Everyone is coughing behind a mask. The papers warn that the only way to avoid the sweeping sickness is to limit contact, but kids are still playing together in the streets because October in Cloquet, Minnesota is rarely this…
Later, after my uncle’s suicide, the gun cabinet would be moved into the attic, but in the early eighties it still stood in the upstairs hall, just outside my bedroom door. An unassuming wooden display case with twin glass-paned…
That Friday night, on her way back from the library, Jia saw a boy in a baseball cap coming toward her. She listed to the side, knelt to tie one shoe, then the other, hoping he’d walk past. But…
She had become clumsy. She’d dropped the mug she loved, the green one the color of an aspen leaf, with its fluted skirt at the bottom. Either she’d knocked it to the floor, or worse, forgotten it was in…
Do all things expire? you ask on trash night, and I shake my head, shake two-week-old pasta into the sink, shepherd it down the drain. No, surely no. And later—the refrigerator cleaned out, its shelves crumbless at last, so…
The approach is by boat—the passage is narrow. Our steamer slipped through the still, dark water. Us passengers, bewitched, red-eyed and scorch-lunged refugees from the burning south, reached out to touch the icy granite, scraped clean as a birth…
This story started with an image and an affect. I came across the image a couple of years ago while on a road trip through wild country. I won’t describe it. I found it deeply troubling: impressive, grotesque, and sublime in scope. It ached and continues to ache. It is horror and grief. I wanted to hold on very tightly to this emotional register. I wanted to write a version of its story.
When I started writing this piece, I set myself the challenge of writing a plotless story. The older that I get, the less interested I am in traditional plot or character development. What happens when you attempt to write a narrative devoid of sequential events, cause and effect, characters changing for the better (or worse)? You need to find other ways to provide that narrative structure and support.
There’s a “why” behind this challenge. Living in the Anthropocene and on the Northern California coast, I return again and again to the following questions in my work: how do we write trauma? How do we communicate with the written word that which cannot be spoken? I increasingly experience the world in what feminist theorist Toril Moi calls cyclical time: a spiralic repetition of seasons, reflexes, relationships. Playing further with epistemologies of time, I meditate on holographic time: time that flows, but with all objects and their quantum information staying imprinted on the event horizon of our lives. My original questions lead me to these: how do we capture a rupture in the monolithic, linear time of history? How do we nurture it? Make it a friend? And here I return to the challenge of plotlessness: I want to contemplate the unexplainable, the unnarratable.
Did I succeed in writing my story with no plot? No, but I’ll continue working through this challenge of plotlessness elsewhere. I’m happy that this piece found a home with readers and writers excited to engage in this exercise with me.
We find ourselves on the brink of geologic time in ellipsis. I end on another image, and I’ll describe it to you since I imagine it often: We are skiers on the verge of lifting off the ramp of the long jump, in the moment that the blades of our skis leave the snow and ice and kiss the air. This story continues to live, breathe, grow inside of me. I hope it blooms in you, too.
SARAH ARANTZA AMADOR lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California and writes about longing, ghost-making, and the endearment of monsters. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2019 and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Sarah is currently writing a novel based on the above story. She tweets @ArantzaSarah and sometimes blogs from saraharantzaamador.com.
