406
•
.JrUcbael fltartone
moon, and goes home. Same as it ever was. Thus my particular prob­
lem was animating this sparse movement. I hoped to do it with the
language of this drunken monologue, as the words of the narrator are
the only thing percolating on that particular night and in this partic­
ularfiction. Fortunately for me, Wapakoneta, Ohio, one of those bor­
der towns Hoosier youth visit, was the birthplace of Neil Armstrong,
the first human on the moon. The setting sets up the moon as the
focus of the narrator’s howling for the evening. What form that
howling would take presented itself to me as the classic Japanese
haiku with a particular fondness for Basho’s frog jumping into the
Jim Shepard
LOVE AND HYDROGEN
pond and his drunk attempting to hug the moon’s reflection in the
same or similar body of water. Also, I had to find a way to play with
time in the form of the story. Time, it seemed to me, is theme, sub­
ject, motif as much as place. Or, put another way, time is a kind of
place, a locale. I decided to push the technique of repetition. repeat­
ing the words “moon,” “Ohio;’ and “Wapakoneta” as many times as I
could. I wished that the story would itself, through this incantation,
set up a kind of gravitational field as well. mirroring the inescapable
force of gravity present that night to this particular narrator. Though
this is a monologue, the other players in the drama, for me, continued
to be time and gravity and the equilibrium of those forces, now and
in the future, to strongly attract and repel and. thereby, keep the nar­
rator and the reader both in flight and perfectly still.
six city blocks could lift, with a bump,
and float away. The impression the 804-foot-Iong Hindenburg
gives on the ground is that of an airship built by giants and
excessive even to their purposes. The fabric hull and mainframe
curve upward sixteen stories high.
MAG I N E
f I VE
0 R
Meinert and Gnliss are out on the gangway ladder down to the
starboard #1 engine car. They’re helping out the machinists, in a
pinch. Gnliss is afraid of heights, which amuses everyone. It’s an open
aluminum ladder with a single handrail extending eighteen feet
down into the car’s hatchway. They’re at 2,000 feet. The clouds below
strand by and dissipate. It’s early in a mild May in 1937.
Their leather caps are buckled around their chins, but they have
no goggles. The air buffets by at eighty-five miles per hour. Meinert
shows him how to hook his arm around the leading edge of the lad­
der to keep from being blown off as he leaves the hull. Even through
the sheepskin gloves the metal is shockingly cold from the slip­
stream. The outer suede of the grip doesn’t provide quite the pur­
407
408
•
Jim Shepard
LOVE AND HYDROGEN
409
chase they would wish when hanging their keister out over the
gasbags for wear, their glue pots clacking and clocking together-but
open Atlantic. Every raised foot is wrenched from the rung and
mostly their ardor is channeled so smoothly into underground
flung into space.
Servicing the engines inside the cupola, they’re out of the blast,
streams that even their siblings, watching them work, would be satis­
fied with their rectitude.
but not the cold. Raising a head out of the shielded area is like
Meinert loves Gniiss’ fussiness with detail, his loving solicitude
being cuffed by a bear. It’s a pusher arrangement, thank God. The
with all schedules and plans, the way he seems to husband good feel­
back end of the cupolas are open to facilitate maintenance on the
ing and pass it around among his shipmates. He loves the celebratory
blocks and engine mounts. The engines are eleven hundred horse­
delight Gniiss takes in all meals, and watches him with the anticipa­
power diesels four feet high. The propellers are twenty-two feet
tory excitement that an enthusiast might bring to a sublime stretch of
long. When they’re down on their hands and knees adjusting the
Ai”da. Gniiss has a shy and diffident sense of humor that’s particularly
vibration dampers, those props are a foot and a half away. The sound
is like God losing his temper, kettledrums in the sinuses, fists in the
effective in groups. At the base of his neck so it’s hidden by a collar
face.
he has a tattoo of a figure-eight of rope: an infinity sign. He’s exceed­
ingly well proportioned.
Gniiss loves Meinert’s shoulders, his way of making every physical
act worthy of a Johnny Weissmuller, and the way he can play the irre­
MEl N E R TAN D
G N ij S S
are both Regensburgers. Meinert was in
his twenties and Gniiss a child during the absolute worst years of the
sponsible daredevil and still erode others’ disapproval or righteous
indignation. He’s openmouthed at the way Meinert flaunts the sort
inflation. They lived on mustard sandwiches, boiled kale, and turnip
of insidious and disreputable charm that all mothers warn against. In
mash. Gniiss’ most cherished toy for a year and a half was a clothespin
his bunk at night, Gniiss sometimes thinks I rifuse to list all his other
on which his father had painted a face. They’re ecstatic to have found
qualities, for fear of agitating himself too completely. He calls Meinert
Old Shatterhand. They joke about the age difference.
positions like this. Their work fills them with elation, and the kind of
spuriously proprietary pride that mortal tour guides might feel on
It goes without saying that the penalty for exposed homosexuality
Olympus. Meals that seem giddily baronial-plates crowded with
in this case would begin at the loss of one’s position. Captain Pruss, a
sausages, tureens of soups, platters of venison or trout or buttered
tesy of Luftschifibau Zeppelin. Their sleeping berths, aboard and
fair maIi and an excellent captain, a month ago remarked in Gniiss’
presence that he’d throw any fairy he came across bodily out of the
control car.
potatoes-appear daily, once the passengers have been served, cour­
ashore, are more luxurious than any other place they’ve previously
Meinert bunks with Egk; Gniiss with Thoolen. It couldn’t be
laid their heads.
Meinert and Gniiss are in love. This complicates just about every­
thing. They steal moments when they can-on the last Frankfurt-to­
helped. Gniiss had wanted to petition for their reassignment as bunk­
mates-what was so untoward about friends wanting to spend more
Rio run, they exchanged an intense and acrobatic series of caresses a
hundred and thirty-five feet up inside the superstructure, when
Meinert was supposed to have been checking a seam on one of the
Each night Meinert lies in his bunk wishing they’d risked it. As a
consolation, he passed along to Gniiss his grandfather’s antique silver
pocket watch. It had already been engnved 10 My Dearest Boy.
time together?-but Meinert the daredevil had refused to risk it.
LOVE AND HYDROGEN
4IO
•
411
Jim
rummaging through it shoulder to shoulder with him. They’d given
Egk is a fat little man with boils. Meinert considers him to have
been well named. He whistles the same thirteen-note motif each
one another playful bumps.
