Scaffolding and Ivy
My favourite short stories have an almost physical impact, as though the story's emotions are happening to me. So little prose in short stories is wasted. Never has this been better demonstrated than in Bryan Washington’s collection LOT.
LOT contains thirteen stories, several of which are overtly connected, following a young gay Black man in Houston. Our main protagonist spends much of the book nameless and holds an according sense of aimlessness and transience. We learn about his parents and his siblings, Javi and Jan, in some detail, but until the last story our protagonist holds himself back from the reader, even as we view Houston through his eyes.
“Lockwood,” the first story in the collection (you can read it here at American Short Fiction), begins: “Roberto was brown and his people lived beside us, so of course we went over on weekends.” Washington’s writing is so striking in how much weight is pulled by sentences like these, how immediately the reader is immersed into a breathing world. Untold lives and centuries alluded to in just this line. Houston is depicted in full colour: lives are lived under bridges, in apartments, as doctors in hospitals. Houston is a multilingual city, itself alive, being broken up and rebuilt into what is unrecognizable to its unrecognized—now recognized—residents.
When I called Bryan Washington the gold standard of short story writing to friends last week, it felt like a small act of disloyalty. I have long held Alice Munro, one of my countryfolk, in such esteem. RUNAWAY is a different book than LOT on fundamental levels, but RUNAWAY is especially memorable to me in the way its stories wend together. The centre of the book is dominated by three connected stories with Juliet, our central protagonist—“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence.” We are taken through three stages of Juliet’s life: a portrait of the protagonist as a young woman, then as a young mother and adult daughter to her aging parents, then as the successful career woman trying to find her own lost adult daughter.
The vignette format presents the stages of these characters’ growth more starkly than a continuous narrative might. Common to these volumes is also the centrality of place. The remote community of Whale Bay in RUNAWAY is as vivid and prescient to the story as Houston is to LOT; but while Houston feels full and defined, the British Columbian coast in contrast feels solitary and isolating. Even before the sea takes her partner’s life and her daughter joins a cult on a yet more isolated island, Juliet is often lonely. First she chooses it, but the setting enforces it: the isolating nature of the coast is central to the stories’ themes of love, loss, and grief.
Compare this isolation against Houston, which instead serves as a plane for connection. Juliet often feels like the only woman left on the West Coast, but the protagonist of each story in LOT feels connected to the others, unified by Houston’s rhythms and heart.
Like Washington, Munro often delivers lines that sum up a complex sentiment in few words. In “Chance,” Juliet is suddenly reunited with Eric, whom she would later settle, after an absence: “He advances on her and she feels herself ransacked from top to bottom, flooded with relief, assaulted by happiness. How astonishing this is. How close to dismay.” This complexity of emotion—the proximity of joy to despair; how possible it is to confuse them— is echoed through each story as it depicts a different stage of Juliet’s life. Exceptional to Munro’s prose is the way it draws the reader’s focus to some subtextual truth: that complexity appears also when Juliet, visiting her ailing mother Sara, could not grant her the fantasy of her extended company:
When Sara had said, “Soon I’ll see Juliet,” Juliet had found no reply. Could she not have managed something? Why should it have been so difficult? Just to say, “Yes.” To Sara it would have meant so much—to herself, surely, so little. But she had turned away. She had carried the tray to the kitchen, and there she had washed and dried the cups and also the glass that had held grape soda. She had put everything away. (From “Soon”)
The passage centres the cups, but it is about the despair and sorrow the cups distract from. As with Washington’s prose, a great deal is buried and partially unearthed about emotion, relationship, and character in a few short words.
At the end of Washington’s “Lockwood,” meanwhile, our as-yet nameless protagonist draws similar focus to his unnamed emotion also by alluding to its physical manifestation. Roberto, now his intimate friend, has been driven from the gentrifying neighbourhood, and he reflects on their last day together:
Roberto’d shown me this crease on my palms. When you folded them a certain way, your hands looked like a star. … We huddled in his closet. Our knees scraped the carpet. He cupped his hands between us, he asked if I’d found one in mine, and even though I couldn’t see shit I called it amazing anyways.
A short story might rely on density for impact, but the most successful ones also create air flows: spaces between the lines where subtext flourishes, where life can root between the cracks. Maybe symbolism is the thing: kneeling, stargazing, holding hands as romantic acts repurposed for the literal closet; the mundane act of shelving a cup as stand-in for the repression of grief and—its counterpart—love. These images close each story, and we can finally see the vines wending between the sentences, the themes taking root from the story’s opening word.