumping in and out of direct moment almost constantly like we’ve come unstuck from time, because in a large way we have. As one could argue is also true for our culture at large when considering this moment, every moment of reality from this point on is tied to the moment the story is following.
I’m talking around the moment, around what that inciting incident is, even though there’s no real reason to do so, because the story talks around it. We know the story takes place in September, the Towers are mentioned, but most of the time we’re using general phrasing like “that day”; September 11, 9/11, is not mentioned by name in the piece at all. For my students, most of whom now weren’t born at the time of the Twin Towers’ destruction, it takes some time to piece together what is being talked about, and there are plenty who can’t quite put it together until we get to the uncles shouting racial slurs near the end of the piece; for me, as a high schooler at the time of the attack, it was enough to see the teacher called from class and return looking horrified. I don’t really have a thesis built around that truth, but I do think it’s interesting, the way certain events become cemented in cultural consciousness and then somewhat malleable so quickly.
Plot as Aimless Misery
Once we learn the event itself, on a simple plot level almost nothing else happens for a significant swath of time: Mom takes him out of school; he talks with grandpa but can’t remember what’s said; time passes; they go to the grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving; more time passes; an urn arrives; Christmas arrives; “New Years Eve was really bad”; Savannah breaks up with him, and so on.
We get a significant amount of rumination, plenty of misery, but there is simply nothing else that happens. What else possibly could happen that could compare? Even the moments that our narrator exists in, as mostly he’s just talking through everyone else’s reactions, he simply recounts what they were doing. Conflict doesn’t exist, internal or external, and there is no propulsive momentum here. Tension in the classic literary sense doesn’t exist. That’s intentional, of course; everything happened at the very start, in that inciting incident that our narrator had no control over, just like he has no control over anything else that happens afterwards. He bounces from moment to moment. This doesn’t get better, this can’t get better.
The closest thing to a moment of conflict, to a traditional build of plot, comes near the very end of the piece, when he announces that he wants to go to boarding school. This is perhaps our chance to break out of some sort of rut, to step away from the continuous monotony, but even here there is nothing like resolution. Mom walks away, no answer is given, and we step away from the piece.
Sitting in that awfulness, with no real chance to step forward into anything new because there was never anything happening under the narrator’s control, nothing for him to really choose or do, we finally step into dream: bringing our thematic introduction of the piece back, the narrator dreams of his father on Mars, bringing us to the present tense in some undefined future moment.
Future Time as Both Real and Imagined
The choice to jump into the future while set in the past creates some really interesting tension in the piece: Multiple times that we do so, we see the narrator engaged in a sort of roleplay of reality. He lies habitually in this future, performing grief while undergoing grief, functioning the way people expect him to while at the same time clearly hurting and yet also aware of the benefits that other people’s pity can gain him. This is one hell of a tightrope the story walks: In the first flash-forward, we see our narrator using a peer’s pity as a fulcrum to touch her breasts; as she stands there feeling awful for him and all he’s gone through, he is actively aware that this opportunity would not be his without the great tragedy that defines him. The second time we flash-forward, the grief and lies are more fully intertwined: We are told that he never got to speak to his father on the day the Towers fell, and then we get a run-up in narrative summary of all the lies he told about that conversation, and even further we push into the potential for lies he could have told: “You could make it up as you went and still give people exactly what they were hoping for.” This kind of narrative play is so effective because of the point of view and tense choice: Setting us firmly in the past roots us clearly in the awfulness of the moment and allows the future to be a little more loosely defined.
The other important thing to take away from that use of time is the realization of exactly how much of this story the narrator controls. Obviously this is true of all stories, and doubly so all first-person stories, but it’s rarely stated so explicitly: The narrator is leading us through the moments he wants us to see and is firmly shutting the door on the rest of it. And just in case that wasn’t clear, he states firmly, “I don’t want to talk about the memorial service,” at the end of a section. And we don’t.
The Narrator is Kinda Gross
On a character level, by far the most defining detail about our main character is the skeeviness that we’ve already partially discussed. His willingness to use the tragedy of his father to get to “more or less simultaneously…first and second base,” and the way that success makes him feel “almost happy about what had happened,” is of course awful, but Knowlton doesn’t let us back away from those moments. And because they’re so briefly touched upon, half-scenes outside of our regular narrative progression, we don’t see any mitigating elements that might make this seem any less terrible. There is no justification, and the piece refuses to show us any. Even the narrator seems aware of that, on some level, but this POV choice pushes him to something almost like an onlooker in his own life just as much as we are.
I love a narrator that I can’t (or don’t want to) explicitly identify with. I can empathize with his situation, of course, because that’s what literature’s about, but reading his choices and actions are pretty much infuriating even as we can’t step away from the tragedy that both has and has not suspended his life. If we wanted to, we could build our arguments for justifying his behavior; we learn in passing about him going to counselors, and we know he’s a seventh grade boy from a certain place and time that often bred exactly these kind of encounters, but the story’s refusal to take those easy paths, to force us to accept the grossness without forcing those excuses, is one of the reasons I come back to it again and again.
In Conclusion
We’ve turned away a lot of 9/11 stories, a lot of dead parent stories, a lot of high school stories, and certainly a lot of not-great-young-dude stories. Grief is a tough subject to write about, and even more so once it gets messy and our main characters refuse to comply with any idea of the perfect victim. But this is the way to pull it off: unflinching, accepting the awful on one end alongside the awful on the other, and putting that next step forward even if there’s nowhere to go.
by Brandon Williams