Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays Read online

  There are no people on the street. It’s Tuesday, the middle of the day. I walk a long ways. I turn corners and stop, forgetting which direction I came from. Nothing looks as it ought to. The gray and brown buildings stretch to the clouds.

  I find a bench and flip through the guidebook. I don’t recognize anything from the pictures. All the streets appear the same. Only chestnut trees. Only plain, boxy buildings. Maybe I should return to my hotel. Lying on the grass, not two feet away, I see a dead squirrel.

  A little boy in wire-rimmed glasses comes towards me. He’s eating a sandwich wrapped in foil. I ask him if he speaks English.

  “Yes. I speak English,” he says, around the bread and cheese.

  “Good. Can you tell me where we are?”

  He laughs and says, “This is the city of Düsseldorf.” He offers me the rest of his sandwich. I decline.

  “But where are all the people? Where are the birds? I haven’t heard a single bird chirp or a dog bark. Where are the cars, the streets signs? If this is a city, where are the shops, the cafés, the restaurants, the bars? Where did you get that sandwich? Who makes the music and the art? Where are all the feral cats?”

  The boy chews his sandwich and swallows.

  I sniff the air. “Why, I can’t even smell anything, can you?”

  “Düsseldorf is a beautiful German city on the Rhine River. Its population is eleven million,” he says.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The boy crumples the foil into a ball and throws it at my face. He tears off down the sidewalk.

  Maybe the squirrel is only sleeping, but I’ve never seen a squirrel sleeping out in the open. It seems a risky thing for a squirrel to do.

  Early in our marriage, my husband brought home a rescue dog. A border-collie mix. We named him Rex. He mostly sat in the corner of the laundry room, chewing his paws. Gradually, Rex came to trust us, and we took him everywhere with us. He slept between us, licked our faces until we woke up. One day he simply disappeared. [The line about Rex the dog changes the story completely. It illuminates the narrator’s fear. It’s the movement moment of this short piece.]

  The guidebook says that Düsseldorf is a city known for its fashion. If I can find a shop, I’ll buy my husband a tie. I’ll buy him a hundred ties in every color and drape them over our bed. I walk the streets for miles, but there are no shops and no ties. For one crazy moment, I imagine Rex bounding towards me, like: “There you are; I’ve been looking all over for you!”

  Over the tops of the buildings, the moon rises. I am alone, and Düsseldorf is empty. I stand in the middle of the street with my arms raised, calling my husband’s name. And it keeps coming back to me, over and over, like a verse. [This resonant ending is perfection. We feel the narrator’s heartache. We understand that she is the one who is lost.]

  This next example is a story by Alice Kaltman, who is a master at delivering a complete experience in a small amount of space. Her story, “Freedom,” feels like a novel, though it’s only seven pages long

  FREEDOM

  By Alice Kaltman

  Published in Luna Luna, January 2015

  Republished in the collection Staggerwing in 2016

  Oh, the burn. That searing pain squeezing his thighs like a vise grip. The supreme feeling. The most validating. Even more affirming than the heaving sensation in his gut. A smaller gut these days. But still a paunch, folded over burning thighs as Danny pedaled fast and furious through the Vermont countryside.

  Danny had never been a big one for physical pain. But the past few months had changed that. Now he was a glutton for punishment, as long as it came via two wheels, multiple gears, and a padded seat. Biking had become his thing. It might smack of mid-life crisis, but no question, it was a healthy outlet. Much better than a trophy wife or sporty car. Not that either of those were viable options for an overweight New York City public-school English teacher recently dumped by his high-power-executive wife.

  The super-steep Vermont inclines provided pure bliss. Now another magnificent hill was coming his way. Danny shifted expertly to proper gear. Like the little engine that could, he made his way to the top. I think I can; I think I can. …

  ********

  Four months earlier, [Kaltman’s use of setting up a moment and then stepping back in time precludes the need to begin with boring backstory. She already has us invested in the main character. Now we’re hungry to find out why this man is pushing himself so hard.] on a tepidly overcast April afternoon, Danny trudged like a tired refugee towards the subway. Meg had planted the bomb two weeks earlier. Her actual words: “It’s not working, Danny. Our fighting is bad for Cody. You know it, and I know it. I want a divorce.” The subtext: “I’m having the best sex of my life with Craig Gundersen. I’m not that interested in the whole parenting thing. I’m out of here, you fat fuck.”