The two friends finished their inspections and waited at attention
night before lights out.
How much happiness is someone entitled to? This is the question
until all the passengers were up the gangway. “Isn’t she the charming
little rogue,” Gniiss remarked. “Don’t scold, Auntie,” Meinert answered.
that Gnliss turns this way and that in his aluminum bunk in the dark­
The first signal bell sounded. Loved ones who came to see the
travelers off waved and shouted. A passenger unbuckled his wrist­
ness. The ship betrays no tremor or sense of movement as it slips
through the sky like a fish.
He is proud of his feelings for Meinert. He can count on one hand
watch and tossed it from one of the observation windows as a
the number of people he’s known he believes to be capable of feel­
farewell present. Meinert and Gniiss were the last ones aboard and
secured the gangway. Two thousand pounds of water ballast was
ings as exalted as his.
Meinert, meanwhile, has developed a flirtation with one of the
dropped. The splash routed the ranks of the Hitler Youth contingent.
At 150 feet the signal bells of the engine telegraphs jangled, and the
passengers: perhaps the only relationship possible that would be more
forbidden than his relationship with Gnliss. The flirtation alternately
engines one by one roared to life. At 300 feet the bells rang again,
calling for higher revolutions.
On the way to their subsequent duties, the two friends took a
moment at a free spot at an observation window, watching
irritates and frightens Gnliss.
The passenger is one of those languid teenagers who own the
world. She has a boy’s haircut. She has a boy’s chest. She paints her
lips but otherwise wears no makeup. Her parents are briskly polite
with the crew, and clearly excited by their first adventure on an air­
ship; she is not. She has an Eastern name: Tereska.
Gnliss had to endure their exchange of looks when the girl’s fam­
ily first came aboard. Passengers had formed a docile line at the base
of the main gangway. Gnliss and Meinert had been shanghaied to
help the chief steward inspect luggage and personal valises for
matches, lighters, camera flashbulbs, flashlights, even a child’s sparking
toy pistol: anything which might mix apocalyptically with their ship’S
seven million cubic feet of hydrogen. Two hundred stevedores in the
ground crew were arrayed every ten feet or so around their perime­
ter, dragging slightly back and forth on their ropes with each shift in
the wind. Meinert made a joke about drones pulling a queen. The
late afternoon was blue with rain and fog. A small, soaked Hitler
Youth contingent with two bedraggled Party pennants stood at
attention to see them off.
Meinert was handed Tereska’s valise, and Tereska wrestled it back,
ground recede. The passengers were oohing and aahing the moun­
tains of Switzerland and Austria as they fell away to the south,
inverted in the mirrorlike expanse of the lake. The ship lifted with
the smoothness of planetary motion.
Aloft, their lives had really become a pair of stupefYing narratives.
Frankfurt to Rio in three and a half days. Frankfurt to New York in
two. The twenty-five passenger cabins on A deck slept two in state­
room comfort and featured feather-light and whisper-quiet sliding
doors. On B deck passengers could lather up in the world’s first air­
borne shower. The smoking room, off the bar and double-sealed all
the way round, stayed open until the last guests said goodnight. The
fabric-covered walls in the lounge and public areas were decorated
with hand-painted artwork. Each room had its own theme: the main
salon, a map of the world crosshatched by the routes of famous
explorers; the reading room, scenes of the history of postal delivery.
An aluminum bust of General von Hindenburg sat in a halo of light
on an ebony base in a niche at the top of the main gangway. A place
4 12
LOVE AND HYDROGEN
Shepard
setting for two for dinner involved fifty-eight pieces of Dresden
china and silver. The butter knives’ handles were themselves mini­
zeppelins. Complimentary sleeping caps were bordered with the leg­
end An Bord Des
L4tsch iffes Hindenburg. Luggage
tags were stamped
1m Zeppelin Uber Den Ozean and featured an image of the Hindenburg
bearing down, midocean, on what looked like the Santa Maria.
413
tanks, bays hold food supplies, freight, and mail. This is one of his
favorite places to steal time. They sometimes linger here for the pri
vacy and the ready excuses-inspection or errands-which all this
storage space affords.
Good news: Meinert signals that he’s located a worn patch, neces­
sitating help. Gnuss climbs to him with another glue pot and a pot of
the gelatine latex used to render the heavy-duty sailmaker’s cotton
gas-tight. His erection grows as he climbs.
W HEN
H E CAN
put Tereska out of his head, Gnuss is giddy with
the danger and improbability
it all. The axial catwalk is ten inches
THE I R
REP A IRS
COM P LET E,
they’re both strapped in on the
wide at its base and 782 feet long and 110 feet above the passenger
and crew compartments below. Crew members require the nimble­
ladder near the top, mostly hidden in the gloom and curtaining folds
ness of structural steelworkers. The top of the gas cells can only be
inspected from the top of the vertical ringed ladders running along
ifhe can locate the most ecstatic feeling he’s ever experienced. Mein­
the inflation pipes: sixteen stories up into the radial and spiraling
bracing wires and mainframe. Up that high, the airship’s interior
seems to have its own weather. Mists form. The vast cell walls holding
of the gas cell. Gnuss, in a reverie after their lovemaking, asks Meinert
ert can. It was when he’d served as an observer on a night attack on
CaJais.
Gnuss still has Meinert’s warm sex in his hand. This had been the
LZ-98, captained by Lehmann, Meinert reminds him. They’d gotten
the seven million cubic feet of hydrogen billow and flex.
At the very top of Ladder #4 on the second morning out, Meinert
nowhere on a hunt for fogbound targets in England, but conditions
hangs from one hand. He spins slowly above Gnuss, down below
over Calais had been ideal for the observation basket: thick cloud at
feet, but the air beneath crystalline. The big airships were much
with the glue pots, like a high-wire act seen at such a distance that all
the spectacle is gone. He sings one of his songs from the war, when as
a seventeen-year-old he served on the LZ-98 and bombed London
when the winds let them reach it. His voice is a floating echo from
above:
safer when operating above cloud. But then: how to see their targets?
The solution was exhilarating; on their approach they throttled the
motors as far back as they could while retaining the power to
maneuver. The zeppelin was leveled out at 500 feet above the cloud
layer, and then, with a winch and a cable, Meinert, as air observer, was
lowered nearly 2,000 feet in the observation basket, a hollow metal
In Paris people shake all over
In terror as they wait.
The Count pr~fers to come at night,
Expect us at half-past eight!
