Emily Ruskovich, Owl

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.