Scott Cheshire is a novelist and short story writer. His novel, High as the Horses’ Bridles, came out in 2014.
In this 11.5 page short story, published by One Story in Summer 2015, Cheshire takes the exercise of dying slowly, hilariously, sadly and memorably, to new heights.
Let’s look at how and why this story works:
Our protagonist Bursk is at the end of his life. He is lying in bed, “confined to the still boat of his bedroom mattress,” waiting for his wife to bring him his last meals. This a great premise, and a wonderful situation in which to place your protagonist---death is imminent and we all know it. With that decision, you already have your reader anxiously awaiting and looking forward to the end. End of life causes stresses to the reader--and your reader likes that kind of stress. We learn that Bursk is “Fifty-five years old, his liver is unlucky.” Too young to die, and dying anyway.
Cheshire “confines” Bursk to his bedroom mattress. Being confined is also a great thing to do your protagonist. Limits of all kinds are great for writers, and their creations. (George Steiner described classical art as “art by privation,” i.e. creativity defined by limits,” and limits make for drama, pressure and stressful situations, which is what all stories need.)
There is also some great, original, vivid writing, in the first paragraph: “the still boat of his bedroom mattress…the solid porcelain clunk of dish on dish…his whole right side in mutiny and bedsores…A pain like someone stuffed an umbrella up his rump and now they’re trying to open it.”
Our protagonist used to work in restaurants, and now he owns one, and the story is filled with the author’s knowledge of food and restaurant operations. (Cheshire used to work as a bartender and waiter.) This is what writers do: We take our real life experiences and weave them into stories.) Bursk is glad the restaurant will provide for his wife after he’s gone, but his wife is still “killing” him: “…the wife and her nonstop milk shakes, apple pies, and omelets."
Food is a character in this story: On page 2, There is chicken soup, fresh (store-bought) bread, cornichon and pate on rye crackers, the memories of foie gras,” “the scent of garlic from the kitchen…roasted garlic ice cream…serviced with strawberry slices… “ These food descriptions lure us into the story. They are familiar props and we know what they look and taste like.
There is a hint of past, deviant behavior and we learn a little something about how men cover up their affairs with garlic: On page 4, we learn that Bursk almost had an affair. “Bursk is reminded of what Amen once told him, how the men back home rub garlic on their fingers after affairs, so the wives can’t tell they’ve been dabbling. He then reminds himself he has never fully cheated on his wife. Although he did come close that one time in Chicago. At an industry tableware convention where a young saleslady drunk on Harvey Wallbangers pulled him into the ladies’ room. Lipsticks smeared on her mouth, like marinara sauce. The lights were hot, and he was famished. Only a full bladder stopped him from going the full ten yards. He has long been heartbroken by this fact, and ashamed. Nevertheless.” Great stories are full of yearning, of dreams deferred or abandoned. There’s power in suppression and denial. We are left yearning on behalf of the protagonist.
There is also a nice flashback to the time when the protagonist was young and in love with his wife. Read this great line on page 6: “He watched her like a dog beside the dinner table, not sure what was being served, but he wanted it all.” He cooks for her on their first date: “A homemade pesto…a scoop of his homemade vanilla mango ice cream.” Food continues to be a character and cooking is an act of love.
And then we get to this great paragraph, on page 7, where butter is elevated as an object, and summons a Proustian memory of the protagonist’s father and wisdom: “He smells butter melting in the kitchen. Must be mashed potatoes, more mashed potatoes. But he distinctly said no more, please. What’s she making? The butter reminds him of his father, and the warm and welcome snell of wheat bread, two pieces, slightly cooked a pat of yellow--shuffle-click of the toaster popping--- , and a vision of Bursk Sr,standing there in his kitchen whites, biting his morning toast. Perfect toast. If my father were still alive, Bursks scolds himself, he wouldn’t stand for so much sentimentalizing. He would slap a table and insist---We’re all food, junoor, and the dirt is alive and well for it. Ask the bugs and bacteria, ask the flowers, the mud bricks, and clay pots, ask whatever else you can think of.” On page 11, Cheshire writes, “All of us are food.”