Gniiss nestles in and listens. On either side of the catwalk, great
tanks carry 143,000 pounds of diesel oil and water. Alongside the
capsule scalloped open at the top. He had a clear view downward,
and his gondola, so relatively tiny, was invisible from the ground.
Dropping into space in that little bucket had been the most fright­
ening and electric thing he’d ever done. He’d been swept along alone
under the cloud ceiling and over the lights of the city, like the mes­
senger of the gods.
414
•
LOVE AND HYDROGEN
Jim
The garrison of the fort had heard the sound of their motors, and
all the light artillery had begun firing in that direction. But only once
4 15
very picture of a fine hotel restaurant, without the candles. After din­
ner, they continue to ferry drinks from the bar on B deck to thirsty
It bowed forward. The capsule canted from the pull. The wind
guests in the lounge and reading rooms. Through the windows the
upper surfaces of the clouds in the moonlight are as brilliant as
breaking surf. Tereska is nowhere to be found.
streamed past him. The lights rolled by below. From his wicker seat
he directed the immense invisible ship above by telephone, and set
Upon retiring, passengers
their shoes in the corridor, as on
shipboard. Newspaper correspondents stay up late in the salon, typing
and reset their courses by eye and by compass. He crisscrossed them
bulletins to send by wireless ahead to America. In the darkness and
over the fort for forty-five minutes, signaling when to drop their
quiet before they themselves turn in, Gniiss leads Meinert halfway up
small bombs and phosphorus incendiaries. The experience was that
of a magician’S, or a sorcerer’s, hurling thunderbolts on his own. That
Ladder #4 yet again, to reward him for having had no contact what­
had a salvo come dose enough to have startled him with its crash.
His cable extended up above his head into the darkness and murk.
night he’d been a regular Regensburg Zeus. The bombs and incendi­
soever with that teenager. Their continuing recklessness feels like love
itself.
aries detonated on the railroad station, the warehouses, and the
Like’their airship, their new home when not flying is Friedrich­
munitions dumps. When they fell they spiraled silently out of the
darkness above and plummeted past his capsule, the explosions always
carried away behind him. Every so often luminous ovals from the
shafen, beside the flatly placid Lake Constance. The company’s pres­
fort’s searchlights rippled the bottoms of the clouds like a hand lamp
beneath a tablecloth.
Gniiss, still hanging in his harness, is disconcerted by the story. He
tucks Meinert’s sex back into the opened pants.
“That feeling comes back to me in memory when I’m my happi­
est: hiking or alone,” Mejnert muses. “And when I’m with you, as
well:’ he adds, after having seen Gniiss’ face.
Gniiss buckles his own pants, unhooks his harnesses, and begins his
careful descent. “I don’t think 1 make you feel like Zeus;’ he says, a
little sadly.
“Well, like Pan, anyway,” Meinert calls out from above him.
T HAT
EVE N I N G
DAR K N E S s
falls on the ocean below while
the sun is still a glare on the frames of the observation windows.
Meinert and Gniiss have their evening duties, as waiters. Their sta­
tions are across the room from one another. The dining room is the’
ence has transformed the little town. In gratitude the Town Fathers
have erected a zeppelin fountain in the courtyard of the Rathaus, the
centerpiece of which is the count bestride a globe, holding a log­
sized airship in his arms.
Fiiedrichshafen is on the north side of the lake, with the Swiss
mountains across the water to the south, including the snowcapped
Santis, rising some 8,000 feet. Meinert has tutored Gniiss in moun­
tain hiking, and Gniiss has tutored Meinert in oral sex above the tree
line. They’ve taken chances as though cultivating a death wish: in a
lift in the famous Insel Hotel, in rented rooms in the woodcarving
town of Uberlingen, and in Meersbtirg, with its old castle dating
back to the seventh century. In vineyards on the southern exposures
of hillsides. Even, once, in a lavatory in the Maybach engine plant,
near the gear manufacturing works.
When not perversely risking everything they had for no real rea­
son, they lived like the locals, with their coffee and cake on Sunday
afternoon and their raw smoked ham as the ubiquitous appetizer for
every meal.
maintained their privacy as weekend hikers, and
developed the southerner’s endless capacity for arguing the merits of
4I6
•
LOVE AND HYDROGEN
Jim Shepard
•
417
various mountain trails. By their third year in Friedrichshafen their
motto was “A mountain each weekend.”They spent nights in moun­
tain huts, and in winters they might go whole days skiing without
national referendum on the annexation of the Rhineland, and helped
the chief steward rig up a polling booth on the port promenade
deck. The Yes vote had carried among the passengers and crew by a
seeing other adventurers. If Meinert had asked his friend which
count of 103 to 1.
experience had been the most ecstatic of his young life, Gniiss would
have cited the week they spent alone in a hut over one Christmas
MEA LSI NFL I G H T
holiday.
N E I THE R HAS BEE N
are so relaxed that some guests arrive for
breakfast in their pajamas. Tereska is one such guest, and Gniiss from
back to Regensburg for years. Gniiss’ most
vivid memory of it, for reasons he can’t locate, is of the scrape and
desolation of his dentist’s tooth-cleaning instruments one rainy
March morning. Meinert usually refers to their hometown as Vital­
ity’s Graveyard. His younger brother still writes to him twice a week.
Gniiss still sends a portion of his pay home to his parents and sisters.
Gniiss knows that he’s being the young and foolish one but never­
theless can’t resist comparing the invincible intensity of his feelings
for Meinert with his pride at serving on this airship-this machine
that conquers two oceans at once, the one above and the one
below-this machine that brought their country supremacy in pas­
senger, mail, and freight service to the North and South American
continents only seventeen years after the Treaty ofVersailles.
Even calm, cold, practical minds that worked on logarithms or car­
buretors felt the strange joy, the uncanny fascination, the radiance of
atmospheric and gravitational freedom. They’d watched the Grq{
Zeppelin, their sister ship, take off one beautiful morning, the sun daz­
zling on its aluminum dope as if it were levitating on light, and it was
like watching Juggernaut float free of the earth. One night they’d
gone down almost to touch the waves and scared the crew of a fish­
ing boat in the fog, and had joked afterwards about what the crew
must have experienced: looking back to see a great dark, whirring,
chugging thing rise like a monster upon them out of the murky air.
They’re both Party members. They were over Aachen during the
his station watches Meinert chatting and flirting with her. She’s only
an annoyance, he reminds himself, but his brain seizes and charges
around enough to make him dizzy.
