Centrifugal Force by Jodi Angel

Jodi Angel, Centrifugal Force, from Tin House, Issue #64, Summer 2015.

Angel is a fiction writer and writing instructor. She has a second book of short stories out called, You Only Get Letters From Jail. For more about her, please go to www.jodiangel.com She often writes about emotionally disturbed teens. She lives in California with her wife and daughters.

This is another intense, short (6.5 pages) story that provides a great example of putting your main character in danger and making your reader glad you did.

Look at these two, great opening lines, which make up the first paragraph: “Harold was off his meds again and we were bored, so we went over and pounded on his door until some guy we’d never seen before opened up and said, yeah, Harold was around, and we went in and went looking for him and finally found him out behind the garage, smashing up garden snails with a hammer.” As is that first setnence is not gruesome enough, read the second sentence “There was a shitload of wreckage in front of him---all kinds of shattered pieces and bodies thick and wet as snot---and he was lining more up, one after another, like small brown stones on a junk piece of board, and he would say something, something so quiet an personal that he had to lean in close to the snail to reveal it, and then he would smile and step back, cock his right arm and swing from the shoulder so that we could almost hear the hammer cut through the air, and instead of the sound of metal on wood there was a squelch and shower of shell, and we watched him do this for a while, nobody saying anything, and somebody whispered that maybe we should go find something else to do, but it had rained not that long ago---rained for what felt like weeks---and the sky was still untrustworthy and everybody was broke, and watching Harold bust up nails was about the only thing left to do.”

This is an unnerving, riveting first paragraph: A kid, off his meds, is killing snails, and a bunch of other kids are watching, because they’re broke and have nothing better to do. This story is a traditional story in that it quickly traces the arc of Harold’s (probably brief) life, but it is also an unorthodox story in that is as much about place and mood as it is about plot.

The unnamed narrator tells the story of Harold. Harold is a destructive force. He’s been medicated for something and he’s violent and destructive. You could call him a psychopath, given the methodical way he kills snails, rips antennae off cars and hits his friends with him. Why do we want to read about such a character? Because if the writing is authentic enough (i.e. if we think we are reading about something that is actually happening, even if we know it’s fiction and it’s not), then we want to ride this wave of danger and see what happens. We don’t mind being scared, or even terrified, as long as the terrifying events are happening to characters on the page, stage or screen (in fact, we like being terrified on their behalf.) Their eventual death or destruction, and/or their escape from it, will bring us relief and catharsis. Death, near death or escape from death---it’s equally satisfying for the reader.

But back to the story. We don’t know where this story takes place, or when, but we quickly learn that the story is about teenagers getting into trouble as they watch the life of Harold possibly unravel. Harold’s parents are AWOL. His mother and grandmother have died, his father has disappeared. Here’s what the narrator knows about Harold, and what s/he shares with us on page 32: “We really didn’t know much about Harold either, when we got right down to it---other than what we had heard or seen---but he was sometimes fun to talk to, and he always had some money, and he was willing to do just about anything, and when we went behind the building and walked through the vacant lot, Harold was still winging the broken antennas ahead of us and he was crossing Jackson Street in the middle of the road." Do we follow Harold down this road to ruin? Yes, we do. He hoists himself up onto the guardrail, courting disaster and maybe suicide, as the trucks and cars rush past him. He’s put himself in danger and his life is at risk. Why has he put himself in danger? We know but that’s not the point. The author, Jodi Angel, has put him--and us---right in the middle of the danger zone.

On page 32, Harold moves onto the guard rail, “walking back and forth, heel to toe, arms extended like wingspan and a car went by and honked its horn and then another did too, and Harold shot them both the finger and kept balancing and there was the wind again, pushing us forward so that we crossed Jackson without thinking and we stood there, at the end of the bridge, watching.” We, the reader, are watching too. Then, Hooker Stacy appears. I have to admit, at this point I thought, Come on, a hooker? Such a cliche. But she serves an interesting purpose--she tells the kids to get Harold down and the kids ignore her. Then she does a 180 degree turns and shouts, “I hope he falls and dies” (bottom on page 33.) Now here’s another interesting, unpredictable character to watch. (Note on craft: Think about developing a character that does a 180 degree turn and see what happens.) We now have two unstable characters, acting crazy in front of a group of nervous but fascinated teenagers. How could we not keep reading?

Read this great, heart-stopping paragraph, starting on the bottom of page 33: “Harold was on the far side now almost to the other end of the bridge, and we could see the hammer in his back pocket still, the handle against his lower back, tapping in time with each step and we huddled together and waited to see if Harold would jump off the guardrail when he got to the far side and head toward something else, but he came to a stop long before he got to the end, and we all waited.” And we, the reader, are waiting too to see if Harold will jump.

