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 “Inventory,” by Carmen Maria Machado (online in a few places: at Strange Horizons, published 2013; re-published at Literary Hub in 2017. We’re using the Strange Horizons link because it was published there first), we meet a woman who, in the midst of a global pandemic that has come close to wiping out civilization, has to run a lonely island and is filling the time by listing out her relationships.
The Basics
This story is written as a retrospective catalogue, a short list in something like diary form: Each relationship being inventoried gets a single paragraph. There are twenty paragraphs, involving one girl (when the narrator was age-appropriate, I stress), one duo of a boy and girl, one trio of two boys and one girl, six women, ten men, and one duo of women. Each introduces the people by a defining feature—sometimes a physical detail, sometimes by their relationship to the narrator, sometimes where or how they met, but never by name. Then, the interaction is inventoried: What they did together, how their time was spent, and how it ended. After the first few, the sexual moments of the inventory take up significantly less space than the intimacy of more general human contact, and the list becomes a chronicle of grief, of loss far more profound than the loss of those sexual partners.
The catalogue format allows Machado to slide easily between plot and memory (I want to call it character, but it’s rarely exactly that; this is a character defined by her lack of existence on the page and by how little we know of her). Our unnamed narrator gives us little access to herself, knows her partners only fleetingly, and reveals almost nothing outside of her memories. Once things break down entirely, she tells us a quick bit about her travels, heading to Maine and renting a cottage for the last stop before crossing the border up into Canada, but the majority of this story exists in the interaction between people. We spend multiple sections almost reveling in human contact, and then there are occasional sections that move us quickly through how she survives, where she’s living, and the protocol of the current reality, but each of those drumbeats of information is given to us within the context of the human contact that created the opportunity for that knowledge.
Form as story
Machado has long been an absolute master at presenting information in the tiniest slips of detail; especially early in this piece, we almost learn more from the quick sketch of what’s not revealed than from what is there. From the end of the first inventoried relationship, before the reader is even sure exactly what is being catalogued or what the titular inventory of the story is, the larger world is hinted at without being told: “I still have never seen Jurassic Park. I suppose I never will, now.” We don’t get our next explanatory moment until the end of inventory three (again, in the final sentence): “End of the world, and all I can think about is fabric softener.” In both those examples, we the reader are putting most of the pieces together: the end of the world of some sort, perhaps the grid failing since she can’t watch movies, but the rest is left to us.
Because of this choice of form, as the pandemic worsens, we still don’t see it other than in flashes: leaving her hometown is a single sentence, and finding safety in Maine gets just a couple of sentences. But this catalogue device also means that even in a story where there are few traditional scenes, everything is still handled in a sort of pseudo-scene; there is almost never a moment where our character is not narrating their interactions with other people, often even with remembered dialogue. This means that the largest reveals about the death and destruction, what it’s done to the world, about the dissolution of the social safety net, are handled just as the smaller moments are, through conversation and community: She tells a lover about the death of her mother, she sees the death of an entire family including the man she was with at that time, and so on. These characters propel our narrator to her decisions: She marries out of fear, but then leaves once the relationship is clearly toxic, drives north and then east as she sees the effects of the pandemic, settles and grows comfortable in a place only for the pandemic to arrive again. Ultimately, then, we’re presented with a story that presents as heavily nontraditional, but that utilizes those nontraditional elements to hit the normal story beats.
Form as purpose
At The Masters Review, we get a lot of list-type story submissions, and for a large majority of them, we find ourselves asking why they were written in that form. What is the story revealing about its world, its ideas and arguments, through the use of such a purposely self-limiting strategy? Why would we read a story that on its face is simply a list of sexual encounters? What’s the point? Why do we care? As bluntly as possible: So what?