The great mass of the airship, though patrolled by crew members,
is otIlimits to passengers except for those on guided tours. Soon after
the breakfast service is cleared, Meinert informs him, with insuffi­
cient contrition, that Tereska’s family has requested him as their
guide. An hour later, when it’s time for the tour to begin, there’s
Tereska alone, in her boyish shirt and sailor pants. She jokes with
Meinert, and lays a hand on his forearm. He jokes with her.
Gniiss, beside himself, contrives to approach her parents, sunning
themselves by a port observation window. He asks if they’d missed
the tour. It transpires that the bitch has forewarned them that it
would be a lot of uncomfortable climbing and claustrophobic poking
about.
He stumbles about belowdecks, only half remembering his current
task. What’s happened to his autonomy? What’s happened to his abil­
ity to generate pleasure or contentment for himself independent of
Meinert’s behavior? Before all this he saw himself in the long term as
first officer, or at least chief sailmaker: a solitary and much-admired
figure of cool judgments and sober self-mastery. Instead now he feels
overheated and coursed through with kineticism, like an agitated and
kenneled dog.
He delivers the status report on the ongoing inspection of the gas
cells. “Why are you weeping?” Sauter, the chief engineer, asks.
418
RES P 0 N SIB I Ll T Y
HAS
•
Jim Sbepard
FLO W N
out the window. He takes to
carrying Meinert’s grandfather’s watch inside his pants. His briefS
barely hold the weight. It bumps and sidles against his genitals. Does
it show? Who cares?
H ESE E S MEl N E R T
only once all afternoon, and then from a dis­
LOVE AND HYDROGEN
419
Has Gniiss seen him or not? the questioner wants to know. He
realizes he hasn’t answered. The whole room has taken note of his
paralysis. He says he hasn’t, and excuses himself.
He finds Meinert on the catwalk heading aft. Relief and anger and
like his frontal
frustration swarm the cockleshell of his head. It
lobe is in tumult. Before he can speak Meinert tells him to keep his
voice down, and that the party may be over. What does that mean?
tance. He searches for him as much as he dares during free moments.
Gniiss wants to know. His friend doesn’t answer.
During lunch the chief steward slaps him on the back of the head for
They go hunting for privacy without success. A crossbrace near
the bottom of the tail supports a card game.
gathering wool.
tThree hours are spent in a solitary and melancholy inspection of
the rearmost gas cell. In the end he can’t say for sure what he’s seen. If
the cell had disappeared entirely it’s not clear he would have noticed.
RHINE
SAL M 0 N
FOR
the final dinner. Fresh trout from the
Black Forest. There’s an all-night party among the passengers to cele­
brate their arrival in America. At the bar the man who’d thrown away
his wristwatch on departure amuses himselfby balancing a fountain
pen on its flat end.
They continue to be separated for most of the evening, which
creeps along glacially. Gniiss sorts glassware for storage upon landing,
and Meinert lends a hand back at the engine gondolas, helping
record fuel consumption. The time seems out of joint, and Gniiss
figures out why: a prankster has set the clock in the bar back,
to extend the length of the celebration.
On third watch he takes a break. He goes below and stops by the
crew’s quarters. No luck. He listens in on a discussion of suitable first
names for children conceived aloft in a zeppelin. The consensus
favors Shelium, if a
Someone asks ifhe’s seen Meinert. Startled, he eyes the questioner.
Apparently the captain’s looking for him. Two machinists exchange
looks.
On the way back forward, they’re confronted by their two roolt­
mates, Egk and Thoolen, who block the catwalk as though they’ve
formed an alliance. Perhaps they feel neglected. “Do you two ever
separate?” Egk asks. “Night and day I see you together.” Thoolen
nods unpleasantly. One is Hamburg at its most insolent, the other
Bremerhaven at its foggiest. “Shut up, you fat bellhop,” Meinert says.
roughly squeeze past, and Egk and Thoolen watch them go.
“I’m so in lovef” Egk sings out. Thoolen laughs.
Gniiss follows his friend in silence until they reach the ladder
down to B deck. It’s a busy hub. Crew members come and go briskly.
Meinert hesitates. He seems absorbed in a recessed light fixture. It
breaks Gniiss’ heart to see that much sadness in the contours of his
preoccupation.
“What do you mean, the party may be over?” Gni.iss demands
quietly.
“Pruss wants to see me. He says for disciplinary matters. Mter that,
you know as much as I;’ Meinert says.
The radio officer and the ship’s doctor pass through the corridor
at the bottom of the stairs, glancing up as they go, without stopping
their quiet conversation.
When Gntiss is unable to respond, Meinert adds, “Maybe he just
wants me to police up my uniform.”
At a loss, Gniiss finally puts a hand on Meinert’s arm. Meinert
420
•
Jim
smiles, and whispers, “You are the most important
LOVE AND HYI)ROGEN
in tlte world
now.”
The unexpectedness of it brings tears to Gniiss’ eyes. Meinert
421
morning, they drift over New England, gradually working their way
back to Long Island Sound.
At lunch Captain Pruss appears in the doorway for a moment, and
murmurs that he needs to get into his dining room whites. It’s nearly
then is gone. They bus tables. The passengers all abandon their seats
time to serve the third breakfast. They’ve served two luncheons, two
to look out on New York City. From the exclamations they make it’s
dinners, and now three breakfasts.
They descend the stairs together. Gniiss is already dressed and so
apparently some sight. Steam whistles sound from boats on the Hud­
his friend another squeeze on the arm and tells him not to
son and East Rivers. Someone at the window points out the Bremen
worry, and then goes straight to the galley. His eyes still bleary with
before it bellows a greeting. The Hindenburg’s passengers wave
back with a kind of patriotic madness.
tears, he loads linen napkins into the dumbwaiter. Anxiety is like a
The tables cleared, the waiters drift back to the windows. Gniiss
whirling pillar in his chest. He remembers another of Meinert’s war
puts an arm around Meinert’s shoulders, despair making him coura­
stories. one whispered to him in the early morning after they’d first
geous. Through patchy cloud they can see shoal water, or tide-rips,
beneath them.
spent the night together. They’d soaked each other and the bed linens
with love and then had collapsed. He woke to words in his ear, and at
fIrSt thought his bedmate was talking in his sleep. The story con­
Pelicans flock in their wake. What looks like a whale races to keep
pace with their shadow.
cerned Meinert’s captain after a disastrous raid one moonless night
In New Jersey they circle over miles of stunted pines and bogs,
over the Channel. Meinert had been at his post in the control car.
their shadow running along the ground like a big fish on the surface.