Angel writes a long paragraph in the middle of  page 34, in which she describes the weather, and cars skidding to a halt, and this is a great example of a writer exploding the moment. Our anxiety mounts as we wonder, will Harold jump to his death or not? Here is the paragraph, and it is a great one, almost bringing us to the climax of the story ((Note on craft: As an exercise, put one of your characters in serious jeopardy and have him/her face the decision to live or die in a split second. Tease the reader a bit by stretching out the moment of anxiety and exploding it, as Angel does. I also suggest typing out the following paragraph yourself to see how Angel does it.)

“And then it was if the clouds had been stretched until they were thin and then they split and the rain came suddenly in big heavy drops, a few at a time, and then the drops halved and separated and halved again so that the small drops pelted us at all angles and we ducked our heads against it and the wind got serious and there were sirens in the distance and part of us wondered if maybe somebody had called them on Harold, and maybe they had, but we could barely see him now, through the rain, and he had gone statue still on the ledge, and we thought maybe he was just waiting it out, and then we saw him reach for the hammer in his pocket and he pulled it out by the handle and held it against his side, and then he took a few steps backward towards the center of the bridge, and then a few more after that, and we watched him, and we thought maybe he might throw his hammer at a passing car, and they were still moving, the cars, with their lights on now, and the sound of their tires sucking wet pavement for grip, and there was a gust of wind and for a second Harold stutter-stepped and we thought we heard Hooker Stacy laugh, but then he caught his balance and there was lighting so that everything lit up quick and this time there was no mistaking it---and then a pickup passed us, going too fast, and we felt ourselves get pushed into each other by the wind and we heard brakes lock up and a squeal and a skid, and we had to turn and look and wait for the satisfaction of metal on metal, but it was nothing but a near miss and then there was thunder, loud and long, and when we looked back, Harold was gone."

What happens to Harold? We don’t know. Hooker Stacy doesn’t tell the narrator, and Angel doesn’t tell us. “So for a while we just stood there, thinking maybe that Harold being Harold, would appear someplace else, someplace farther down the street and we would hurry to catch up with him, because even Harold was different at night, and it was Saturday night, the best one of the week, and we stood there while the light faded and the rain got weak, and in the splash of headlights we could see everything around us despite the dark---the street and the bridge and the ledge---and we were surprised at so much movement everywhere---it was as though could stay still--even as we stood there and tried as hard as we could to keep the earth from spinning beneath our feet.”

This is a beguiling ending. The narrator leaves us in the middle of the scene, returning the focus to him/her, but not offering any kind of resolution about Harold’s fate. Is this ending satisfying to you? Did you want the story to continue? I found the ending to be somewhat satisfying, in that I had been sucked into a disturbing, foreign world and had gained a flicker of insight into what it was like to be in the heads of bored, unsupervised teenagers. And even after the story was over, I continued to wonder about these kids and Harold, and liked the window Angel provided into their lives. This story is very much about mood and its success lies in Angel’s ability to tease out our anxiety and put us in the middle of a brief but terrifying situation, and stretch out the moments leading up to Harold’s possible death.

The Knitting Story, by Tara Ison

Tara Ison,  The Knitting Story, from Tin House, Issue #64, Summer 2015

Ison is a short story writer, novelist, screenwriter and essayist. She has a short story collection, Ball, coming out this fall from Soft Skull Press. She teaches fiction at the Arizona State University.

First, let’s look at craft. Note that every paragraph begins, “She knits.” Think about using two or three words like this repeatedly in your writing. It creates a subtle thread (forgive the pun) in your work.

On the face of it, this initially appears to be a lovely story that has three themes: The lifelong process of looking for love, our heroine's love and knowledge of knitting, and the way in which knitting both saves and possibly ruins this unnamed protagonist’s life. But like all great stories, this story becomes darker and more complicated as we read on, and the ending has a surprising, sharp sting to it.

The story opens semi-sweetly, with a girl learning to knit to please her mother and to keep herself occupied as a child. (Though even in the first paragraph, we see that the mother’s carefully knitted socks have been destroyed by a  careless boyfriend.) But the glory of this story ultimately lies in the process of knitting, which is revealed to be a precise, soothing, satisfying ritual that gives the child comfort and an increasing sense of satisfaction, and ultimately becomes a way for her to create gifts for people she loves, or, and this is the interesting part, possibly hates. 

