Extraordinary how precisely the syntax mimics the drowning it describes, clauses that refuse to end cleanly, commas doing the work of held breath, so the reader's own body paces the scene before the mind catches up.
Storms in literature usually function as pathetic fallacy, weather borrowing the characters' emotion. You invert it, the rain doesn't reflect the feeling, it “authors” it, dissolving the boundary between bodies the way it dissolves the boundary between sky and lake. Weather is accomplice.
Accomplice is so right, and I’d push it one notch further. The rain provides the alibi. Everything that happens against that wall can be blamed on weather afterward. She didn’t decide; the storm nailed them there. That’s the sly thing about letting rain author the scene, it launders the wanting. Desire gets to arrive disguised as something that fell from the sky, nobody’s fault, an act of God.
The held-breath commas you caught…... I wanted lungs, not punctuation. :)
Your story earns its intensity through discipline, the storm becomes syntax and setting. What impresses the most is your control, sentences lengthen and coil exactly as the tension builds, then snap short ("He stayed") for maximum weight. That's a rare technical discipline, most writers over-narrate this kind of scene. Your prose trusts silence and rhythm to carry meaning. Incredible skilled pacing, Tamara.
The short ones cost the most, oddly. “He stayed” is meaningful because the sentences around it were allowed to run long and wet and overgrown first. You can’t snap a line taut unless something nearby is slack. I spent more time deciding where to let the prose sprawl than where to cut it. The cutting is easy. Knowing what to leave uncut, what to let flood, that’s the part I rewrote until it hurt.
Thank you for this, Alexander, most people read for plot and miss the breathing!
Ohh the imagery of water erasing borders, between his palm and her hip, the lake and her blood. You've stumbled onto something most writers miss: memory itself works like water. It doesn't preserve events, it dissolves their edges until only sensation remains. That's why you "never once managed to decipher" his words, the not-knowing IS the memory. You wrote how desire refuses translation into language, decades later. Remarkable restraint. Brava, Tamara!
… and the water dissolves the genre too, not just the memory. A story usually owes you connective tissue, what he said, whether they met again. Water lets me skip the debt. It leaves you damp and unsure which part was the lake. As for the deciphering, we only try to decode what was said in the moments we were the least able to listen. Nobody spends decades parsing a grocery list. Legible would have killed those words.
Thank you for going straight to the water, Céline! That was the part I feared no one would step into.
Reading and writing sit closer together than that, though. The distance you feel like the gap between hearing a piece of music and playing it. You already hear it. That's the harder half. Thank you for coming back to read, Andrew!
When someone answers my story with a story, I am moved because it is the highest praise for me.
Your door closed at the end. Mine never let the two of them indoors; it kept them pinned against a wall in the open, no roof, no after. Yours grants the shelter mine withholds… twilight, then a threshold crossed, then the door shuts and the poem stops looking. Two different mercies.
“Distress” is a strange, good title for something this tender. The ache underneath the sweetness. You knew where to file it.
It’s a leitmotif with me. I like to write in weaving tendrils with melting words, but the titles are always something discordant or ominous.
If I can find it, I’ll post it on Inelegant Vices, but I wrote something a couple of years ago from the inward perspective of a man and a woman who work together, but harbour deep-seated feelings for each other, describing their feelings as forms of transcendence and deliverance, where the folly and and consequences of their unrequited love was a muffled echo against the backdrop of their humming, euphonious ecstasy for each other.
Ian… only you could have done something similar! “Homewrecker” over all that shimmer… ha! the method in one gesture. The tendrils and the melting words are the lovers’ own account of themselves, transcendent, self-forgiving. The title is the neighbour’s account. The word the world would use, dropped on top like a verdict none of the humming euphony gets to appeal. I do the same with mine. “He Stayed” sounds tender until you notice it’s also a charge sheet.
Please dig it up and post it! I want to read a story that files unrequited transcendence under “Homewrecker” , if only to watch the title argue with every line above it.
Actually, I was wondering about the dissonance in the title. “He stayed”. Was it wishful thinking? Was it the vital imprint he left on the few moments he borrowed and paid to her in interest in spades? Was it a tenacious regret, like a parasite sucking against all the future’s innocent intentions?