The story ends with great smells as Bursk dies, calling out to his wife in his mind, speaking directly and silently to her as she “lifts the spoon to his lips (page 11)”. How exciting it is to be with a man as he dies---don’t underestimate the power of this. We are at the end of this man’s life and in the middle of his death. This is a great, sad place for your reader to be. You want the reader to mourn the death of a character s/he has become attached to.
Smells and scents are crucial to making a story come alive. Bursk remembers their eating and lovemaking, the activities all mammals do, and the smells that went with their lives: “The smell of you under the stinking compress of whatever fills my head, the smell of our vegetables going soft in the bin, the coffee grinds in the trash, musty cereal boxes stacked by the stove…You smell of thirty-nine years of light, and dust, and like the cigarettes from back when you were smoking, like those strawberry gums you nibble and the stay lovemaking we made in the outside showers up north. It’s all yours, my love. The Cutting Boards is yours, let it last forever and forgive me. Please. For leaving. And maybe don’t come any closer, because my death is sour, and this bed is moving, and if you reach out to me, warm bowl of whipped potatoes, metal spoon, I might knock them from your grip and grab your hands instead. Tell Amen to bring your favorite dishes. Let him ladle gravies, and portion pot roasts, and push in your comfortable chair the way I used to. Make every menu, winter, spring, summer, and fall, corn soup, kebab, and cassoulet. Fill the table up with every season. Eat slowly. Pretend with every forkful, every last lift to your lips, and make believe your hand is in mine ."…”
The last line is glorious: “Even when I’m gone, let us eat.” How exciting for us as a reader to be there as a protagonist dies and we are able to listen to his last words, a confession of sorts, and a last lover letter to his wife. What a privilege. We feel that he is speaking to us, and he is.
As an exercise, write out the last paragraph to see how the rhythm works, and notice how the author slowly shifts from writing in the third person about Bursk, to writing directly from Bursk to his wife. It’s a terrific way to end a story.
Please see below for info about Scott Cheshire. I particularly love his Q&Q with Hannah Tinti.
http://www.one-story.com/index.php?page=stories&story_id=206
“Bursk’s Cutting Board” by Scott Cheshire
Scott Cheshire is the author of the novel High as the Horses’ Bridles. His work has been published in AGNI, Electric Literature, Guernica, Harper’s,Slice, and Picador’s anthology The Book of Men. He lives in Los Angeles.
sample:
Confined to the still boat of his bedroom mattress, Albert Bursk hears the solid porcelain clunk of dish on dish coming from their kitchen and wonders what she will shove at him today. He’s not pale like you’d think. Instead his eyes and skin are going gold like a trophy —1st Place for “He-Who-Sleeps-the-Most-and-Refuses-to-Make-His-Wife-Feel-Unappreciated-by-Saying-I’m-Sick-and-I-Have-No-Appetite-Left.” Like it or not, she makes him eat, his whole right side in mutiny and bedsores. A pain like someone stuffed an umbrella up his rump and now they’re trying to open it. His bones work against him. This is a man who jogged, drank little, never smoked a cigarette in his life, and walked how many stairwells, a million steps through countless kitchens, propping restaurants up on their faulty feet. All this while the back-of-the-house sucked down Heinekens swiped from the walk-in cooler, while the line cooks puffed like smokehouses out back by the dumpster. They stay up for days, and work double-shifts on the end of a cocaine bender. Those suicidal bastards will live forever. But not Bursk.
Q&A by Hannah Tinti
What was the seed of this story? What was the first thing you wrote?
Most of my writing is rooted in a question I find compelling, some idea I can’t quite shake, and the more unanswerable that question the better. In this case, I read an article by a hospice worker who happened to mention what a complicated relationship there is between food and the fatally ill. How food quite literally represents “life” for us all, and so, predictably, the closer one comes to death, the less one desires food. And yet food is often exactly how a concerned family shows its love. This seemed to me a profound irony. And because I worked in restaurants for years, as a waiter, and as a bartender, and because I love food (I do all the cooking in my home), I wondered what that loss might be like for a man who’d spent his whole life around food. Food was all. I also wanted to write my version of a love story. And so I put the poor man in bed, exhausted, dying, and dreading what the love of his life might be cooking for him in the kitchen. I wrote the first paragraph, pretty much just as it is. It has changed, but very little. And this became Albert’s voice.