As the story progresses, and the protagonist’s skill as a knitter increases, the rhythm of the knitting accelerates and we learn that knitting is also used as a cover to reveal the protagonist’s failed efforts to become close to people, and also to hide her rage and sadness over her frustrations with her mother, her friends, her lovers, her father and ultimately herself, as she finds herself knitting herself into a shroud.

Let’s look at the first three paragraphs. (I suggest you type out the first three paragraphs yourself to see how the author established rhythm, tone and point of view.) In every short story,  essay or book, the first two or three paragraphs are crucial because as we know from our own experiences as readers, if the first few paragraphs don’t grab you, you probably won’t read on. In these three paragraphs, love, betrayal and rejection are subtly revealed through the gorgeous, detailed descriptions of how and why a girl learns to knit:

“She knits as a clumsy, pudge-fingered child, because her mother loves to tell her once-upon-a-time story of knitting socks for her college boyfriend, painstaking argyle wool socks for the princely young man who carelessly thrust his foot through the sock toe after all that labor the mother did to show and prove her love, because that was how. She knits because her mother is at a luncheon or antiques show or mahjongg and Can’t the child occupy and entertain herself, and so after school the child trudges to the craft shop and spends her allowance coins on a Let’s Get Knitting! booklet  and a fuzzy pink yarn like a long bubble gum worm, and a pair of pointy twig-thick needles she is a little frightened of, because if you walk around with them and trip you could poke out an eye , and on the floor of her canopy-bed bedroom she teaches herself how to cast on, how to loop little nooses of yarn through other loops, scoop the alive loop through, and let the old loop fall away and die, loop loop loop, your rows like little crooked cornfields growing, and then you cast off and are done and look what you have made and can do, ta-da!”

"She knits gifts for her mother---a pot holder, a hot pad, a long tubular scarf, everything a wormy fuzzy pink---because that is how, and her mother exclaims with joy at her own sweet misshapeness, and spills bloody meat juice on the hot pad and scorches the pot holder and cannot wear the scarf because of its so-beautiful but impractical color, but is so very proud and What else can the child make, What else can she do?”

“She knits because she grows absorbed by the taming of chaotic string into structure the geometry of a messy line turned to a tidy grid, and her fingers slim to deft and she buys slenderer needles and more levant yarn and her after-schools and weekends are now so very busy herself, in her room, with all those squares. Square, square, square, a big gift pile of them, this is what she can make and do.”

The beauty of this short story is that the more we read, the more we learn about the intricacies of knitting, as well as the intricacies of human relationships.

This is a fast, intense, short story. What Ison did so well here is to weave (forgive the pun) her knowledge of knitting with the details of her unnamed protagonist’s life. In five pages, the author rushes through the highlights and lowlights of the protagonist’s life: The pleasures and perils of childhood, high school and college, followed by the limitations of and envious feelings inherent to friendship, the mysteries of failed romances, the grief of tending to friends with cancer, the grief over a father’s aging body and ultimate death, and ultimate the anxiety and realization that she has been knitting herself into  her own imminent death. 

But Ison does it brilliantly and she does so by embracing the practice of what Frank Conroy used to tell his writing workshop students: Process. Process is always interesting. Here the process of knitting is fascinating. It saves the protagonist, it allows her to make gifts of love and healing for friends, and it also allows her to see how she really feels about her lovers and her mother. But does it also keep her sequestered away from other people, and give her something to do that makes her feel productive, when in fact, it simply ensures that she stay busy alone? The fact that this story generates multiple questions means the author is doing her work and has created a layered, complex story that is really a journey to discover what the protagonist’s struggle really is.

One question we always ask in class is: What is this story really about? I think this story, ultimately, is about being flawed and utterly human, and trying to create something positive, but perhaps also destructive, in the process.

The last few lines of this story upend much of what has come beforehand. The protagonist has knit babies’ caps, caps for friends with cancer, blankets for abandoned infants. She seems charitable. And yet. How do you feel about the ending? Is this a tragedy, ultimately, with the protagonist comparing herself to the villainous, vengeful Madame Defarge from A Tale of Two Cities, who knit the names of people she intended to kill or have killed? Look at the last paragraph.

“She knits and knits like Madame Defarge in her chair, content in the breeze of the blade, knits until she feels the blood has risen warm to her ankles and it is suddenly, surprisingly, her turn now, sees she has blindly knitted herself into the wooly smothering thing that will bag her own cold twiggy bones, and that is all she has ever made, or done.” 

This ending stops you in your tracks and makes you think, What was this story really about? I think it commands a second read, a sign of excellent writing.