That’s what I like about these subtle pivots. They make you ask questions and wonder. Myself, the best way I can describe it is the necessary adultery that prevents a story about love or erotica or sins or nectar of the flesh from being above reproach. It’s like Zappa said about going outside scales: to do otherwise is akin to making a movie with only “good guys” in it.
All three you listed, and the title won’t tell you which….. that’s the point of putting it in the past tense and then walking away. It reports a fact and withholds the verdict on it. Was staying the gift or the wound? The grammar refuses to say. She’s still not sure decades on, so why would the title be surer than she is.
The wrong note is the proof there was a scale to leave. A story where nobody transgresses has no music, just correctness… the one thing eros can’t survive. The adultery, the recklessness, the kiss she never forgave are the outside-the-scale note that tells you the rest of it was even tonal to begin with. Take it out and you get a jingle.
That’s what I like about unresolved cadences: even if it’s not the intent, you are free to envision the resolution of your own accord.
Jingles, you will note, are always resolved. They sell something easily consumed. But that suspended chord at the end, the one you don’t know if it will alight on a major root or pull you into the minor equivalent…
Just like an unresolved thought or story. Sometimes the tale is in the part not told.
It's the love's grave of departure that hesitates the first hello. The entrance into another mind and heart comes with a roulette universe.
Love can make miracles with old magick or as my Uncle William and James who wrote The Crow found, each the death of their fiance's life through car crashes, utterly the death of each man. My uncle went dead numb after he crashed the car. He did marry, it was never the woman who died. I asked James and he did everything to kill himself. The rage you see in Brandon when his girlfriend is killed in the Crow was fueled by James’ fiance being killed by a drunk driver.
Distress can be death knocking and though we refuse it entrance, it literally crashes into what is most important: being in love with another.
Yes Ian. I already feel a kinship with you. My second son is Ian. His initials are I.A.M. - Ian Andrew McBride. Bless the world with the likes of you. May all Irish groves, dells, islets and pendrifts you own on arrival.
Odd thing about that flash… it doesn't reveal anything. It whites the scene out. The wall, his skin, my hands that I'd already stopped controlling by then, all of it gone for a second. So the most present moment in my story is also the one where nothing can be seen. Glad it was the lightning you reached for, out of everything, thank you so much, Doc!
You are the lightning. You flash your truth, your moment, and the world looks different. And yes, the details are important, because they bring it to life, so that when the lightning flashes, what is whited out is already part of me, of us. A lot of people can share the details. Very few have the courage to share the flash.
Courage might be the wrong word for it, or half the word. The flash isn't something I decided to share so much as something I couldn't file down small enough to hide. I chose the details. The flash chose me. But I'll take it, gladly, coming from you. :)
I could only see her hair fluttering, a distant flag summoning the soldier to trek up hill. And I did. My rage spent in the swim. I felt lighter than earlier today.
We had almost argued. A playful banter, the light rain, a distant rainbow she spotted, all had the effect of melting something inside me. A childhood dream which I could never make sense of but had stayed with me. I had blurted it out, confession style. She had had to put on a serious face all of a sudden. But the momentum was too strong. She suppressed a giggle. And I smiled, turned quickly away from her eyes, climbed down the hill and swam away. Not once did I look back.
The waters got darker, the waves a menacing black and the dark sky warned me to turn back. And I did.
The storm turned my rage into fear. I wanted to make it back. But my body was beginning to tire. The tide helped. Almost as a prayer, I pictured her face and swam on. The rain had a humbling fury that soaked up the last embers of that old fire in me. When I finally hauled myself into the now black rocks, I was spent. I glanced up again to where I had last spotted her. She was gone. The rain had a chill that made me tremble. Or was it the rain? I scanned the hills again. And from the corner of my eyes she emerged almost out of nowhere. I didn't know the storm and rain could conceal shapes moving amidst rocks. The sudden warmth she blanketed me with...it was like a homecoming.
I knew it then. I peeled her away, just enough. I wanted to look into those eyes...