The captain had started talking to himself. He’d said that both radios
time for them to take their landing stations.
were smashed, not that it mattered, both radiomen being dead. And
Sauter passes them on their way to the catwalk and says that they
that both outboard engines were beyond repair, not that that mat­
should give the bracing wires near Ladder #4 another quick check
and that he’d noticed a little bit of hum.
tered, since they had no fuel.
By the time they reach the base of
it’s more than a little bit of
a hum. Gniiss volunteers to go, anxious to do something concrete for
A R 0 UN D
F0 U R
A. M.,
the passengers start exclaiming at the
lights of Long Island. The all-night party has petered out into knots
of people waiting .and chatting along the promenade. Gniiss and
Meinert set out the china, sick with worry. Once the place settings
are all correct, they allow themselves a look out an open window.
disconsolate beloved. He wipes his eyes and climbs swiftly while
Meinert waits below on the catwalk.
Meinert’s grandfather’s pocket watch bumps and tumbles about his
testicles while he climbs. Once or twice he has to stop to rearrange
They see below that they’ve overtaken the liner Staatendam, coming
himself. The hum is up near the top, hard to locate. At their favorite
perch, he stops and hooks on his harness. His weight supported, he
into New York Harbor. She salutes them with blasts of her siren. Pas­
turns his head slightly to try and make his ears direction-finders. The
sengers crowd her decks waving handkerchie£~.
They’re diverted north to avoid a front of thunderstorms. All
hum is hard to locate. He runs a thumb and forefinger along nearby
cables to test for vibration. The cables are covered in graphite to sup­
422
•
Sbepard
press sparks. The slickness seems sexual to him. He’s dismayed by his
single-mindedness.
On impulse, he takes the watch, pleasingly warm, from his pants.
LOVE AND HYDROGEN
423
From the ground, in Lakehurst, New Jersey, the Hindenburg
malingers in a last wide circle, uneasy in the uneasy air.
He loops it around one of the cable bolts just so he can look at it.
The fireball explodes outwards and upwards, annihilating Gniiss at
its center. More than a hundred feet below on the axial catwalk, as
The short chain keeps slipping from the weight. He wraps it once
around the nut on the other side of the beam. The nut feels loose to
him. He removes and pockets the watch, finds the adjustable wrench
the blinding light envelops everything below it, Meinert knows that
whatever time has come is theirs, and won’t be like anything else.
on his tool belt, fIts it snugly over the nut, and tightens it, and then,
and sandy flats weedy with dune grass, Gerhard Fichte, chief Ameri­
uncertain, tightens it again. There’s a short, high-pitched sound of
can representative of LuftschifIbau Zeppelin and senior liaison to
metal under stress or tearing.
Goodyear, hears a sound like surf in a Cavern and sees the hull inte­
Four hundred and eighty feet away, loitering on the windblown
rior blooming orange, lit from within like a Japanese lantern, and
BEL 0 W
HIM, HIS
lover, tremendously resourceful in all sorts of
chameleonlike self-renovations, and suffused with what he under­
stands to be an unprecedented feeling for his young young boy, has
been thinking, Imagine instead that you were perfectly happy. Shivering,
with his coat collar turned up as though he were sitting around a big
cold aerodrome, he leans against a cradle of wires and stays and reex­
periences unimaginable views, unearthly lightness, the hull starlit at
altitude, electrical storms and the incandescence of clouds, and
Gniiss’ lips on his throat. He remembers his younger brother’s irides­
cent fingers after having blown soap bubbles as a child.
Below the ship, frightened horses spook like flying fish discharged
from seas of yellow grass. Miles away, necklaces oflightning drop and
fork.
Inside the hangarlike hull, they can feel the gravitational forces as
Captain Pruss brings the ship up to the docking mast in a tight turn.
The sharpness of the turn overstresses the after-hull structure, and the
bracing wire bolt that Gniiss overtightened snaps like a rifle shot. The
recoiling wire slashes open the gas cell opposite. Seven or eight feet
above Gniiss’ alarmed head, the escaping hydrogen encounters the
prevailing St. Elmo’s fire playing atop the
understands the catastrophe to his company even before the ship
fully explodes. He thinks: Life, motion, everything was untrammeled and
without limitation, pathless, ours.
LOVE AND HYDROGEN
425
compelling that now-lost world of zeppelins was. All sorts of won­
derful and evocative details began to accrue.
The crucial step, though, was still to follow. Arcana without
some sort of emotional stake in the arcana was just trivia. I still
Behind the Story
oVE
began when I was stuck for
was provided when, surprising myself, I wrote, a page or so after
..,4somewhat longer than I wanted to be in the children’s book
having introduced my two protagonists, “Meinert and Gnuss are in
section of my local bookstore. I’d been trailing back and forth
through it in the company of my four-year-old son, and he’d been
love. This complicates just about every thing.” Which, I discovered
happily, turned out to be the case.
not much interested in his father’s conceptions of what constituted
In one quasi-intuitive stroke, I’d provided myself with a way of
adequate browsing time. The afternoon came and went. Some­
thinking in more individual and personal terms about the apoca­
AND
H
needed something to lift the project beyond your average small
boy’s absorption with big things that blew up. And that something
Y DR 0 G EN”
times he wanted to show me what he’d found; sometimes he
lyptic hubris involved in building and flying a sixteen-story-high
wanted to poke through discoveries on his own. During one of the
aircraft filled with explosively inflammable hydrogen. Now one
latter periods I came across a children’s book about the Hindenburg.
relationship would illuminate the other; one would instruct me
The oversized illustrations seemed startlingly evocative, though
about the other. The personal and the political would again begin
their usual intricate interpenetration.
evocative of what, I wasn’t sure. I was struck by the immensity of
the ship’s scale, which I’d known about intellectually but hadn’t
Had this been a departure from other stories I’d been working
experienced viscerally. A sense of the hubris of the thing-build­
on? Yes and no. “Love and Hydrogen” was produced in the middle
ing a lighter-than-air machine that immense, and then filling it
of that rarest thing, at least for me-a creative roll-during which
with hydrogen-and then building into its belly a smoking room­
I’d generated a series of stories all of which had necessitated a lot of
touched off in me a sense of the apocalyptic, which, it’s been
research, and then some hard thinking about why these subjects had
recently pointed out, has been a long-standing fascination of mine
fascinated me in the fIrst place: one about the movie monster the
in my fiction.
