I. Rain gush-pummels our car. Whippet wipers slash frantically at the whitecaps. Off to Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, to watch our daughter, Lily’s, volleyball tournament. It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, and our son, Hudson, is meeting us there from Pittsburgh. …
We fill up on deep-fried bricks of cheese and rib eyes big as our heads at Burly’s Roughrider Bar & Steakhouse. Our neatly laced Merrells and moisture-wicking Patagonias set us apart from the mud-splattered, steel-toed boots under most every…
Peterborough, New Hampshire We get lost and it’s my fault. I think I know a shortcut. Mary knows only the long way around. I have an appointment for a man to look into my mouth and tell me my…
Naomi Cohn was sighted until the age of thirty, when her vision began to decline. Now in her sixties, her pathological myopia has progressed to the point that she is legally blind. One of the ten percent of blind…
Kelsey Norris and I spoke in December. She was in Washington, DC and I was in St. Augustine, Florida, two arguably very different spaces to prepare for the holidays. We were also preparing for her to join me at…
Essay by Shara Kronmal • My Mother in Havana by Rebe Huntman is a memoir about journeys and the lessons learned along the way. In the memoir, the journeys are threefold in nature: physical, a literal journey from Ohio…
By Tim Bascom • When I was twelve, I wrote my first short story, which was about a boy who, while hiking alone, falls off a mountain cliff and lands on a narrow outcrop, unable to get down or…
I told my mom I loved her at a gas station in Minnesota but I’m not sure she heard. The cashier must’ve been stocking drinks or something so it felt like it was just me and her in there.…
A stowaway made the long trip to the United States with my mother, father, and me. Unbidden and unticketed, tucked into the pocket of a gray overcoat, chilled by early fall’s ocean breezes, pushed back by hope—grief nevertheless made…
When considering the mysterious circumstances at the centre of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes says to Watson that in order to begin, there are two questions that must be considered. Firstly, if a crime has been committed at…
In order to write this story, I had to invite my teenage self to possess me. I think that’s why it came out so fragmented, melodramatic, and desperate. I was trying to communicate something emotionally truthful about my adolescence even though I can’t remember with any clarity what exactly happened to me. My poor memory is part of why I’m drawn to fiction as opposed to memoir, although in this story I’m invested in memoir’s common thematic concerns: memory’s imperfections, personal culpability, and the relationship between meaning-making and the ability to identify what “really” happened.
Teenage me is something of an unreliable narrator. I love unreliable narrators for the same reason I love liars, cheats, magicians, and con men: because I’m compelled by the reasons someone might have an ambiguous relationship to truth. I enjoy the mediation between the performance and what’s “really” happening, and I enjoy the other question—if they’ll be able to get away with it. As a teenager with deeply repressed gender problems, masculinities based in artifice felt more attainable to me and their life-and-death stakes were large enough for my emotional reality to inhabit. That, and I found these archetypes seductive. The figure of the detective appears at odds with these sorts of unsavory characters, but thematically they have many of the same concerns—what is real, what can be known, if the self can be made so large and slippery that it has an effect on what is true.
Many of the storytelling decisions I make in this piece (the specificity of voice, obfuscation, deceptive foreshadowing, invocation of archetypal characters, and the mystery structure) are in service of negotiating the frisson between what really happened and what I wanted, without allowing one to subsume the other. I love fantasy, as in to fantasize or desire, because it’s a kind of storytelling that disrupts the truth/lie binary. A fantasy didn’t really happen and may be composed of lies, but it seems misleading to conclude that this makes a fantasy untrue. Like the facts of this story, the difference between fantasy and reality can’t quite be reconciled. I’ve always liked that kind of dynamic tension.
FRANCIS VAN GANSON is a fiction writer, bookseller, and organ donor. They attended the Clarion 2023 Writers’ Workshop, their short story “What I Know Is in the Ocean” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and their favorite NASCAR driver is three-time champion Joey Logano. Their writing explores violence in movies, sex on TV, and what grief, trauma, and mental illness do to narrative. Some would say that they are best known for a One Direction fan fiction in which Harry Styles gets brain cancer and dies. Find them on Instagram @fire.motif.
