And Then There Was One

As you've no doubt noticed from my reviews, there are many qualities to admire in the stories selected for Storyglossia's Fiction Prize Issue. Choosing a winner from among the finalists was challenging, and taste being what it is, you probably have your favorite, perhaps would have selected a different winner. For me, however, Kristin Tsetsi's "They Three at Once Were One" was the clear winner.

The submission came late in the contest, the day before the deadline, so I'd had a chance to read most of the entries already, and from the first read I knew the story would be a finalist. A couple of things separated Tsetsi's story from the others. The first is that it was among the few entrants to forego explanation from the narrator. I reject so many stories because they over explain. What am I hoping to see instead? More stories such as "They Three at Once Were One" where the experience is rendered from within the character, in her language, in her emotional shorthand, without the narrator explaining what is significant and why. Consider the first four paragraphs and all that is not said:

The news recycled again on the small TV, rabbit-ear antennae half alert, half asleep: A downed helicopter outside of Mosul. A roadside IED. A flipped-over tank in the Euphrates.
   Nan checked her phone again for signal bars, then set it beside the plastic plate of Chinese food, uneaten and cold, and lit another cigarette.
   A flipped-over tank in the Euphrates.
   Just some string of words crossing the Teleprompter, and the anchor even smiled before commercial. "Coming up," she said, "America's obesity crisis." Nan looked past the lobby windows at drifting storm clouds, their depths and flowering expansions revealed in teasing, random lightning flashes. She willed a strike to wipe Marc from her memory—flash!—and render him foreign, the way her own language had once sounded foreign when overheard at the fringes of her attention.

Any doubts about what is going on? As readers we don't have all the details—the details explanation would provide—for example, we don't know whether Nan is girl friend, wife, sister, or mother, but we have enough, and we have it from inside her perspective looking out rather than from a narrator's perspective looking in. Resisting the urge to explain, to instead just put the experience on the page for readers to settle into and interpret, seems one of the more difficult styles for writers to accept as valid. Is it the lure of storytelling, the desire to hear one's own voice overriding the story and its characters? Or is it a lack of trust in one's readers to get what you want them to get in just the way you want them to get it? Certainly it is a difficult style to master and Tsetsi deserves props for such an excellent example of the aesthetic. As you'll see from the interview, there was much explaining she, as author/narrator, could have done. That she allowed the character's experience to stand on its own—and saved the explanation for the interview—is a big part of why I selected "They Three at Once Were One" as the winner of the contest.

Even if you won't go as lean on explanation as Tsetsi does in this story, you can still learn from her explanation-lite techniques. For example, do you really need to say that a character has been "crying?" Or does this work as well:

Nan put out her cigarette, wiped her face with her sleeves, and turned down the TV.
   She took her spot behind the counter and noticed mascara on the cuffs of her sleeves. She bunched them in her palms.

Or how about this gem, when Tanner is trying to watch TV:

The girl climbed on the bed. Nan heard her sniffing, and then the TV powering on.
   The bed squeaked. "Sorry," said the girl.
   "It's all right. Hey, you like this show?"
   Nothing.
   "Hey?"
   "Hm?"
   "I said, you like this show?"
   "It's all right, I guess."
   One television character said something to another and the other made a noise—Nan couldn't see what was done from underneath the bed—and she heard Tanner laugh loud with the laugh track.
   "Tanner?" said the girl, so low Nan barely heard her. She wondered if she might have imagined it. But, there again: "Tanner?"
   He laughed, said, "Ahhhh, shit."

Easy image to conjure up, isn't it? I think reading is more fun when a writer allows me to share in the ah-ha moment with the character. Can't do that if the narrator is explaining to me how and why the blouse is coming off.

The other thing that set this story apart is its perspective on the war: rather than a soldier's story, it is the story of the one waiting at home. Another of war's dirty secrets. A story deserving to be told, but censored in so many ways (as Tsetsi alludes to in the interview), and it was exciting to see a writer champion such an ignored perspective and give it vibrant life. Nan is not a passive character, and her job as a hotel clerk puts her on the front lines of her own battle as she is constantly reminded, with each arriving couple, of what she doesn't have and may never have again. One way the story achieves its emotional affect is that it allows us to follow Nan in the efforts she makes (including putting her job at risk) to move girls like Jennie to better rooms; in doing so she fights her own metaphoric war:

Nan pressed her pin-pricked thumb into one of room 129's pillowcases until the blood soaked through. Three days ago, it had been cornflakes softened in milk and splattered in a dark corner. The memo had read, GUEST FEARED SUBSTANCE A HEALTH HAZARD; MOVED TO SIMILAR ROOM AT REDUCED RATE TO APPEASE. The cleaning women were yelled at and the manager didn't believe them when they swore it wasn't there before, that they'd have seen it.

I've frequently written about the use of objective correlatives, especially in the context where the correlative is not simply used as a symbol, but also (apologies to Gass on this, who is adamant that characters are just words—actually, noise—on the page) employed consciously by the character as poultice and painkiller. Words on the page they may be, but when characters act like that, they act like us. The prime example in "They Three at Once Were One" is the entire final scene, which has Nan sneaking into Jennie and Tanner's room to vicariously share the soldier's leave they get but she doesn't:

Such privacy they'd created in just minutes with their clothing, their little things, their scents. The air was heavy with their presence and Nan thought of Christmas lights strung under snow, or of the soft melody made by a body moving under bathwater in a still room, and she was there, right in the middle of it, drowning in it, but not really, because even with her eyes closed and her fingers clutched around the girl's necklace and her breathing deep to take it all in and make it hers, it wouldn't take, and trying to be a part of it was like trying to throw a lasso around a ghost. It wasn't hers for the having, not for a long time, not until Marc came back, and he wouldn't be back. Not for a long time.

Not enough, of course, so Nan needs a more radical connection:

She let go of the necklace and picked up the hairspray and sprayed it in her mouth because it was the only thing in the room she could ingest, but it didn't taste like grape, not at all. It tasted the way bug spray smelled, and it burned.
   "Fuck." She spit on the floor and felt her tongue and lips swelling. "Fuck." She started for the bathroom to rinse out her mouth when she heard movement, talking, outside.

Which is just a completely unexpected action that also seems so perfect that it puts the story over the top for this reader. Except that an even more heartbreaking moment is yet to come as Nan hides under the bed, slobbering still from the hairspray, until the pain, anger, and other emotions become unbearable. And then, following the brief struggle, we get this:

Nan slumped to the floor to check her phone for a signal. She moved it this way, that way, never getting more than two bars, and her lips felt sticky and thick when she said, "Can you turn on the news?"

With the ending, Tsetsi takes as much risk as she does elsewhere in the story, once again choosing not to elaborate or explain, just leaving us hanging on the emotion, also waiting for news.