So I did what I always do in such situations: I started research­
Creature from the Black Lagoon; one about a young couple who
found themselves in the middle of the Charge of the Light Brigade;
ing, and hoped that all of that reading would start setting off bells
one about the rock group The Who; one about John Ashcroft’s early
somewhere, would generate that vaguely excited feeling of a possi­
days as a politician; one about cryptozoologists and one of their
ble story beginning to coalesce. I forged through books with titles
like The Complete History of Lighter- Than-Air Aircraft. (My book­
obsessions: Carcharodon megalodon, the prehistoric precursor to the
great white shark. And so on. The librarian at my college library
shelf is often studded with spines that seem stunningly dull or
finally looked up from one of the piles I’d lugged to her station and
nerdy.)
All that research hugely enlarged my sense ofjust how bizarrely
said, “Can I ask: what is your field, anyway?” It’s a question my par­
ents and relatives have wondered about more than once, as well.
424
426
• ]im
Shepard
Where do these stories come from? They come from fascina­
tions I’ve cultivated; obsessions I might have had; intrigued
curiosities I’ve allowed myself the luxury of pursuing. In all such
ways and others, I’ve tried to expand that horrifyingly narrow
bandwidth we call autobiographical experience, while still engaging
those issues and emotions· which most matter to me.
Peter q’urchi
“~~
NIGHT, TRUCK, TWO LIGHTS
BURNING
ATE
N I G H TIN
early winter. The last hour of the long
drive home. I tend to the thermostat, keeping the car warm
for my sleeping family, but not so warm that my
focus turns dull. Beyond the chilled glass to my left, green dashboard
lights angle up toward the stars.
Distance defines our relations. My wife’s parents live five hundred
miles away, what we have come to think of as a day’s drive.
When we arrive, she will hoist our son high against her chest and
take him, murmuring his dreams, into the house. I will carry our
long-legged daughter from our car to her room, where I will lay her
gently on the bed we have made for her.
proud that I hadn’t fallen asleep.
“You go ahead and rest,” my father told me. “I’ll let you know
when we get there.”
But I had promised my mother I would help him stay awake, so sat
IRE M E M B E R BEl N G
42 7
The Last Days of Rodney
Tracey Rose Peyton
He was known most everywhere—a face, a caption, a grainy video
clip—but it had been over twenty years now, and he was still trying
to forge a new chapter unconnected to the first. Wishful thinking, he
knew. It would always be connected. No one would ever bring up his
name without mentioning the past, without talking about the public
spectacle of a private beating that almost killed him, but didn’t. And
when his heart slowed and breath filled his lungs, he was someone else.
It wasn’t amnesia. He knew he was the man on the tape. He could
piece together the jumbled happenings of how things spiraled out of
hand. How he misheard the first officer and moved away when he was
ordered to stay put. Police didn’t understand things like reflexes, how the
body rises up on its own to stave off danger. For years after, he practiced
forgetting. Cough syrups that made sleep blacker than night. Pills with
complicated names he got from therapists, which he crushed and chased
with liquor until every memory was as distant as a picture show.
That was what his Dad called the movies—picture shows. And by the
time a home movie changed Rodney’s life, his father couldn’t see too
good or hear much either. They hadn’t been close. They were a family
of deserters. Of runners, of folks who took long absences when things
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t r ac e y r o s e p e y t o n
15
got hard or heated, which was often. But now that the old man was
of the criminal), but mostly because he was still alive. Cracked skull
small and sickly and senile, now that he couldn’t do much more than
and eleven fractures be damned. He had lived. A still-sentient being,
drink a bit of whiskey and talk trash over a game of dominoes, Rodney
aware of the needs of every single cell and muscle calling for comfort,
had seen more of him than he ever had as child. He had given up on
rest, or Vicodin.
completing his family’s photo album in his mind long ago, ramming
He wasn’t sure what he expected Lotto to tell him. He had seen
some shiny, youthful version of the man into his memory of backyard
enough in his life to know there were some problems money couldn’t
barbecues or parent-teacher conferences. No, what made Dad comfort-
solve. And let’s face it, Lotto was not the best tool for divination. He
ing now was that he didn’t ask about the case or what had happened
had tried all the usual routes, the velvet pews of storefront Pentecostal
that night. The dementia had settled so far in that he couldn’t hold
churches, head-wrapped psychics in glass cases peering into palms
onto the telling. Only the distant past was accessible. New things were
or playing cards. He even went way across town to the botanica,
drops on the skin, felt for a second and then wiped away. And Rodney
where he bought some tall white candles adorned with the faces of
needed that forgetting.
spooky-looking saints. He burned them for a while, but clarity never
Mornings like this one, he realized he still hadn’t gotten it down.
came. He tried therapy. First, the real kind and then the reality show
He rolled out of bed while Vera was sleeping. Picked his pants up off
kind, but the latter was for money, and by then, he was so close to the
the floor and stepped into them. Stuck his wallet in his back pocket
edge, the wide eye of those cameras gave him something to focus on
and pulled a shirt off the chair. At the front door, he slid his feet into
long enough to get through the minutes and hours that squeezed the
his flip-flops and stepped outside. The sun was weak at this hour. The
air out of his chest and throat. It hadn’t helped with the anonymity he
cul-de-sac deserted, an unnatural sight at almost any time of day. There
hoped for, but he figured that ship had long sailed anyway.
was always a bit of noise in the air, though. A car driving by spraying
On the lottery form, he colored in the numbers. The same sequence
the street with bass or some sing-song refrain. The chatter of kids on
every time. The day of his birth, but not the year. The birth year of his
their way to school. The neighboring couple, waking the whole block
first-born, Jermaine, who was now grown and not speaking to him. The
up with their quarreling or fucking.
number of separate fractures inflicted that day. Each time he penned it
He headed down the street to the corner store. He wanted a cigarette,
in, he felt a twinge of some dark feeling he couldn’t name and thought
a cup of coffee, and a newspaper. The parking lot was empty, no sign of
to himself, he wouldn’t play that number anymore. It had been in the
life but a stray beer can rolling downhill. Inside, he shuffled past the
newspaper with the rest of the details, a string of disembodied facts
clerk, a graying head bent over a spreadsheet. “Sup, Rajeev,” Rodney
that read like a rap sheet.
said. The man grunted in reply. It wasn’t Rajeev but someone new. “Oh
sorry, my bad.”
