Owl, by Emily Ruskovich, was published in One
Story in March 2014. Ruskovich grew up in the Idaho Panhandle and has an
untitled novel and a book of short stories called Idaho coming out from
Random House. She has an MFA from Iowa and teaches creative writing at the
University of Colorado in Denver. To read a Q&Q with Ruskovich in One
Story, click here.
In this story, we again have a first person, male
protagonist. Again, I imagined a man, sitting on a stool on a stage,
telling us his story through a series of flashback scenes and dialogue. The
story begins with an accident: His wife has been hurt, “bullets taken from
her body.” This is a great premise for a short story. The narrator is
reeling, his wife’s life may be in jeopardy, his whole life has been turned
upside down.
The story takes place in the early 1890’s/early
1900’s. We are on a farm, in Idaho. Life is difficult, the characters dependent
upon each other for survival. Jane, the wife, has been shot by one or perhaps
four teenage boys.
SPOILER ALERT: This story is a mystery. Why was
Jane outside that night? Was she flirting with those boys? Is Jane innocent or
guilty of betraying her husband? Her husband does not judge her, or even ask
that question. He shows great restraint. It is very clever to have your
protagonist show restraint and not pass judgment on the character who has hurt
or betrayed him/her. This empowers the reader and allows the reader to do the
judging for the protagonist. Jane was outside late one night, when the young
boys saw her, shot her and said they thought she was an owl. Is this really
what happened? We don’t know. The narrator is both a naive observer and
unwilling participant in the intrigue that is woven into this story.
On the surface, the plot is simple: When the
narrator marries Jane, they are both young. He works for her father, and she is
a teenage girl, pregnant by another boy, who is ultimately given to, or sold
to, the narrator by her father. Jane loves another man and this marriage to the
narrator is not a love match, though we get the impression that the narrator
comes to love and appreciate Jane. Lopsided love makes for a great plot point.
Use it if you can in your own fiction.
Whether Jane loves and appreciates the narrator
is in question; By the end, we suspect she may have been biding her time until
her true love was released from prison and came to find her.
Elevation of objects/inanimate objects and
animals as characters in the story: Feral cats are characters in this story, as
is the cornmeal that the narrator feeds them, he is careful to make sure the
cornmeal cools before he leaves it out for them. The cats and the cornmeal are
elevated objects---by the end of the story, we can see and almost touch the
cats, and can almost feel the hot cornmeal burning their tongues.
There is a lot of food in this story, and its
presence in the story works on many levels. One, though the story took place
more than a century ago, the food they eat is very much the same as the food we
eat. The food makes the story feel current and relevant. Two, the description
of the food is luscious, vivid and makes you want to eat. Three, the use and
eating of the food helps makes the fictional characters seem real. Notice the
cornmeal, the cherries, the pie, the pie pan and Jane’s last buttered piece of
toast, in particular. They move through the story. We come to expect them and
recognize them.
Also notice the use of insects---the flies that
land on top of the cornmeal. This is disgusting but real and memorable.
If you are trying to make your scenes and/or your
characters sound authentic, go to a diner and watch people order and eat.
Write down what they eat and how they eat it, how they fold or scrunch up
their napkins, how they wipe their mouths and spear their asparagus: Gestures
relating to the preparation and eating of food will contribute to the “reality”
of your writing.
Examples of great food writing in Owl:
1) On page 3, Jane brought the young
boy Peter “eggs and hot venison sausage at sunrise.”
2) The cherries, which first appear
in page 6, are elevated and referred to frequently over the course of two
pages: “He held, awkwardly, a bowl of cherries, at such a precarious slant
that with one small movement of his wrist, the cherries would come pouring
out.”
3) The pie on p. 6: “Against his
body, he held a pie covered in cloth. His neck was very white like it was
recently scrubbed. By contrast, his freckle splattered face looked filthy, as
if underneath a film of orange dust.”
4) The cat food, the flies and the
pie on page 8: “They had a smell to them, a mix of soap and filth. They laid
their dishes on the table where the boiled cat food was cooling in the pan. A
few flies had landed and gotten stuck on the grainy skin forming on top of the
oatmeal. The red-haired boy was watching them. He had a bright red mark on the
skin of his ribs from having held the pies so tightly against himself.