There are some basic reasons: This format allows Machado to both push us through time and also to cross time and distance quickly. We have no real opportunity for large info dumps of backstory, a trap fallen into by many an end-of-the-world story, because what information we do get has to be tied to the relationships that are the conceit of the piece. Moreover, there’s no need for the constant one-upmanship of horror story deaths, we can avoid all the tedious prepper and survivor explanations that aren’t our focus here anyway, and we don’t have to justify pretty much any of the decisions that our character makes in the way that scenes would require us. We can both use and avoid setting: We know the virus is first mentioned in California, and we eventually make our way to Maine, but all the description we need of the place of this story is that it’s a cottage on a beach with an island in sight.
This is also essential to the story on a character level. We learn almost nothing about the woman, but there is one very specific character note that is referenced a few times. In Inventory Eight we first learn that Machado’s narrator makes lists when she is “revved from adrenaline,” which certainly makes sense for the end of the world scenario in which she now exists. The process of listing is how this character makes sense of the world, and so the most true representation of her psyche in this most nonsensical moment is to represent her world via list. It doesn’t work for every story, but when you can lock in a form that represents the inner thought process of your character (the other example that comes immediately to mind is “Problems for Self-Study” by Charles Yu), that’s an opportunity you should take.
Form as theme
But there’s plenty more that Machado is doing with this form. Our narrator in her final inventory has been forced to remove herself from community entirely: In a desperate effort at survival after her last relationship caught the virus, she’s on an island that has always functioned as her final backup plan, out of reach but not out of sight of the cottage where she’d stayed for so long, and considering the possibility that she will never interact with another human being again. We’re reading one of many lists she’s made: “Every teacher beginning with preschool. Every job I’ve ever had. Every home I’ve ever lived in. Every person I’ve ever loved. Every person who has probably loved me. And now this.” So in cataloguing these moments, she is holding onto aspects of herself that will be gone the instant she no longer grips them so tightly. Each of those lists that we don’t see speak equally well to the things that were ephemera, that only exist for our narrator, and have passed into memory for as long as they’re allowed to be that.
That leaves the question of why this list rather than the others, but that too is artfully handled by the story. In Inventory Fourteen, perhaps the most plot-heavy of our sections, a former CDC employee drops two absolutely essential pieces of knowledge: First, about the non-development of a vaccine, but far more important for our purposes, she reveals that the virus “is only passing through physical contact…” This, then, is the conflict at the heart of our piece: The thing that our narrator craves, that she’s chronicling, is also the thing that puts her in the most danger. She’s doing everything she can to stay safe, but also in being connected with others is by definition unsafe.
The absolute glory of this story is that that conflict, presented in this manner, allows for both internal and external conflict, both of which are perfectly displayed by the chosen inventory format. In the current moment of the story, where our narrator is on the island, she is confronted with her internal conflict of loneliness and all that’s been lost, with the fact that without the connections she’s written here her reality can only exist in this written form, with her awareness of the virus and how quickly the world will move on. Meanwhile, she’s reflecting on the external conflict in each of the people she inventories, where we’re watching her actively making choices to lower her risk (fleeing) while also heightening it through the encounters that define this piece.
Form as Post-COVID reading (and writing)
I know that humanity being destroyed by a virus isn’t a new concept, and I’m certainly not giving Machado credit for coining the idea or inventing the genre or anything crazy like that, but I came back to this story so often during COVID. Maybe it’s just me, maybe Machado is uniquely in my head like I wish was true, but so much of this story holds perfectly right to my experience during the lockdowns, those terse months during and after: The loneliness and desperation for connection, and also the way that everyone you met felt almost shapeless and empty, blank slates of basic traits, their individuality disappearing within their masks. This piece was published for the first time in 2013 (that I can tell, presumably it was written even earlier), but it sure feels like it’s hit our pandemic squarely.
In our slush pile, we’re reading a ton of pandemic stories, and I presume will be for quite a while. But it’s hard to find ones that tackle it perfectly. Often, they’re too specific, or they try to tackle COVID itself as subject. That’s important, it is, and there are I’m sure plenty of ways to do it, but what’s often left behind in those stories (and what I think Machado’s arguing for so effectively in this piece) is the humanity at the heart of even the worst disasters.
by Brandon Williams