God, this is beautiful! You climbed into the story from the other body. Mine is welded to her point of view. You’ve answered from inside the swimmer, the confession on the hill, the rage swum out, the childhood dream she almost laughed at. She thought some power beyond nature sent him back. You show he was already praying too, picturing her face to keep his arms moving. Neither ever finds out the other prayed. And you cut one breath before the kiss, right where mine opens. They clasp at the wrist.
Thank you, Tamara. You take us to places, sensations and feelings we once used to dream of too. Your words wipe away the dust of time and bouy up an otherwise sinking skill.
The title of this "He Stayed" story, if not it's steamy dynamics per se, reminds me of Roy Orbison's song, "Running Scared" which has its own heartfelt drama too, building up to the finale, when "you turned around and walked away with me", matching up with your "He did not run."
Your story is about this first encountering moment, his is about a possible resurgence, but both hinge on the other's coming or going for their denouement, precisement.
Boil your story down to lyrics and or upack his lyrics into a story, may not work, as your story is pretty much boiling already and his lyrics are as unfolded as one's attention span would allow?
Everything hanging on whether the other one goes or stays is fabulous. Orbison was brilliant. That whole song is engineered anxiety, the narrator sweating through every verse convinced she’ll walk off with the old flame, and then the payoff… she turns and walks away with him. The held breath gets its exhale. Orbison built a 3-minute panic attack so the last line could cure it.
Good ear, bringing Orbison to a wall in the rain. Thank you for it, Michael!
Extraordinary how precisely the syntax mimics the drowning it describes, clauses that refuse to end cleanly, commas doing the work of held breath, so the reader's own body paces the scene before the mind catches up.
Storms in literature usually function as pathetic fallacy, weather borrowing the characters' emotion. You invert it, the rain doesn't reflect the feeling, it “authors” it, dissolving the boundary between bodies the way it dissolves the boundary between sky and lake. Weather is accomplice.
I am in love with your stories, Tamara. Fabulous!
Accomplice is so right, and I’d push it one notch further. The rain provides the alibi. Everything that happens against that wall can be blamed on weather afterward. She didn’t decide; the storm nailed them there. That’s the sly thing about letting rain author the scene, it launders the wanting. Desire gets to arrive disguised as something that fell from the sky, nobody’s fault, an act of God.
The held-breath commas you caught…... I wanted lungs, not punctuation. :)
Thank you for the wonderful compliment, Clara!
Your story earns its intensity through discipline, the storm becomes syntax and setting. What impresses the most is your control, sentences lengthen and coil exactly as the tension builds, then snap short ("He stayed") for maximum weight. That's a rare technical discipline, most writers over-narrate this kind of scene. Your prose trusts silence and rhythm to carry meaning. Incredible skilled pacing, Tamara.
The short ones cost the most, oddly. “He stayed” is meaningful because the sentences around it were allowed to run long and wet and overgrown first. You can’t snap a line taut unless something nearby is slack. I spent more time deciding where to let the prose sprawl than where to cut it. The cutting is easy. Knowing what to leave uncut, what to let flood, that’s the part I rewrote until it hurt.
Thank you for this, Alexander, most people read for plot and miss the breathing!
Ohh the imagery of water erasing borders, between his palm and her hip, the lake and her blood. You've stumbled onto something most writers miss: memory itself works like water. It doesn't preserve events, it dissolves their edges until only sensation remains. That's why you "never once managed to decipher" his words, the not-knowing IS the memory. You wrote how desire refuses translation into language, decades later. Remarkable restraint. Brava, Tamara!
… and the water dissolves the genre too, not just the memory. A story usually owes you connective tissue, what he said, whether they met again. Water lets me skip the debt. It leaves you damp and unsure which part was the lake. As for the deciphering, we only try to decode what was said in the moments we were the least able to listen. Nobody spends decades parsing a grocery list. Legible would have killed those words.
Thank you for going straight to the water, Céline! That was the part I feared no one would step into.
Beautiful.
I come here to read things I could never write.
Reading and writing sit closer together than that, though. The distance you feel like the gap between hearing a piece of music and playing it. You already hear it. That's the harder half. Thank you for coming back to read, Andrew!