5) On page 25, as we near the
beginning of the end of the story, we see how time passes through the pie pan:
“At some point, she washed the pie pan and the
other dishes that held the food the boys had brought, and she set them out on
the porch in case they ever returned. The dishes remained on the porch the rest
of the summer. I got so used to seeing them there that I stopped seeing them at
all. Soon they held no associations; they collected the same dust as everything
else...Then one evening, early in the fall, I came home from a hunt just after
sunset and saw that the dishes were gone.” (Also, notice the use
of the sunset.)
6) Also on page 25, we see the
end of Jane, as seen through the food and dish she left behind: “On the
night table, I saw one of her novels, opened facedown, beside a plate with a
half eaten piece of toast shining with butter.” That piece of buttered
toast is memorable.
7) And on p. 27, we have light, food
and dirt, all in the same paragraph (see my note about light below): “Soon
I saw the light in the window of the trapper’s house. Out of breath, I paused
and looked inside, where husband, wife, son and baby ate a late dinner of
potatoes and broth. Their dirt floor was nearly black with what looked to be
coffee grounds.”
The dirt floor says so much about
this family, as does the meager meal they are eating.
Now, take a look at some other wonderful details
in this story, details that make the characters feel yanked from real life:
1) Great gesture on p. 7: “I saw in
the boy’s eyes a yearning to touch it (the cat) and I myself was touched by
that. It was respectful the way he stood so still knowing this was not the time
to pet a cat, even such a friendly, stupid one, and that show of self restraint
softened me a little…” This is a great gesture, the boy’s restraint
completely makes the boy feel real.
2) Sunlight and hair on p. 7 “The
sunlight he’d stepped into revealed a single, white, glossy hair on his Adam’s
apple.”
We
often talk about using sunlight and moonlight in our stories; see how well this
works here. Don’t forget to use light in your stories.
I also want to point out the dirt floor (and the
smell of coffee) on pages 13-14, which become characters in this story as much
as the cats and the corn meal. The dirt floor first appears on page 13 and by
describing it, the author tells us a lot about the narrator’s sad history (as
it turns out, this detail comes from the author’s family’s history):
“The floors of my mother’s house were made of
dirt. My father had built the pitiful place on a piece of oven-farmed soil. The
more we beat it down with our feet, the finer the dirt became. The dust rose
with every step, with every gust, with every turn in the night of our bodies in
our beds. It settled in our sheets, on our clothes, in our hair, and finally in
my mother’s lungs, where it lingered for years before it turned into the
infection that turned her, with a bit of time, into dust itself…Around the time
the infection set in, my mother discovered coffee grounds. She spread them wet
across the dirt. It was the only the thing that ever worked to keep the dust
down, her one triumph in all those years as a housewife in a house without
floors, and she began to drink so much coffee as a side effect of using it on
the floor, that deep down I wonder if it wasn’t’ her lungs that let her down
but her heart. Just before I closed the lid of her coffin, which I did alone,
my father having long since left, I smelled the coffee that had replaced the
dust on her body and her clothes, and I thought what a shame it was to bury
someone whose essence was still so much alive.”
Two pages later, on page 16, we read that the
narrator “built a good, sturdy house, with boards across the floor.”
You can see the dirt and smell the coffee grinds
and the boards across the floor by the time you finish reading these pages.
Essentially, floors define characters in this short story, a fascinating and
original concept.
Weather is also a great character in this story.
Notice this great sentence on p. 24: “The river ran low; the sun baked the
hides of the cattle.” Don’t forget to weave the weather into your fiction:
Is it windy out? Hot? Freezing? Using all of these outdoor elements will make
your story feel real.
The narrator tells this story in retrospect; by
the end of the story, the narrator is alone with his dog. Jane has left him,
the cats have disappeared. How do you feel about him by the end? Do you wonder
what happened to him? Do you wonder what happened to Jane? Do you think he’ll
ever see her again? Are you satisfied with the ending of the story? I was. I
felt I had come to know, understand and feel sorry for him. I admired his
restraint and his doomed love for his wife. Doomed love can make for a great
plot. But my real question to you is: Did this story make you want to write one
of your own?
Exercise: Write a story that takes place in the
past or the future. Use details from your own family’s history.
