It’s late, hours late for lunch, and my stomach is dreaming of edible art. One drumstick, fried, and one scoop of potatoes, glazed with translucent brown gravy. My mouth, agrees, thinking of the soft liquid salt of the gravy and the thick grainy cream of the potatoes. A single crunch through the thin skin and the soft meat beneath. Just enough food to taste, the way I used to get it on vacation with my grandmother. I don’t remember the restaurant; just that it was attached to a shop, like a mall or a strip center. It was dark, a cave of things Texan. And the genie of the cave, the spirit of that wide dark space, served fried chicken and mashed potatoes like a treasure on heavy plastic plates. No grease to the meat and stiff potatoes, real starch, like the uniforms must have had pressed into them.
I went from meal to meal when I was younger. Missing a meal left me shaky and sick, as did sleeping in the middle of the day. My physical schedule had a primacy that has left me, years later, with a general inflation of being as my metabolism has ceased its frenetic demands. That anxiety, the where, when, how of what it is to come, has been replaced by the demands of writing. Where shall I find a space to write? On this desk in which the papers and photos creep ever closer to the keyboard? When shall I write? During the morning, during work, in the crawl spaces of time during the day? How shall I write? As a fantasist, spinning cotton candy threads in place of good stiff Texas cotton?
The latest short story, Poolside, is on its third round of revisions. It's cotton candy rather sturdy denim. While I was driving home thinking about something else, it came out of nowhere, based on one glimpse of a gross pool many decades ago while on vacation. We didn’t stay at that hotel—a stressful peak in a much-delayed homecoming for my mother. Somehow, the memory encysted itself in that tension and now is a small narrative.
I haven’t worked on it every day, but I can feel a tiny knot of tension whenever I sit down the computer or pick up book and this is the intention to go back to the story. The story; however, is not important. While working on this story, I’ve either picked up or started to read books that I’ve had on writing and on the meaning behind the tropes and actions in fairy tales and fantasy in preparation for working on my novel. It’s overwhelming to think about all the things one has to do to make a psychologically truthful, eminently saleable book.
So, the short story lingers in the back of the desk, a small knot of tension that has no grand plot, not much to recommend it. It lurks, like a small animal, in the safety of the darkness, where the sharp beaks of point-of-view shifts can’t chew it up and spit out 3rd person bones, clean of narrative intrusion. I keep reading. A bigger animal will eventually become restless, and I will leap on the novel with all the sharp insight of a dozen books on writing and then we shall see what kind of structure it will leave.