  No question who Cody should end up with as far as Danny was concerned. What the courts decided was another matter.

  Before descending the subway stairs, he lifted his eyes momentarily, hoping for a glimmer of sunlight, a ray of something akin to hope. It was then Danny spotted the bike, propped in the window of Urban Cyclist, front wheel slightly elevated, as if to create the illusion of flight: the Kestrel Talon. Maybe it was the name, the implication of speed and slice. Or maybe it was how the weak sunlight reflected off the bicycle’s silver metal while it barely warmed Danny’s disappointed soul. The Kestrel Talon gleamed. It downright beckoned. Danny hadn’t ridden a bike in fifteen years. The damn thing set him back two-thousand bucks.

  He trained every day. Got up at five a.m., headed to Central Park and did the loop, not just once, not just twice. By mid-May it was often ten times. Danny added extra workouts in the afternoons, snuck out of MS 115 like a cat burglar, skipped the useless faculty meetings, let his perpetually delinquent students off without detention. Why waste his breath?

  All rides were cathartic, his earliest ones pointedly so. Danny’s cycling was ferocious, if uncouth and energy inefficient. His pre-divorce imagination went vividly wild. Danny rounded the 110th Street hill and left a long tar-and-pebbled gash across the sloping asphalt which he fantasized was Meg’s formidible ass. The downhill at 72nd Street provided opportunity to hyper-speed along the delicate bridge of Meg’s lovely nose. Danny broke it, deviated her septum. Snap, snap, snap. Ah, but the sweetest musing of all came at the southeast corner of 59th, where Danny pumped his brakes to gouge a repeated pattern along the meat of Craig Gundersen’s overrated cock.

  ********

  [These breaks in time move the story along at the pace necessary to deliver a story in seven pages, no extra scenes or narrative passages here. Kaltman barrels us toward the next important story moment.]

  Now it was August, with only a few niggling details of shared custody to work out. Danny had arrived at this remote corner of Vermont two days earlier with the Kestrel Talon secured to the roof of his Prius. He checked in to Olaf’s Country Inn, an old farmhouse with a few musty spare rooms near the back entrance. Tomorrow uber-parenting would begin again. Danny would be sitting in the outdoor Arpeggio Lake Music Camp Amphitheatre, trying to covertly swat voracious mosquitoes while his brilliant flute prodigy of a son trilled his way through Mozart. Last year Danny and Meg had come together, sitting closer to each other than they had in years all for Cody’s benefit. Meg would’ve rather died. She complained about the heat, the uncomfortable backless outdoor seating, the bugs, the humidity, the other parents. But it was Danny she most abhorred. Danny with his hairy, clammy thigh pressing against her wall of impenetrable smoothness.

  But this summer, Danny was in biking heaven. Meg was out at Gundersen’s East Hampton compound doing God knew what. Danny couldn’t care less. He was in stellar cycling form. There was no more need for revenge riding now that he was such a cycling beast. No decline or coasting or resting before he got to the tippy top of this hill. Just. Going. For. The. Burn.

  Hill, meet Danny. Danny, meet Hill.

  He cr
ested the top and gave himself a silent cheer. No pause, just an easy coast down, taking in the sights. Danny passed beauty; he passed despair. To his left, gold flowers sprouted through the broken window of a derelict home. Vines with deep purple blossoms twisted around yellow hazard tape on a rusted wire fence. To his right, a gorgeous green field was filled with abandoned car chassis. If Danny still wrote poetry, this contradictory Vermont landscape would provide inspiration. Better than teaching slow-witted eighth graders to churn out their own half-baked verse, that was for sure.

  Danny hit a straightaway. Time to pour on the juice. He looked at the speedometer. Forty mph. Not too shabby. He couldn’t help wondering if Craig Gunderson was capable of such a feat. But why think of such things? Danny refocused. Speed was his priority.

