Name of fiction work? And were there other names you considered that you would like to share with us? THEY KEPT RUNNING is the title of my new book, a collection of 57 flash fiction stories. I don’t recall considering any other titles. The title comes from the final line of a story within the collection called “Binary Code,” in which three women go running in a national park in the desert, where they are warned to watch out for mountain lions and the heat, but where the real threat they encounter is men in a jeep.
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What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? The oldest story in the book is a story titled “Three Ways to Eat Quince,” which was published in January 2016 in the long since defunct journal, Word Riot. The newest story is “Cake or Pie,” which was published in Wigleaf in Fall of 2020 and which later was included in the 2021 Best Small Fictions anthology.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? I do most of my writing at my desktop computer. I do always keep a writing journal that I lug around with me pretty much everywhere I go, but how much I actually draft stories in that journal ebbs and flows. Some of the stories in this book were drafted and revised in such journals, but I think the bulk of them were written at my computer.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I do most of my writing in the early mornings, so I drink plenty of coffee. Other than that, the one other constant is that my cat, Zaz, is almost always either in my lap while I write or nearby keeping me company.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. Since all of the stories in this collection are quite short, most of them under 1000 words, I’ve pasted a story in its entirety here. “Tea Kettles” was originally published in Okay Donkey.
I was at the mall to replace a broken tea kettle when I saw one of the dads from my kid’s school, the one who’s a cop. He looks exactly like what he is. Honest, I call that. The way a good tea kettle looks like a tea kettle, whereas some are designed these days to masquerade as other things—flamingos, giraffes, UFOs. For no good reason at all, other than that people in the world collect such shit. This department store, in fact, sells a tea kettle that resembles a toilet. It doesn’t even make sense.
This cop, his name is Donny, keeps his head shaved. His irises look like discs of ice, like if you were to put your finger to his eyeballs, your finger would freeze to them. At a school spaghetti dinner he showed everyone at our table the raised bump on his bicep where he’d been bitten by a police dog. The word “bump” does not do the scar justice unless you think on the scale of the protuberance and hardness of a baby bump. Or like how a tree oozes out its own liquid bandage when you prune it, only the liquid bandage hardens into an impenetrable barrier. Not that I touched his scar. I mean I’d wanted to, because I’m a curious person. But how would that have looked? Me reaching out to place my hand on Donny’s bicep?
Anyway, I spot Donny in the women’s lingerie department, staring absent-mindedly at a rack of animal-print bras. Again with the animals.
I think he must be purchasing a gift for his wife, Kate. That woman is on the board of a charity for dogs and is always asking people to attend this or that fundraiser or purchase this or that expensive raffle ticket for makeovers and computer repair certificates and what have you, but then when the middle school kids are having their bake sales, she’s all oh-I-can’t-buy-any-of-that-or-I’ll-end-up-eating-it-all.
Or maybe since he doesn’t seem to be so much considering the animal-print bras as to be resting his focus on them, he’s just waiting on Kate while she tries on lingerie. Kate runs with that dog of hers, I know, because I’ve seen her, and even if I hadn’t seen her, I’d know because of those calf muscles. Only runners have calves like that, calves so meaty they make you think of drumsticks, like the way predators in cartoons picture their prey as cuts of meat. What I mean is Kate is probably the type of woman who actually enjoys trying on lingerie.
But the person who comes out of the dressing room isn’t Kate but Allison, the mom of that girl in my son’s class who he says lives in a shelter. My son, barely seven, told me the girl, Reilly, isn’t allowed to see her father or rather he isn’t allowed to see her and her mother. Because he threw something at Reilly’s mother. Because glass shattered all over the kitchen floor. Because Reilly’s mother’s cheek turned purple. My son tells me this, and I’m thinking he’s too young to know about stuff like this, but then I think about Reilly and all the other kids who know-know stuff like this, and then I just shake my head. My son told me that Reilly both misses her father and doesn’t. He said, “I understand that, Mom,” and I said, “You do?” “Not about Dad,” he said. “Oh,” I said. “I mean,” he said, “feeling two ways at once. I feel that way a lot, like when I want to go swimming but also I don’t because then I have to have a bath after to get the chlorine out, plus the chlorine always makes my penis sting.”
I realize I’m not so surprised to see Allison. This Donny guy looks like the kind of guy who would cheat on his wife. Like I said, he looks like what he is.
So Allison walks out of the dressing room in this summery white dress. It’s an eyelet fabric, falls to just below her knees. I think of photographs of Woodstock, only she’s a clean, bleached version of that time. And she doesn’t have flowers in her hair, though she looks like she could pull that off, like she should be running barefoot through a meadow in that dress. What is it that bear used to say in that laundry detergent (or was it softener?) commercial? Fresh like a summer’s breeze? Something like that. Scratch and sniff Allison, and she’d smell like daisies and fresh-cut grass and pot.
What I’ve wanted to know ever since my son told me about Reilly and Allison in that shelter is what is her ex like out in the world? Like if he were sitting across from me at a school spaghetti dinner, would he give off a creep vibe? Would I think there’s something not right about that guy? Like Donny over there. Not the most charming man I’ve ever met. Doesn’t smile much. Has that steely stare you expect from a cop, particularly if one is pulling you over for speeding. Or was he more like my Carver? Smiling across the table at Donny at that spaghetti dinner. Offering to refill my lemonade. But then later that night, after our son was asleep, he was all everyone-saw-you-staring-at-his-bicep and don’t-you-fucking-embarrass-me-like-that-again. Carver is like a tea kettle disguised as a sheep.
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Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? This story came out of a little prompt I gave myself, which went something like this: write a story in which a character encounters an acquaintance in a random, public setting not related to where they know this person from. I had no preconceived notions about what I would write. As it is with writing, you often find that you’ve been thinking about things you didn’t even realize you were thinking about. This character Allison and her daughter Reilly were born from my son indeed telling me that a classmate of his lived in a shelter with her mother because the girl’s father had been violent with her mother. I, like the protagonist of this story, was a little surprised when my son told me this, surprised that he even knew about such things. Years ago, I volunteered at a domestic violence shelter. I’m well aware that intimate partner violence accounts for a notable percentage of violence in this country, but I was surprised to learn that my young son was no longer ignorant of this sort of violence. And, of course, that got me to thinking more about all the children in the world who are intimately familiar with this kind of violence.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. I have a tendency to delete most prior drafts of stories after I’ve finished them. And with flash fiction in particular, I often don’t have many different files in the first place, if things go relatively smoothly. I’ll just revise the story as I go, all in the same document. And my recollection is that this was one of those magic stories that came together rather effortlessly.
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Most of the INSIDE THE EMOTIO OF FICTION links can be found at the very end of the below link
http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/03/stephenson-holts-arranged-marriage-is.html