SmokeLong Quarterly

How did you pick this moment as the moment of the story?

I wanted a scene where nothing really happens but just by looking at it, you’d still get the sense that something’s very wrong. Nobody in that car’s talking or looking at one another. They’re just sitting there and even the car is idling. All the dicey/ugly things leading up to this moment have already happened, but they’re present because they weigh on the girl who’s stretched thin trying to be a good daughter/sister while also not losing out on what she wants for herself so bad. It made sense to me to start at this tail end, where it’s all just bottled up and ready to pop open.

What do you love about writing very short?

One thing is it lets me come to rest and appreciate little bright things. Instead of worrying over how a single scene might fit into a longer narrative with all its trappings and dead ends, I get to front-load all the juicy bits and then say, The rest is up to you. Good luck! as long as I give you enough to chew on so you don’t feel starved or cheated by all the loose ends. What I really enjoy is figuring out how to dial in tension just so, knowing a scene has to be in the thick of it right off the bat—i.e., bottom line for each new piece of info I squeeze in is Why’s it matter?

What is in the Ohio water?

That whole last line plays with the idea of the hand you’re dealt as a kid and how when you’re tied up in your teens, you’re just simply too young to do much of anything about it. You’re kind of blind even to what it would take to make things less messed up, because what you have is all you know when you’re knee-deep in it at that age. And when the things you’re at the mercy of—your parents, your ZIP code, all the stuff coming at you that’s much older and more tangled than you are—fail to protect you, you start to think that your status quo is just how it’s going to be and outside your control, much like your genes or sin or luck or a coin toss or the water that comes out the tap for you to drink.