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 “Cat World” by Elle Nash (published in Guernica), we meet dErAnGeDkItTy69 (as she’s known in her AOL chatroom) as she builds her online and offline persona. While she makes up her catgirl persona online with another chatter who pressures her to go further and further, a friend in school (Mikaela) suggests they hang out over the weekend and get high. Mikaela’s dad convinces our narrators’ barely-there mom that the kids will be in good hands, and then she’s whisked away to the man’s temporary hotel home, full of liquor and drugs and every opportunity to make some bad decisions. Time passes quickly, as one Friday party becomes the next, and Mikaela and our narrator grow closer, pulling her more tightly into this family and their meth and cameras and the dad who leaves them alone for hours. Her own home is falling apart in its own ways, and Mikaela is growing up and only calling sporadically, and the people she’s found in the chatroom aren’t a ton of help either. As the story puts it, “The problem is you find a place you think you might belong and want to violently wedge yourself into any open space warm enough to welcome you.” As her father moves out of the house, as her online boyfriend refuses to speak to her until she sends him pics she doesn’t want to send, Mikaela shows up once more, with her family and a new man in tow. They all go to the hotel and party, harder drugs and more of them, and things go further and further. While the story ends before any decisions are fully more or actions taken that cannot be undone, it feels clear that at least in this moment the narrator can see no other life for herself.
The Basics
This story is written in first person present tense, floating back and forth between the online world and the motel world; we learn about our narrator’s home life, but mostly in passing. Our narrator is built out as a character in negation—we learn about her because of what we learn about other people, because of what she says in the chatroom that may entirely be made up, and so what we learn about her is about the way she thinks and how she’s struggling rather than physical details. These three worlds, and this narrator who is almost unseen in her own story, combine to build a piece whose thematic arc is one of trying to creates oneself almost whole cloth. Perhaps not an entirely unexplored terrain for a story about a fourteen-year-old, but one that’s given new legs by its time period: the misery of the parents, the dissociation of our narrator, the abdication of responsibility by basically every adult in this story, and naturally the rise of internet culture and the overbearing masculinity that pervades it.
Detail as Seen by a Young Narrator
So let’s dive into our takeaways as writers, starting with the way that the story uses its physical details: They are often sexual, or something closely related to sexual (our opening sentence is a man wanting “to put his fingers in my mouth until they wrinkle and turn pink.”), but they are rarely if ever played luridly. They land most often as grotesque, from the father who “ferrets” his hand into his pants, to Mikaela’s rabbit teeth. This is doubly impressive since the narrator herself is trying in life for an easy sensuality into which she has not yet grown, and which she does not always understand—there are so many ways for this to go wrong, both in the character’s life and in the story itself, especially with underaged narrators, but the way that Nash steers us into discomfort and grossness keeps this story well on the right side of that line. A huge lesson for us on how to do that: Nash is carefully utilizing first person, and this narrator who doesn’t fully understand the world into which she’s trying to step. First person, especially with young narrators, can often become a trap; because young narrators don’t see everything that’s happening, there can be a simplifying effect on the story that doesn’t allow for true depth.
But Nash has used the simplification of the younger POV somewhat differently: Rather than keeping us from the complications around her, Nash allows her narrator to see them but not comment on them fully. Two examples: someone in the chatroom says he’d like to see “You and your friends in your bikinis, spread-eagle.” All of the grossness and discomfort we could talk through from that unprompted line is sidestepped by the narrator admitting she doesn’t know what spread-eagle means—while the narrator is allowed to be a stumbling kid, we readers can still build in all of the larger-level conversations, because the story has acknowledged them. This happens again in our first moment in the hotel: Mikaela asks if the narrator has ever kissed anyone, then leans in and kisses her. It’s a moment of experimentation, sure, already a bit awkward and weird, sure, but then out of nowhere, we “hear the click of a digital camera.” The scene ends without further comment from the narrator, but we readers are allowed to recoil at what that suggests about this moment, this relationship, how these people view the narrator, and what kind of danger she may be in as a result.
Time and Place
It’s probably the thing I talk about most in these essays: Great stories are a product of, and as a result deeply use, their time and place. The trust, the believability, and yes the reality of their worlds comes from that deep, effortful interaction with the most unique pieces of their world. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of writing “timeless” stories with no technology or slang that immediately identifies decade or region, but I’m here to reiterate that that is a trap. There has never been some universal white-screen background where characters simply interact in their own platonically ideal manners. Even if you don’t describe it in the piece, your characters and how they function will always be a product of your world as you conceive it. Might as well use it then.
This story is especially valuable because it hits us with the grounding aspects of setting right from the start. Here’s something crazy about this story involving American teens in the 2000s: the internet exists. We start our story in a chatroom, and the opening paragraph makes it clear that Nash understands this culture: The opening image is one of violence played as sexuality, and the metaphor used is one from a video game pushing immediately all the way to the extreme: “YOU DIED.”
This easy familiarity with its place and its world is peppered throughout the opening. We are introduced to catboys and catgirls, to cosplaying, to avatars, and to fuku, without stopping to bother explaining any of these ideas. Perhaps they’re obvious to most or even all readers, but it’s still fairly rare in fiction not to see internet-speak over-explained. The same thing happens when the person with whom she’s chatting asks “A/S/L” and she replies immediately (with false information). A very specific time and place—AOL chatrooms specifically—is connoted with that simple phrase, and because the narrator knows it so well, we’re not going to bother slowing down with it. It’s simple, it’s straightforward, absolutely. But these are the kind of writerly choices that create authority of world, that allow the reader to fall into your place and accept reality as you the writer want it to exist.
In Conclusion
For a story where not a ton actually happens on a plot level (she drinks and does drugs, she has her first kiss, she parties with Mikaela), there are so many things happening in here. It’s so efficient with all of the setup as well: we get two families falling apart, we get a life built online and a relationship both created and potentially dashed in that world, we get an entire section devoted to wandering through the catgirl/furry niche, we get the scariness of men from Mr. Donohue to Mason to Shawn, and we get the uncertainty of where our narrator stands in basically any relationship in her life. All that, built from a narrator who couldn’t fully explain any of it to us, and while we never stop stumbling belatedly forward in the effort to create the self we want to be.
by Brandon Williams