SmokeLong Quarterly

One of my favorite aspects of this story is the offhand way the narrator is giving us how to lessons. How to dress a mannequin. How to handle a Chloe …. There’s a hint of vulnerability when she seems to be saying, Don’t be like me because I never got a customer to sign up for the credit card. What was your connection to this retail setting that makes it feel so alive?

Just before I went to grad school, I spent a year working at a clothing store in a mall. Like the narrator, I was not a very good salesperson. Unlike the narrator, I refused to trail Chloes.

Sponge bathing the mannequins was not something we did often, but it was definitely one of the weirder and more memorable parts of the job. Dressing them was a violent process. Really, anything involving the mannequins was weird.

My other favorite is the juxtaposition of jagged things, like brittle bones and theft, against the perceptible softness as characters handle cashmere sweaters. In both cases, you’ve buried such nuances of judgment—who should touch, who should not, and things breaking. Were you mindful of this as you wrote?

I thought I could use the elements of the story—the pregnancy, the mannequins, the merchandise—to develop the characters and heighten the sense of place. But I didn’t notice the juxtaposition until you pointed it out. My students used to ask me if writers knowingly add literary elements to their work, and I would always say, Sometimes! But often it’s an attentive reader who discovers these things. As you described the juxtaposition, I wondered, How did I not notice? But I also think that if I had, I might have tried to strengthen it in a way that might have ruined it. I might have made it too obvious, like, Look at this cool thing I’ve done!

Considering the brevity of flash, you created such cinematic details: movement, dialogue, a developed setting, and a span of time that includes the present moment, backstory of theft, and an ending that projects forward in a fading bruise. Did all of this all evolve naturally from an early draft, or were there revisions to create the nuance of inner conflict? What was your process?

This piece started as an exercise in a class with Robert Yune almost fifteen years ago. When I opened the document last summer, I thought I might expand it into a full-length story, but I kept coming back to this one scene. I don’t have much experience with flash, but in grad school, I was fortunate to study with Sherrie Flick, who is a senior editor at SmokeLong. I revisited her collection Whiskey, Etc., and I started to think about “Mannequin” as a scene and a poem, with a setting, characters, and a turn at the end.

I often find inspiration in unexpected places, and that was definitely the case here. It was an episode of The Great British Sewing Bee that introduced me to Victorian practices of infant swaddling, which turned out to be a key to the story. Victorian babies were indeed fragile—rickets, limited or even hazardous medical care—but the swaddling was excessive and probably hurt some infants. The fear of an infant’s vulnerability, and the instinct to protect in a way that may actually cause more harm, felt very relatable to me as a new mom. And it was actually a beautiful children’s book, Little Owl’s Night by Divya Srinivasan, that gave me the inspiration for the end of the story. When Little Owl asks his mother to tell him again how night ends, she describes how the light changes over time. I wanted to find a way to show that the narrator was going to be okay, in spite of all that she’d been through. The bruise, the way it changes color as it heals, gave me the ending I was looking for.

You mentioned you taught high school English. I’m in the high school world myself—that daily exposure to contrasts in generations at the same time there’s continual deep dive into universal themes—so I wondered, does that experience add layers to your writing? It feels like it, in this story.

I spent sixteen years teaching high school English. I had no time to write, but the work was excellent training. Empathy is so important for writers. My first priority as a teacher was always to know my students as best I could, to really see them. And studying, for example, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” closely enough to teach it to young readers, I learned so much about the care and compassion a writer can have for their characters. Witnessing a classroom full of teenagers feeling tremendous compassion for a dying, monstrous insect covered in dust was instructive. Good literature can make us better, kinder people. As a writer, I’m not thinking about how I can make a reader a more empathetic person, but I’m always thinking about how I can be more gracious with my characters, how I can see them more fully. And I certainly haven’t mastered the techniques I noticed in the books I shared with my students—far from it: I still see myself as a beginner.