It was summertime when we kissed;
Sensations that I never even knew I missed.
Secrets left uncovered, I would fall apart,
Until your smile shot an arrow through my heart.
Crashing from the stars, we’ve come undone.
But hand in hand, we’ll fly into the sun.
Here we lay upon this meadow green.
The way the world looks is like I’ve never seen.
Twilight, and we sit and listen to the shore.
Moonlight, and we go upstairs and close the door.
Crashing from the stars, we’ve come undone,
But hand in hand, we’ll fly into the sun.
🌷
“Distress”. Written about an encounter I had myself, some years ago.)
When someone answers my story with a story, I am moved because it is the highest praise for me.
Your door closed at the end. Mine never let the two of them indoors; it kept them pinned against a wall in the open, no roof, no after. Yours grants the shelter mine withholds… twilight, then a threshold crossed, then the door shuts and the poem stops looking. Two different mercies.
“Distress” is a strange, good title for something this tender. The ache underneath the sweetness. You knew where to file it.
Thanks for trusting me with yours, Ian!
It’s a leitmotif with me. I like to write in weaving tendrils with melting words, but the titles are always something discordant or ominous.
If I can find it, I’ll post it on Inelegant Vices, but I wrote something a couple of years ago from the inward perspective of a man and a woman who work together, but harbour deep-seated feelings for each other, describing their feelings as forms of transcendence and deliverance, where the folly and and consequences of their unrequited love was a muffled echo against the backdrop of their humming, euphonious ecstasy for each other.
Naturally, I titled it “Homewrecker”.
Ian… only you could have done something similar! “Homewrecker” over all that shimmer… ha! the method in one gesture. The tendrils and the melting words are the lovers’ own account of themselves, transcendent, self-forgiving. The title is the neighbour’s account. The word the world would use, dropped on top like a verdict none of the humming euphony gets to appeal. I do the same with mine. “He Stayed” sounds tender until you notice it’s also a charge sheet.
Please dig it up and post it! I want to read a story that files unrequited transcendence under “Homewrecker” , if only to watch the title argue with every line above it.
Actually, I was wondering about the dissonance in the title. “He stayed”. Was it wishful thinking? Was it the vital imprint he left on the few moments he borrowed and paid to her in interest in spades? Was it a tenacious regret, like a parasite sucking against all the future’s innocent intentions?
That’s what I like about these subtle pivots. They make you ask questions and wonder. Myself, the best way I can describe it is the necessary adultery that prevents a story about love or erotica or sins or nectar of the flesh from being above reproach. It’s like Zappa said about going outside scales: to do otherwise is akin to making a movie with only “good guys” in it.
I’m actually inclined to look for it now.
All three you listed, and the title won’t tell you which….. that’s the point of putting it in the past tense and then walking away. It reports a fact and withholds the verdict on it. Was staying the gift or the wound? The grammar refuses to say. She’s still not sure decades on, so why would the title be surer than she is.
The wrong note is the proof there was a scale to leave. A story where nobody transgresses has no music, just correctness… the one thing eros can’t survive. The adultery, the recklessness, the kiss she never forgave are the outside-the-scale note that tells you the rest of it was even tonal to begin with. Take it out and you get a jingle.
That’s what I like about unresolved cadences: even if it’s not the intent, you are free to envision the resolution of your own accord.
Jingles, you will note, are always resolved. They sell something easily consumed. But that suspended chord at the end, the one you don’t know if it will alight on a major root or pull you into the minor equivalent…
Just like an unresolved thought or story. Sometimes the tale is in the part not told.
It's the love's grave of departure that hesitates the first hello. The entrance into another mind and heart comes with a roulette universe.
Love can make miracles with old magick or as my Uncle William and James who wrote The Crow found, each the death of their fiance's life through car crashes, utterly the death of each man. My uncle went dead numb after he crashed the car. He did marry, it was never the woman who died. I asked James and he did everything to kill himself. The rage you see in Brandon when his girlfriend is killed in the Crow was fueled by James’ fiance being killed by a drunk driver.
Distress can be death knocking and though we refuse it entrance, it literally crashes into what is most important: being in love with another.