The lotto machine loomed in the corner. He moved toward it
without stopping. He had told Vera he wasn’t going to play anymore.
Sticking the form under his arm, he walked up to the coffee machine
and slid a paper cup under the spout. The streaming, dark liquid sloshed
violently as it approached the rim. One cream, two sugars. He slapped
a lid on.
This wasn’t a lie. He wasn’t playing. He was winning. Lotto just needed
“A pack of Newports,” he said to the clerk at the counter as he
to say the same. And until it did, he folded the cards into thin strips and
reached over and grabbed a newspaper from the stack and set it down
slid them into the last pocket in his wallet, as guilty as an illicit phone
along with his lottery form.
number. It felt like cheating almost, but Vera didn’t understand. He was
He scanned the front-page headline and tried to turn it over
looking for a sign. He had been looking all over for them ever since the
before it could register. But even the safety of the sports page, with
incident. People said he was lucky. Not for what happened, but because
a Dodger in mid-swing, didn’t erase the previous image or the large
there was video, because he won the civil suit (after the clusterfuck
blocks of black text. Another police shooting. An unarmed thirty-
16
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t r ac e y r o s e p e y t o n
17
six-year-old father of two shot seven times, five of them in the back,
people knew his face was hard. People kept wanting to talk to him. Not
the coroner reported.
because they wanted to hear from him, but because they had things to
“Twelve dollars and forty cents,” the clerk said, interrupting his
thoughts.
Rodney fished out his wallet. Shit. Only a ten. He put the ten-dollar
say, things to wrestle with, that seeing him brought up. And sometimes
that was harder than being an object everyone orbits. Who could take
on all that, really? Jesus couldn’t.
bill on the counter. “I’m short two dollars. Let me bring it tomorrow.”
“Fine, man. That should cover these,” Rodney said as he picked
The clerk shook his gray head and scrunched up his face. “No, you
up the lottery form and crumpled it in his pocket. He’d have to play
pay now.”
those numbers another day. He tucked the folded newspaper under
“C’mon, man. Y’all see me almost every day.”
his armpit, pocketed the pack of cigarettes, and left. He hadn’t lied to
“I don’t see you. You pay now.” The man’s face was as a brown as his
Vera after all. That was a plus, right?
own, but the clerk’s skin had a greenish tinge to it, no doubt obtained
Outside, he sat down on the curb facing the parking lot and
from a steady diet of honey buns and long shifts spent under fluorescent
spread out his purchases. Coffee on the right, cigs on the left, paper
lights. But this likeness didn’t matter, he knew. Country mattered.
in the middle. He lit a cigarette and turned his attention to the front
Culture mattered. Similar concentrations of melanin, not so much.
page, but he couldn’t make himself read past the first sentence. All
“Where you from, man?” Rodney said, taking a sip from the coffee
cup. “Where’s Rajeev?”
of sudden, his head was throbbing, an insistent knocking at the
base of his skull. He put the paper down and inhaled a drag of his
The man shot Rodney a sideways look but didn’t say anything. “You
cigarette. He was sitting too low on the ground. The whole parking
never mind where I’m from. You gon’ pay?” One hand fluttered on the
lot was tilted. He hadn’t eaten anything. Shit, he shouldn’t have left
counter, the fingers drumming an odd rhythm on the red laminate
his change in there. He could have gotten a donut or a candy bar.
surface, the universal language for “hurry the fuck up.” The other hand
Something that could right his blood sugar. He felt tingly now, in
remained hidden though, underneath, and Rodney could see the clerk’s
his head, his fingers.
mind slowly calculating the odds. Was this towering, broad-shouldered
He looked down at the paper to turn the page, but the picture kept
dark figure a threat? Was he trying to walk out with more than the ten
him frozen. The man was relaxed and smiling, a posed photo with
dollars sitting on the counter could pay for?
friends or family cropped out of it, an anonymous, lazy arm draped
He almost laughed out loud. The only people who ever considered
around his neck. Rodney couldn’t help feeling that the man was inter-
him a threat were those who didn’t recognize him. Anyone who
rogating him somehow, looking deep into his head, lacing a singular
remembered his story from the papers knew the person he was most
question in his mind—why me and not you?
in danger of harming was himself. After years of being recognized,
He kicked the paper away from him and reached for the coffee. The
he was damn near out of practice with this particular performance of
rush of heat singed him, and he swallowed quickly to get the liquid off
being big and black and male in public space. Don’t pick up a lot of items,
his tongue. He felt it burning a path down to his stomach. He shook his
especially anything you don’t plan on buying. Make a performance of
head and stood up, grabbing the pack of cigarettes. No paper today. No
placing any unwanted merchandise back on the shelves. Slowly and
lotto either. Maybe this was the sign he had been waiting for.
solidly. Make noise when you’re behind people. Cross the street first.
He didn’t pay much attention to dreams and hated when people
And so on. He practiced fading into the background, trying to return to
bothered him with theirs, but he had a recurring one he couldn’t shake.
anonymity, but he had a body that was hard to hide in. His size made
He could stave it off if the sleep was deep enough, if he tipped off with
him conspicuous in public. This was typically true for white spaces,
a cap or two of NyQuil, but now even that wasn’t working, and he
but black spaces were hard, too. Oakland was hard. Any place where
couldn’t talk about it.
18
a m e r i c a n s h o rt f i c t i o n
Just yesterday, he tried. He woke up, chest heaving, covered with
sweat, and stumbled down to the kitchen. Everything was still there
as he’d left it the day before, the black spindly chairs, the glass table,
the dingy vertical blinds. Vera was standing over the stove, scrambling
eggs, when she saw him. “You look awful. Sit, let me get you some
water. You feeling okay?”
t r ac e y r o s e p e y t o n
19
front of four-year-old Marlon, trying to get him to allow her to tie
his shoes.
“Stop,” the boy whined. “Let me do it,” he said as he pushed her
hands away.
Vera sighed. “Fine, you have two minutes.” She looked up at Rodney
standing in the doorway. “Where you been?”
He nodded as he sat down, his breath still coming out jagged. “You
ever have that feeling you’re going to die?” he blurted out.
“Honey, we’re all going to die,” she said, sitting a glass of water in
“Out of smokes,” he said, closing the door behind him.