What was the most challenging aspect of writing this story?
I would say trying to believably straddle comedy and tragedy. I imagined Albert as one of those men I knew in my youth, like my father and his friends who would gather around the grill in our backyard, and talk and shout and eat and gossip with so much enthusiasm, so much life. Their faces would go red, making each other laugh, as they told and retold the same ridiculous stories, calling each out on earlier versions that belied the one they just shared. All very old school. I imagined a man like this cut down, at way too young an age. I figured Albert would be bursting with life, even while he was dying. In fact, this is where his name came from—“burst” became Bursk. So I wanted a tone that allowed for laughs, but one that also let Albert be sincere, loving, and possibly, hopefully, strike sad chords within the reader. Not to mention I’m naturally drawn to playing with structure and perspective, so that’s always a challenge for me. Pushing the envelope, but also making it work.
This story is about a man’s last meal, and also, a kind of reckoning. Can you talk a bit about the connection between food and memory, and how you used it wind your way through Bursk’s life?
I’m drawn to stories that unapologetically face the fact that all of life is spent inside the mind. Yes, we walk through the world, and we fall in love, and we play sports, and we knock on doors, etc., but all of that is mediated by consciousness. I love books that attempt to marry the exterior and interior experience. I try to do the same in my own work. And food is a hell of a bridge. When I smell fresh curry I’m helplessly thrown thirty years back (I grew up in an Indian neighborhood in Queens, NYC) to my twelve-year-old self. I see faces and places I’ve completely forgotten. I leave my body. When I smell fresh New York bagels, I swear I can see my grandmother, who’s been gone for years. It works the same for Albert. On a technical level, food as a trigger for memory is sort of perfect. It’s particular and tied to real experience, and yet it’s sort of ghostly, and exists only in the senses, and so it allows him to travel about in memory, which of course lets the writing go anywhere I want it to. Plus I got to write about toast. I love toast.
Like most writers, you’ve worked in a restaurant before. Did that experience help you write this story?
It definitely helped, if for no other reason than I got to briefly write about those deathless pirates that work in a busy kitchen. Line cooks are by far the most dangerous and devoted people I have ever met. I love them.
One of the hardest things for Bursk to deal with is the jealousy he feels about his wife Shelly, as well as regret for his own near-dalliances. Do you see this story as a kind of confession?
Yes! And I’m so happy to have you describe it this way. There is the obvious deathbed confession trope, but for me all of writing is confessional, in one way or another, even if it’s done inversely. If a writer writes about things that do not in fact matter to them, that do not feel pressing, personal, or real, this too is a confession of sorts. A rather sad one. But the best writing, as far as I’m concerned, is always some veiled admission of obsession to the reader. Frankly, it was a bit of a relief to let a character do it so openly, for once.
The concept of zaghghat (forced feeding) winds throughout the story, from goose liver pâté to Shelley’s spoonfuls of mashed potatoes. Something that should bring joy and sustenance becomes instead distasteful. How does this relate to Bursk’s own life? And what do you think he realizes, in the end?
Sometimes when you’re writing the universe seems to respond, and it feels like you are directly in dialog with what Emerson called the “Over-Soul.” You ask, and the great world answers. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for that kind of mumbo jumbo. Either way, when I realized that essentially I was writing a story about force-feeding, it only made sense that Albert had a problematic relationship to foie gras; and when I realized that zaghghat was the original and Egyptian term for force-feeding, and that that word sounded uncomfortably like a certain diner’s guide—well, it was like a great gift, a deeply embedded pun had been revealed. Or maybe it’s just me. As far as Albert, I think he comes to accept love, utterly. Which means he forgives himself. He eats up life to the end.
If you had the chance to choose your last meal (and could still enjoy eating it) what would it be?