  There was a minor obstacle just ahead, before another magnificent hill. A dog straining on a chain connected to a stake at the end of the straightaway. Imprisoned on a dusty patch of earth at the foot of a beautiful incline. Another countryside paradox. It looked like a mutt. But what did Danny know about dogs? He’d never owned one. His childhood had been petless. His Depression-era parents had had no extra cash floating around their Flatbush apartment to feed a mouth that wasn’t even human. Cody, of course, had always wanted a dog. But Meg was allergic, which was lucky, because Danny was a wee-bit scared of dogs.

  But Vermont dogs were tolerable, in large part because they were always behind fences, roped to mailboxes, leashed to barns, or chained to posts like this one. They were shackled, while Danny was free.

  The dog edged its front paws onto the asphalt. Toenails click-clacked like castanets as it lurched and howled. It was female, emaciated but with a bunch of droopy teats.

  Danny grunted as he did a clean little loopy loo around the poor, hapless beast. He moved onward and upward. The hill was mighty steep. Danny’s breath was shallow. His gut lurched. His heart pumped. And joy of joys, his thighs were killing him! Perfection but for the continued, desperate yapping of that dog down the hill.

  At the summit, Danny stopped to take a swig of Powerade. He took big gulps of the fresh Vermont air and told himself he was glad to be alive. He gazed behind himself, proud to survey where he’d come from. The dog stared up at him, quiet now. She knew her limits.

  “Top o’ the mornin’ to ya, Ma’am,” he called to her with a jaunty and terrible faux-Irish accent.

  The dog barked once. Then, with canine decisiveness, she bounded up the hill at quite a clip, the chain and upended stake clanging behind her like tin cans attached to a newlywed’s bumper.

  Danny scrambled to reattach his cleats, his entire body quaking. He adjusted his gears, and after a wobbly start, he careened down the next decline. His breath was shallow. His gut lurched. His heart pumped. But this was panic, not joy.

  The dog raced closer, dragging that damn stake and chain. She was fast for a scrawny little thing.

  Danny willed himself to focus on the road ahead. The dog was gaining on him, galloping like a horse. She was so near, Danny could hear her wheezing breath. There was a gurgle and a catch to it. The dog was determined. Maybe desperate, too.

  The pothole was an unforeseen conclusion. While Danny flew over his handlebars, he thought, Who will cut the crusts off Cody’s peanut butter and banana sandwiches?

  He landed with a dull thud. Bruised and scraped but nothing severed. His extra poundage had cushioned the blow. Before he could get up, the dog was upon him, her paws pressed against his chest. She licked his cheeks, his lips. She slobbered all over his bike goggles, his helmet, his neck.

  Her collar was so tight that her dun-colored fur puffed and swelled around it. Yellow crud coated her lower lids. Her breath was swampy and hot. The dangling teats were dried up, crusted over, spent.

  Danny lay still and let the dog kiss him. There was no need for any more fear. Eventually he reached up to unbuckle her collar. Underneath, the bare doggy skin was red and raw. She paused for a moment, registering this new sensation, breeze on flesh. She sniffed the air, considered the empty road ahead. Then she returned her gaze to Danny with eyes dark as tar and started kissing him again.

  Danny rolled out from under her. Instantly she leaned in to him, her ribs pressing against his sopping-wet tunic. Olaf’s Inn was less than a quarter mile away. An easy ride. An easy run. There were no other guests. And there was that back entrance after all.

  Cody had always wanted a dog.

  “Do you know how to keep quiet?” Danny asked.

  The dog looked up at him and blinked. [The reader has witnessed Danny cycling his way back to self-worth. We are also aware of the bigger picture—the new kind of life he wants to have with his son Cody. Bonus: He’s got room in his heart for a dog now, too.]

  This next story is from Denise H. Long. “Dollhouse” is a perfect example of the unmistakable immediacy of short stories. Her use of concise language and compression in every paragraph leave no extra words on the page.

  DOLLHOUSE

  by Denise H. Long

  Published in Matter Press’s Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, January 2017

  From her mattress on the floor, the girl tries to block out the noise from downstairs, the music, the glass breaking, the laughter too loud for anything to have been funny. The sounds that sometimes push past the lock of her bedroom door and the dresser she pushes against it, hunting for her in the tangle of blankets that used to swallow her whole. [There are two clever moments in this story that tell us this girl has been here for a long time. She’s grown up in this room, which no longer fits her—literally and figuratively.]

