Happiness House by Hadley Franklin
Preface We almost hit a deer, the night we drove up. We had the high beams on, and they broke through the darkness of the long dirt road that led to Happiness House, but we mostly saw encroaching leaves…
Preface We almost hit a deer, the night we drove up. We had the high beams on, and they broke through the darkness of the long dirt road that led to Happiness House, but we mostly saw encroaching leaves…
Chapter One I. At dawn, Mom says not to wake the others, but I don’t think anyone’s sleeping. We crouch beneath the low tarp shelter that’s tied to a fence post with the wire of someone’s earbuds. It is…
You fluff the white rice for lunch. Aroma of fermented soybean paste stew wafts in the air. Gazing out the open window, you tense. You slap the rice paddle on the counter and rush outside, charging headfirst across the…
In David’s previous life, he was a mad scientist. According to him, I was a lab rat. I’m chopping the remaining half of a watermelon and am more concerned about the ant infestation I had eliminated yesterday because I…
You came and I was longing for you You cooled my heart burning with desire. — Sappho, fr. 48 The days run together now Monday is a Wednesday is a Saturday is a Thursday and most days I…
In The Family Chao, publishing today from W. W. Norton, Lan Samantha Chang presents a contemporary Midwestern family in fascinating crisis. I was fortunate to work with Sam in 2018 during the final semester of my MFA studies at…
Content Warnings—mental illness, suicidal ideation Close to midnight, I approach the Michigan-Ohio border, headlights flashing around me like starry pinpricks in the vast, dark tunnel along southbound I-75. It’s November 2015—a cold, clear-heaven night—and I’m clocking ninety miles per…
Marshall is in his office, and he says to please get the wretched dogs to stop barking. He’s preparing for a call, an important call. It’s hot, above ninety, margarita-with-salt weather but I’m nursing so you know what that…
I carry her in my fingertips when I’m far from home. Feeling the heat of her skin if I press thumb and index finger together hard enough. I can trick myself into her softness if I brush my thumb…
At nine years old you pin him to the soil, knees around ribs, center your two fingers together between his eyes and shout bang, bang, you’re dead, you’re fucking dead. He is writhing, trying to escape you; your sounds…
At the end of 2019, I faced an uncomfortable question. I was a semester into my MFA program and had written a number of short stories that touched, only briefly—in the gentlest, most agreeable spots—on the kind of queer fiction I knew I wanted most to write. It was the best I could do. I was not yet out to large swaths of people in my life. I was not yet out to myself. While attending class, reading work by Justin Torres, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, I felt inauthentic, writing stories that made references to ‘a boyfriend,’ a queeny neighbor, that had a small, stilted coming-out scene, and the like, without much substance behind them. I was writing about queerness in a way that might have appeared normative but was in reality as guarded as it could possibly be.
Aside from the personal goal I set for myself in this story, I needed a reason to write another queer story. I needed something that made it feel different to me than other stories I’d read that are similar, something I think about every time I try something new. It was important to me that “Ariel” portrayed its narrator’s queerness as more internal than external. The rage he feels toward the story’s end is not an outright anger at being outed (his parents and community take the news better than many closeted young people see today) but rather because Ari has forced him, unwittingly, to confront his own identity, and taken, more or less, the easier way out for himself. I struggled over the line, “you used me to become you,” thinking it too on-the-nose. I found it to be the trickiest part about dabbling with the political—the tendency to over-explain.
I wrote “Ariel” over the span of a month once I decided, concretely, to sit down and write it; the plot and characters arrived easily because it is, in some ways, an idealized scenario I’ve carried with me long before I ever wrote, something I think a lot of people visualize for themselves. Falling in love with one’s best friend felt beautiful and simple. I’d adopted sparse prose, perhaps as a defense mechanism, in my writing before this, and I needed a place to put my exaggerated sentences. A goal was to make every inch of this story something I found beautiful. I believe most stories begin with at least some goals, even if they are implicit or unspoken.
JINWOO CHONG is currently an MFA candidate for fiction at Columbia University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Tahoma Literary Review, The Forge, No Contact, and others. He serves as Fiction Editor for Columbia Journal. Twitter @jinwoochong