My dead Aunty May visits me while I assemble the baby’s crib. Her pale blue fingers catch my wrist while I’m twisting the Allen wrench to secure the right side panel. Delia, my wife, is at work. Aunty May…
CRAFT is thrilled to welcome Alan Heathcock as guest judge for our 2022 Short Fiction Prize. Heathcock is the author of Volt, a collection of short stories from 2011, and 40, a debut novel that publishes on August 2,…
Riding the night streets wrapped in our tight young skin, brave-stupid and untamed, magic bursting from our pores like new stars. We met under the sign of the flying horse, the vacant shell of an old gas station, our…
Essay by Jahzerah Brooks • The Eight Mile Suspended Carnival is, at its core, a story about tearing down and building up. In this debut novel set against the backdrop of a working carnival and a wartime munitions factory,…
By Audrey T. Carroll • Dreams have woven their way into fiction from The Iliad to The Lord of the Rings and beyond. They can, of course, serve all kinds of purposes—deepening understanding of a character’s fears, desires, or…
You’re looking through the hole in your father’s shoulder like it’s a spyglass. Or a kaleidoscope. Except, it isn’t either of those things. It’s a long, dark tunnel, and the other side isn’t magnified or broken into crystal fragments.…
Content Warning—miscarriage, childbirth I wake up to a uterus on the pillow next to mine. It looks vaguely like the image I saw on the pamphlet when I was browsing for birth control. I close my eyes again. The dull,…
They were calling it Glitch Tuesday. “A woman menaced by a jackhammer,” said the radio. “It’s all hitting the fan today,” Philip said. He bit into a slice of toast. Julia had woken to the sound of a car…
Essay by Kristin Tenor • Virginia Woolf writes in her novel Orlando: A Biography: “Nothing thicker than a knife blade separates happiness from melancholy.” Perhaps the same might be said by the characters inhabiting Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut short…
My mother has become a shadow. I wake to find her leaning over me, a dark blur, the edges of her just visible in the thin morning light that filters into the tent. It feels early, but I can…
It’s difficult to pinpoint how this story began, as my stories often come from multiple beginnings. Instead, here are some questions I asked myself in writing and editing: How do I write English dialogue for a character whose first language is not English, without resorting to stereotypes? What do we do when our parents seem to be our only connection to an entire country or culture? How can fiction capture the feeling of being split between languages, between continents, and between relationships?
Dialogue and dialect are tricky, slippery things. Like many writers, I’m interested in what we don’t say, and how we misunderstand others, especially when we are dealing with grief. I made Lily and her mother speak past each other, tangentially, sideways, never fully face-to-face. Because Lily has control of this story, she is also able to recreate or invent her mother’s words and fill her silences with meaning. I’ve wondered if Ma’s story would be very different, or if there might be surprising points of commonality, if I’d written from her perspective.
Recently, I was told that something I wrote was “almost anti-narrative”. I suspect this is a recurring theme for me. The structure of “Body Language” was an early decision, one that developed organically with Lily’s character, her hopes and her fears. Time passing, and people passing—these are frightening in their inevitability. Scary enough to make someone jeopardise a relationship, I think, or drop their responsibilities to go searching for comfort. It felt necessary for Lily to interrupt the progression of her story in the present by dwelling on memories of the past. Refusing a certain narrative, perhaps. Then again, I don’t think narrative has to be action-filled and forward-marching. We are always tangled up in our pasts.
“Body Language” could be read as a pandemic story, but I hope that’s one of many readings. I wrote the first couple of drafts in 2019, which feels like a very long time ago, and I don’t know if I could come up with the same story now. This isn’t any sort of conclusion, except to say that I’m still struggling to write in this post-COVID world, trying to rediscover joy in it, and wishing the very best to anyone feeling the same.
TIAN YI lives and works in London, where she is currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing. Her short fiction has appeared in Visual Verse and The Fiction Pool. Her twitter is @tianyiwriting.
