The In-Between
The In-Between
Hi, friends.
Here we are at the end of February. Goodness. A week ago I was layering on all the clothes, and now it feels like April here. I’m afraid we’ll pay for it come tornado time, but the birds are happy and the trees are about to bloom, and I’ve been waiting for this for a very long time. Northern friends, hang on. We’ll send it your way soon.
Story.
This week’s story is Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel Moniz. Her collection of the same name has been getting a lot of buzz lately and it’s easy to see why. It is so good.
Craft tidbits.
One of the things Moniz does so well here is capture the awkwardness of being thirteen. Ava and Kiera are in between girlhood and adulthood. They still play with Barbies (though they hang them from the Dream House). But Ava isn’t sure that things will get better with age. On the roof she sits
listening to the indistinct bustle of other people’s lives. Ava can’t tell if any of them are happy from way up here, if anything really gets better with age.
Even before that moment where everything shifts, they feel “stretched in time,” not really belonging to the world or with others at the birthday party. Only to each other.
On the one hand, it’s a story about friendship forged from this awkwardness, but it’s also a story about language.
Neither Kiera nor Ava have the language to describe exactly how they feel. Kiera says that she feels like she’s drowning. And Ava knows what she means.
It was the type of feeling she herself sometimes got, a heaviness, an airlessness, that was hard to talk about, especially with her mother. Trying to name it was like pulling words up from her belly, bucketful after heavy bucketful, all that effort but they never meant what she wanted them to.
What’s the point of trying to explain how you feel if the words won’t cooperate?
So, they go to the pond and terrorize tadpoles. They feel like monsters in bodies that aren’t quite theirs anymore.
She is Frankenstein’s monster. She is a vampire queen. She is newly thirteen, hollowed out and filled back up with venom and dust-cloud dreams. She throws her head back and howls and howls at the sun, pretending it’s a strange burning moon, and that there is no other world than this one where she and Kiera are.
The repetition here is so, so nice. The howling as a new language. A language for monsters who don’t fit in anywhere else.
Moniz gives Ava so many attempts to explain this feeling, trying to find a name, a metaphor for it. But in the end,
They grit their teeth and keep moving. They swallow their pain.
Ava understands the world and seems to see the unfairness of it even if she can’t always pinpoint the why. She knows she is the
prettier friend, but much browner, so she is often overlooked.
She also
wonders if their differences are only because Kiera is white, or if there’s something more. Something beneath the skin.
But again, there is no precise word. Just something. A feeling. An uncertainty.
There’s also the difference in mothering. Kiera is a free range child. Ava’s mother is more judgemental and strict. Questioning her (and Kiera’s parents) when she comes to pick her up. She sees her as a child still, one who needs supervision, at once saying,
Child, go play.
And later,
Baby, you don’t know what you need.
Ava doesn’t know how to talk to her, would rather have Kiera’s parents. But we see too that this is her mother’s way of shielding her from the burden of adulthood.
Ultimately, Ava knows that language is slippery and untrue. This, she learns from the code switching that her mother does. The way she talks to white friends. But in the face of all of her mother’s questions, Ava stays quiet. And we’re reminded a second time that
words never mean what she wants them to.
If Ava can’t quite make words work for her, Kiera can. At the birthday party, when they want to get away from everyone else, she says
“Mr. Z…it’s just, you know, girl stuff.”
These are “the magic words” that allow them escape. Stuff. A placeholder for words that would make both parties uncomfortable.
Formwise, the Q & A section is great. The questions build and build, one right after the other, though Ava knows that the adults will never be satisfied with the answers. They are looking for cause and effect, something to blame, but Ava knows it doesn’t always work like that.
Ava lets the grown-ups talk. She’s told them everything she knows, except the thing they can’t handle, the thing it’s kinder not to say. That of all the possible and conflicting truths, there is a smaller, much simpler reason Kiera chose to fall. Just this: she wanted to know what it felt like.
There’s also the detail revealed earlier that Kiera moves through the world as though she has nine lives. Death is just a thing they ponder, a game they play. What If. They live in the subjunctive, an in-between time, where there are no consequences. Until ther are.
In my Intro to Fiction class this week, we talked about beginnings and endings. I listed several ways to begin on the board. Opening with dialogue was one of the choices, though the only example I have of this is Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited.” But now I have two.
Pink is the color for girls, Kiera says.
It’s a declarative sentence, a thing they know for certain, when not much else is.
The ending does two things. It slips forward into the future to Ava’s wedding day and then circles back to the beginning. (Both are great ways to end things. That Fitzgerald story also ends as it begins, in a bar, so that we know that change for Charlie is not possible.) But here we’re left with the image of Ava comforting Kiera’s mother, pressed against her, wondering if she can feel the drop of Kiera’s blood between them. There is still the howling. And heat.
Sparks.
Remember how everything in eigth grade seemed so important? How you were trying to figure things out on your own. How being an adult seemed both great and terrifying. (Was I the only one who sobbed in the bathtub after watching Big because I didn’t want to grow up?? Oh. Okay then.) Write about the awkwardness, the uncertainty of that age.
Revision Inventory. How much of your work or the characters in your WIP look like you? Is there diversity in skin color, experience, class, sexuality, etc? If it doesn’t match the world outside, it’s probably worth having a think about. Alexander Chee has some thoughts on it. As does Jess Row.
Endings. Doy have a story you don’t quite know how to end? Take a look at the breadcrumbs you left yourself in the beginning and see how you can circle back to an idea, to an image, to a set of words.
Other tidbits.
I’ve been using Erika Rouse’s Lit Mag Rankings for a while now to help me decide where to send work. She’s updated it for 2021 to include more online-only outlets. I’m sharing it with you because I like you and I want you to get your work out into the world. (I share her philosophy of starting as high as you think you can place. Mabye not The New Yorker, but you know your work. Is it your best? Shoot for the stars or, in this case, The Sun.)
I’ve been wasting a lot of time this winter. This pandemic. This life. And I’m not happy with self. I’ve done timed writing stints in the past, but I’m starting to use a habit tracker to keep my butt in the chair more often. It’s one of those where you can share habits, so if anyone wants to sync up with some big brother style accountability, let me know. (I’m using Habit but could be persuaded to use another.)
If you want to write a short segemented story (or essay) of your own, there are still a few spots in my Flash Class tomorrow. Would love to see you there.
Okay Scribblers, next time, I’m going to take a stab at an essay for my CNF friends. Until then, off you go, pencil in hand~
Marsha