Lilith insists on waiting in line for the photo booth anyway. It’s Friday night, the middle of winter, and her friends are being unbelievably lame—what with Devyn and Wilson on the brink of yet another drunken argument and Jon…
When the drink arrives, it isn’t because I’ve ordered another. The server floats a short glass from her tray to kiss the back of my hand on the table. What was once, until recently, my favorite kind of short…
“Yeah, he’s totally jerking off,” Lexi said. She elbowed Lara in the side and pointed to the front of the school bus where Coach Rogers sat alone. Lara let slip a laugh, but otherwise tried to ignore Lexi by…
The electronic beat pulses through my veins like a drug, and I shimmy toward the man. He takes my hand in his soft warm palm and pulls me close. “Guapa,” he whispers in my ear, his breath steamy. His…
By Emilee Prado • Toni Morrison’s novel Love grapples with the vast, mutable, apparitional human experience that we compress into that four-letter word taken as the title. For those who have fallen in and out of romantic love, for…
Thank you for your e-mail informing us of the incident that has upset your daughter Dolores.
What you describe in your e-mail as “duck rape” must have been bewildering for a young lady to see for the first time, but I assure you that it is a natural process….
The slime of shredded pork meat coats Minh’s fingers as she mixes strands of mushroom, carrot shavings, and salt. Her hands ache from clawing, squeezing, and lifting. She wants to sit, but she needs to have her feet planted…
The last time I picked Hallie up at the airport, she was wearing a ratty beige shift that would’ve been a nightshirt if not for the decorative navy rickrack at the neck. Instead of hello, she said, “You hate…
Once you could sleep. At five a.m. the ravens are a collective of voices, neighbors in the apartment next door. You wake to their arguments or their lovemaking or their overwrought drunken discussions but there is no wall to…
The boy woke to the sound of his father grabbing the gun. He heard his father sit up in bed, heard his feet touch the floor. Heard him switch the safety on and clear the round in the chamber.…
“Ricochet” is the first story I’ve ever written that I knew the ending before I started writing. Usually I am muddling around trying to figure out where the story is going, but this one came to me before there was any story. I grew up in deer-hunting country, and had heard stories similar to this, in which men argue over who killed a deer. As a former member of the military, I had also been writing about war, and what it does to the men and women who serve, so the ending came, fully formed, out of those two ideas.
The problem, of course, was getting to the ending, which proves that even a story in which the ending is already written is hard to finish. I wasn’t sure where to start. I wasn’t sure the point of view. I wasn’t sure how much of the father’s backstory to include. I knew I wanted to mention the war in some way, and I knew I wanted every aspect of the story to point to the sudden onset of violence: dawn “carves” the mountains into shape, the boy wakes to the sound of his father grabbing the gun, the violence of killing a deer begets the violent confrontation between hunters.
I figured out the problem with point of view by realizing this was a coming of age story. It had to be from the point of view of a boy. The father would already understand what war was, and why men fought—he would have seen that firsthand. But that bled over into the second problem of how much backstory to include. So I solved that problem by thinking about language. To me, writing always comes back to language. As Frank Conroy writes in his great essay “The Writer’s Workshop,” “if there is some problem with a story…the seeds of the problem can always be found at the microlevel of language, the words and sentences on the page.” The father’s language would be sparse, so he wouldn’t talk much about his time in the war. He would be a man of action instead of words. He speaks about the war to his son only once, in the light of the TV, as they watch a war movie.
The rest was reaching that final confrontation. I wanted the woods to seem unfamiliar to the boy, even though he had been in them before, because now he wanted something from them—in this case, he wants to be like his father, and since he is too young to fight, hunting is his rite of passage. I wanted the journey through the woods to be a journey toward manhood and violence, toward death and an understanding that the outcome of any sort of violence is more violence. And I wanted that sudden understanding to haunt the boy, that he might be the kind of man who questions, constantly, the need for violence.
PAUL CRENSHAW is the author of the essay collection, This One Will Hurt You, published by The Ohio State University Press. His second collection of essays, This We’ll Defend, about his time in the military and beyond, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press. Other work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, anthologies by W.W. Norton and Houghton Mifflin, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, Tin House, North American Review, and Brevity, among others.