This is such a good question, as it’s just the sort of question you ask yourself or you ask your friends but never take it quite seriously. And so here is my answer, for posterity—it would be breakfast: a pot of hot coffee, fresh cream, and a lightly toasted sesame New York bagel, with a thin schmear of cream cheese, a generous portion of smoked sable, a tomato slice, red onion, and capers. The Sunday paper. A breeze.
How long did it take you to complete this story?
On and off, it took about a year. Short stories are not especially cost effective endeavors. But how I love to read and write them.
What are you working on now?
I’m halfway through a new novel. It’s sort of an inside-out thriller, “a literary thriller,” if you like that better. I’m also working on a short story, based on one I used to think was the best thing I’d ever done, until I realized it was actually incoherent, often terrible, and forty pages long, which officially made it not short. I liked the last paragraph, though, and so I made it the first of a brand new story. The rest went in the trash. We’ll see what happens.
What is the best bit of advice about writing you have ever received?
I’ll give you two since they are both wonderful, and have done me well, and because they both involve profanity. The first came from my teacher Colum McCann, after I explicitly asked for advice regarding my career. He said: “Don’t be a dick.” Succinct, punchy, and wise. Just like him. The second came from another writer, one I deeply love and admire, but I’m afraid I cannot give the writer’s name, as I have no good reason to think the writer would appreciate the anecdote. The question was: “What do you do when people don’t get what you’re doing, when they’re confused by a book, or a direction you’re going in? When the critics don’t like it.” The answer was a brief pause, then: “Fuck ‘em.”
https://www.one-story.com/blog/?p=5555
Issue #206: Bursk’s Cutting Board by Scott Cheshireon
Nothing taught me more about the inner lives and desires of people than waiting tables. From the maniac chefs in the kitchen, to the customers demanding substitutions, to the bartenders passing around kamikaze shots, a restaurant is full of drama and bursting with energy. At the center of it all, of course, is the food that is being served. The pleasure of eating and the awakening of the senses. But what happens when a bite loses its taste? When a man whose entire life has been focused on cooking finds himself the one being cooked for? This is the dilemma in our new issue,“Bursk’s Cutting Board” by Scott Cheshire. As the narrator awaits what could be his final meal, he reminisces on his past and his marriage, sifting through his memories as the smell of his wife’s cooking winds through their apartment to the bedroom (now sickroom). Bursk has lost his appetite, and though he hides this from his wife, this loss intertwines with all his other regrets and fears. He worries: was he a good husband? He worries: what will happen when I am gone? In the end Bursk connects it all–his past, present and future—in a rousing speech that clutches at joy and salutes his hopes and dreams. I hope you’ll read Scott Cheshire’s Q&A with us on how he wrote this compelling and moving story, and also this interview where Scott discusses publishing his celebrated debut novel, High as the Horses’ Bridles, and what it’s like to be a One Story Literary Debutante. Until then, let’s all raise a glass to first books, and to great meals, and to the smell of garlic lingering on our fingers.
http://www.one-story.com/blog/?tag=scott-cheshire
Introducing 2015 Debutante: Scott Cheshire
On May 15th, at our 6th annual Literary Debutante Ball, One Story will be celebrating 10 of our authors who have published their debut books over the past year. In the weeks leading up to the Ball, we’ll be introducing our Debs through a series of interviews.
This week we have the pleasure of chatting with Scott Cheshire, a wonderful and generous person and author. Scott’s debut novel High as the Horses’ Bridles is now available from Henry Holt. The book follows Josiah Laudermilk as he goes from being a twelve-year-old prophet in a religious household in Queens, New York, to a divorced man who goes by “Josie” and owns computer stores in southern California. When his estranged father falls ill and Josie returns to New York to care for him, Josie confronts his past in ways that reverberate into his present and future. Memories of his childhood, his departed mother, his break from the church, and the early years of his marriage collide as he tries to figure out how to be around his father again and how to move forward in life with a clearer vision of his reality. It’s a very relatable family story told through the fascinating lens of religion, history, and love.
Where were you when you found out High as the Horses’ Bridles was going to be published? How did you celebrate?