I remember seeing an interview with O’Barr where he described that incident, as well as his stint in the army.
Yes Ian. I already feel a kinship with you. My second son is Ian. His initials are I.A.M. - Ian Andrew McBride. Bless the world with the likes of you. May all Irish groves, dells, islets and pendrifts you own on arrival.
Ineffable, profound, like the flash of lightning - a moment of presence, of beauty.
Odd thing about that flash… it doesn't reveal anything. It whites the scene out. The wall, his skin, my hands that I'd already stopped controlling by then, all of it gone for a second. So the most present moment in my story is also the one where nothing can be seen. Glad it was the lightning you reached for, out of everything, thank you so much, Doc!
You are the lightning. You flash your truth, your moment, and the world looks different. And yes, the details are important, because they bring it to life, so that when the lightning flashes, what is whited out is already part of me, of us. A lot of people can share the details. Very few have the courage to share the flash.
Courage might be the wrong word for it, or half the word. The flash isn't something I decided to share so much as something I couldn't file down small enough to hide. I chose the details. The flash chose me. But I'll take it, gladly, coming from you. :)
I could only see her hair fluttering, a distant flag summoning the soldier to trek up hill. And I did. My rage spent in the swim. I felt lighter than earlier today.
We had almost argued. A playful banter, the light rain, a distant rainbow she spotted, all had the effect of melting something inside me. A childhood dream which I could never make sense of but had stayed with me. I had blurted it out, confession style. She had had to put on a serious face all of a sudden. But the momentum was too strong. She suppressed a giggle. And I smiled, turned quickly away from her eyes, climbed down the hill and swam away. Not once did I look back.
The waters got darker, the waves a menacing black and the dark sky warned me to turn back. And I did.
The storm turned my rage into fear. I wanted to make it back. But my body was beginning to tire. The tide helped. Almost as a prayer, I pictured her face and swam on. The rain had a humbling fury that soaked up the last embers of that old fire in me. When I finally hauled myself into the now black rocks, I was spent. I glanced up again to where I had last spotted her. She was gone. The rain had a chill that made me tremble. Or was it the rain? I scanned the hills again. And from the corner of my eyes she emerged almost out of nowhere. I didn't know the storm and rain could conceal shapes moving amidst rocks. The sudden warmth she blanketed me with...it was like a homecoming.
I knew it then. I peeled her away, just enough. I wanted to look into those eyes...
God, this is beautiful! You climbed into the story from the other body. Mine is welded to her point of view. You’ve answered from inside the swimmer, the confession on the hill, the rage swum out, the childhood dream she almost laughed at. She thought some power beyond nature sent him back. You show he was already praying too, picturing her face to keep his arms moving. Neither ever finds out the other prayed. And you cut one breath before the kiss, right where mine opens. They clasp at the wrist.
Thank you for this, Harshan! I am grateful.
Thank you, Tamara. You take us to places, sensations and feelings we once used to dream of too. Your words wipe away the dust of time and bouy up an otherwise sinking skill.
And I’m so incredibly grateful for what you wrote here!
The title of this "He Stayed" story, if not it's steamy dynamics per se, reminds me of Roy Orbison's song, "Running Scared" which has its own heartfelt drama too, building up to the finale, when "you turned around and walked away with me", matching up with your "He did not run."
Your story is about this first encountering moment, his is about a possible resurgence, but both hinge on the other's coming or going for their denouement, precisement.
Boil your story down to lyrics and or upack his lyrics into a story, may not work, as your story is pretty much boiling already and his lyrics are as unfolded as one's attention span would allow?
Just sayin'.
Everything hanging on whether the other one goes or stays is fabulous. Orbison was brilliant. That whole song is engineered anxiety, the narrator sweating through every verse convinced she’ll walk off with the old flame, and then the payoff… she turns and walks away with him. The held breath gets its exhale. Orbison built a 3-minute panic attack so the last line could cure it.
Good ear, bringing Orbison to a wall in the rain. Thank you for it, Michael!
I think that Sting answer your story with a song!
https://youtu.be/hKks7D7DVZw?is=gT3c8eebzZhK8y5s
I agree! :)