  But as the night grows darker, the girl turns out her lights, unfolds herself, and climbs into the small wooden house in the corner of her room.

  She slides aside the tiny staircase and the miniature couch with matching side chairs. She stacks the end tables on top of each other and balances them atop the coffee table. She moves the beds to one side, careful not to disturb the family that lies under handkerchief blankets, each member touching another. And she pulls her legs underneath her, curves her back to the slope of the roof, stretching into the pinches of what might no longer fit. [This is the second hint that this girl has outgrown her surroundings.]

  She runs her hands over her skin, blooming with delicate hives, finding intricate patterns in her scabs. She feels the gentle teeth of the bugs in her unwashed hair, waiting for them to settle into the crevices behind her ears, imagining it’s their voices that echo in her head.

  As she tucks her chin to her chest, she waits for morning, when the darkness will bend and break, letting in the cool light of day. And she will pull her fingers free from the grate of the tiny windows and dig her toes into the soft wood of the house’s floors. She will touch the family’s impossibly tiny smiles and wish herself smaller, fit for of their world. [In this last sentence, we feel the truth of a much larger story. The girl wants to escape back to a better time in her life, but she sees the impossibility of it.]

  This last short story is from me, titled “Mrs. Anderson’s Jesus.” I’ve included it here as an example of the dance between action and reaction, all relating to one single dramatic story event. In this case, the event is a storm that brought notoriety to one small town.

  MRS. ANDERSON’S JESUS

  by Windy Lynn Harris

  Published in Pithead Chapel, December 2015

  There was a dust storm in Duval that September, during the single driest month the town had ever recorded. Harsh winds became mini twisters that tore across cotton fields and baseball parks. One of those dust devils knocked over a cow. One ripped the “Welcome to Duval” sign clean off its post.

  And one of them brought Jesus to Mrs. Anderson’s front porch. [The story begins as close to the main conflict as possible.]

  Painters working on Mrs. Anderson’s railing had to abandon their jobs when a swirl of dust crossed main street and spun right into Mrs. Anderson’s yard. The men dropped their brushes and ran into Mrs. Anderson’s house, leaving th
e open paint cans to the will of the twirling wind. Hunter-green and lemon-yellow globs flew up and out, splattering Mrs. Anderson’s home.

  “Stop right there,” Mrs. Anderson barked. She admonished the men for taking it upon themselves to rush into her home. Not one of them had wiped his feet.

  “The wind,” the foreman said, hands in the air. “It attacked us.”

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Anderson said.

  The wind had died down enough for the men to feel foolish under the scrutiny of their client. “Please forgive us,” the foreman said. He motioned for his men to head back outside, but all three of his employees hesitated. The foreman had to open the door first to prove it was safe. When he did, green and yellow globs dripped down the door and onto Mrs. Anderson’s polished entryway.

  Mrs. Anderson shrieked. “What have you fools done? You’ve ruined my door!”

  “We’ll fix it; I promise,” said the foreman. He hurried the other men out and used his hands to stop more paint from dripping. “Hand me those paper towels and a tarp,” he said to the open door.

  Nobody answered him.

  “Hurry!” yelled Mrs. Anderson, watching the circles of paint begin to harden on her floor, but still, not one employee came back.

  Mrs. Anderson stomped to the door and peered past the foreman. She saw all three painters on their knees. “You idiots!” she cried. Mrs. Anderson pushed the foreman into the wet door as she passed him. “Can’t you hear your boss? Don’t any of you boys obey?”

  The three men ignored her, shaking their heads in disbelief. She walked up behind them, and that’s when she finally saw it, too, the face of Jesus in a blend of yellow and green against her once-white front wall. The Son of God was quickly drying in the hot sun, smiling right at Mrs. Anderson.

  “It’s a sign from God,” [Up to this point, we’ve seen small action and reaction moments: The dust devil comes up on the porch, which makes the men run inside; Mrs. Anderson shoos them back out. With the appearance of Jesus’ face, the action and reaction moments escalate.] she announced, and the men nodded. The foreman came to the porch, too and gasped. Mrs. Anderson swelled with pride.