I was at the Housing Works Bookstore Café, in Soho, when I got the call. Which was fitting as I wrote much of the book there. After the call, I wanted to call my wife and my friends but I resisted that and went outside. I walked around the cobbled streets out front and I tried to be very aware of the moment. I let it sink in. I thought about how long I had been working on the book, how many years. I thought about how long I had been writing. Then I called my wife. I probably got weepy. And then I called one of my teachers, who by then had become a real mentor and friend. I asked him what to do next. He said, start another book, right now, even if it’s shit. That was very good advice.
The title of your book is so perfect. How did you decide on this title and were there any other contenders?
Well thank you so much for saying that. The whole time writing it, the book was called The Ends. I had it at the top of every page. It kept me focused. Everything in the book had to funnel toward that, and so the book became about the many ends of our lives, the end of childhood, the end of love, the end of faith, the end of life, the end of time, even the opposite ends of the country. At some point I realized this was not, in fact, the title of the book, but rather its preoccupation. It also helped that everyone hated that title. I made a list of more terrible titles until it struck me that the title should come from the book ofRevelation, since the book itself was birthed from that book and my relationship to it. I readRevelation again and came across the phrase. It seemed poetic, even American, it sounded like a Cormac McCarthy novel (which couldn’t hurt), but actually referred to something quite violent and nightmarish, the depth of sinners’ blood come Armageddon. I liked that tension.
High as the Horses’ Bridles is set mostly in Queens and Southern California, both locations where you have lived yourself. Can you talk about the process of writing a story that takes place in environments with which you are very familiar? And has your recent move back to Southern California from Queens affected your current writing at all?
This is an especially interesting question because I never had plans to live in California again, and yet here I am. Place, I must say, is very important to me. I mean in life and in my reading and writing habits. Place directly affects my mood. For instance, just thinking about the splintery beach of Truro, Mass., gives me peace. I have a photo of that place on my laptop screen. As far as Queens and Southern California, they were the landscapes of the most formative times in my life and so it made sense to write about them. Not to mention, for me, life is sort of a dialog with the physical world. And so my work tends to revolve around characters engaged with the world around them, the trees, the beach, the sidewalks, and subways. As far as returning to California, well, I’m writing about Queens again, but with the beach just minutes away. This makes for a better mood and hopefully makes for better writing.
One of my favorite chapters in the novel is very removed from your own experience—it’s a vivid depiction of a tent revival in nineteenth-century rural Kentucky. What kind of research did you do to create such a believable environment and characters in this section?
This was the last thing I wrote and it happened quite fast. It took about a month of long marathon writing sessions in which locked myself in the bedroom and had my wife bring me lots of coffee. But that only happened after a tremendous amount of research. I took lots of notes but mostly just figured I would use what stayed with me. After writing it, I reached out to a few historians of American religious history who not only responded, but they did so with great enthusiasm. They sent me notes and corrections on things I might consider, or about stuff I got plain wrong. I could not have done it without them.
To me, your novel is ultimately about the often unrealistic expectations that parents place on their children—or even expectations that the children perceive, whether they exist or not—and how families and individuals deal with the dynamics that result from these expectations. Do you agree with this assessment? Have you heard any interpretations of the book that have surprised you?
Well, because the book centers on one family’s religious legacy, people often talk of the book in that context, that it’s a book about religion, but really for me it’s a book about family, first. It’s about fathers and sons. Mothers and sons. So it makes me very happy that you describe it this way. I have heard many differing opinions on the novel. I have been hugged by an atheist who told me he was happy that someone finally wrote a novel about religion from the atheist’s perspective. I have received letters from people thanking me for writing a novel about religion finally from the perspective of the faithful. I have sent at least one woman back to church. All of this pleases me. Probably my favorite response though was from a man in Boston, who bought five copies, one for each of his boys. He said they were going to read the book together. It doesn’t get much better than that. I know writing the book certainly brought me closer to my own family.
What are you most looking forward to at the One Story Ball on May 15th?
I love One Story and have been reading it for years, so it’s thrilling to be a part of this year’s ball. Not to mention I get to put on a tie, and get a haircut, although I need to get new shoes. Since the move out west, I’ve been wearing flip-flops, mostly. Maybe I’ll get a pair of fancy ones to go with my suit.