She eyed the convenience-store coffee cup in his hand. “Don’t know
why you insist on wasting good money when there’s a perfectly decent
coffee maker in the kitchen.”
front of him.
“Not someday, I mean like soon. Like today.”
Vera looked at him, confused. She leaned over and put the back of
her hand against his forehead, checking for fever.
He pulled away from her. “Like Jesus, you know, or MLK, or
Malcolm. They all knew it was coming. They could feel it.”
Her brown eyes widened and her mouth twisted up. “Are you
comparing yourself to Jesus or MLK?”
“Course not. I’m just saying . . . I feel it coming on, that’s all. Like
it’s already here. If it was a blood clot heading toward the heart, it’d be
over here already,” he said, pointing to his chest, close to the shoulder.
Vera froze for a second, without answering him. Then, she stepped
backward, muttering to herself. “Now, where did I put Dr. Morgan’s
new number?”
“It doesn’t taste as good when I make it.”
Vera rolled her eyes before turning back to sleepy-eyed Marlon, still
trying to form the loops with his tiny hands. “See, if you went to sleep
when I told you to, you wouldn’t be tired. Now, let me tie your shoes
or we’re going to be late.”
The boy’s mouth contracted into a frown. His hands flew up to his
face to rub his eyes. Vera tied Marlon’s shoes and pulled him to his feet.
“Is Reggie dressed?” Rodney asked.
“Should be. He’s eating now.”
Vera moved toward the door, guiding Marlon by his shoulder.
Rodney reached down and kissed Marlon’s forehead. “Have a good
day. Be good.”
He turned to Vera, putting one arm around her, but she jerked
She began foraging through the kitchen drawers, drifting over to
the loose papers and stacks of mail sitting in a corner of the kitchen
counter. He knew she was looking for a reality other than the one he
forward, and his mouth just grazed the side of her face. “Love you,”
he said, whispering low into her neck.
She mumbled something indistinguishable back.
was presenting her with. And he knew then, he couldn’t make her deal
“No sugar?” He stepped closer, tightening his arm around her.
with this, too. The cost of being with him was already too much.
“Move. We can’t be late again. I don’t have time for this.”
“You don’t have time for me? You don’t have time to kiss your
————————————
husband?”
She groaned and gave him a dry, heartless peck on the lips.
Outside the convenience store, Rodney drifted back home in a stupor.
The days were taking shape in a way that meant something, even if
he couldn’t discern their meaning. He walked into the house just as
Vera and the boys were preparing to leave. Eleven-year-old Reggie
“Really? Ugh, next time, don’t kiss me,” he said, putting his hand
over his mouth.
She laughed, in spite of herself. She kissed him. “You make me sick,
you know that.”
was clattering around in the kitchen while Vera wrestled with their
He nodded and grinned at her. “Y’all have a good day,” he said,
youngest. With her trench coat and purse on, she was kneeling in
opening the door for her and Marlon. He then headed to the kitchen,
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21
where he found Reggie standing over the sink, slurping milk from a
and Sunday drivers using one graceful, lazy hand. The few days he
cereal bowl.
spent with his dad as a kid were in those kinds of cars, running errands
Reggie drained it of all the syrupy sweet milk and placed it in the
bottom of the sink with a resounding clank. “Hi Dad. Bye Dad,” he said
and rushed past his father, his sneakers squeaking on the linoleum.
Reggie grabbed his jacket and threw his book bag over his shoulder.
“You need some money?” Rodney said, standing at the counter,
fingering the ripped envelope of an unpaid bill.
Reggie paused and turned to face him. “Yeah.”
Rodney pulled out his wallet and then remembered he didn’t have
any more cash. Shit. “I need to go to the ATM. Hold on, I think I got
some cash upstairs.”
Reggie shook his head and opened the front door. “It’s okay. Mom
gave me some.”
The sound of a long mechanical hiss filled the room. “Shit, the bus!”
Reggie took off, sprinting toward the bus stop before Rodney could say
anything about the cursing.
An uneasy quiet settled over the house. He hated a quiet house.
When he was a kid, moments alone were so rare, they were like cherished jewels. Now, they were something else entirely. Proof of his
wrongs. The latitude and longitude of his errors could be tracked in
this way, by the duration of quiet. This moment right now, set to last
between eight and ten hours, was proof, too. He was between jobs
again. That he was home with no foreseeable place to go was another
piece of mounting evidence.
Just then, Reggie opened the screen door and stepped back inside.
“I missed the bus. Can you give me a ride?”
He tried to look irritated, but he was grateful. “Again? You’re
across town, the metal shining in the sunlight and the radio dial too
sacred to be fiddled with.
Rodney drove slowly, humming along with the radio, his foot easing
up and down on the gas as they moved through one intersection after
another. When they pulled up to the school, he had a thought. “Reg,
how about playing hooky today? We can drive around, go get hotdogs
at the pier, maybe go to the aquarium. What do you say?”
Reggie looked pensive. “Isn’t Mom gon’ be mad?”
“Yeah, but we ain’t got to tell her. I’ll call the school myself. It’ll be
just between us.”
Reggie cocked his head to the side. “I don’t know, Dad. Today’s the
last day to turn in permission slips for dodgeball, and if I don’t, I can’t
play. And,” he lowered his voice conspiratorially, “Kia is going to my
lab partner today. Kia, Dad!”
Rodney nodded and laughed. “That is major.”
“Can we do it next Tuesday? Mr. Milton is giving a test.”
“We’ll see. Go on now. You’re gonna be late.”
Reggie popped open the door and hopped out. “Bye, Dad,” he said,
as he slammed the door.
Rodney watched as the kid raced toward the building, his camouflage book bag bouncing up and down as he ran.
It was still early. He debated whether to go home and take a nap, but
he didn’t feel quite ready to face the house, the silent judgement of the
couch, the dirty dishes, the laundry sitting in piles. He drove to the old
folks’ home instead, but the staff had just tried to feed his father, and
it seemed the man couldn’t stay awake.
getting too old for this. You have to start getting out of here on time.”
“Did he eat much?” he asked Ms. Russell, the nursing assistant on duty.
He reached for his keys and grabbed a sweater, and they both headed
“Not much, just some grits, but he slept through most of breakfast,”
outside to the car.
The light in the sky was still weak, hidden by gray clouds. He sank
the woman said, reaching for the tray sitting in front of the old man
propped up in a wheelchair.
down into the seat, feeling his weight upon the tires. It was a Cadillac,
“Just leave it,” Rodney said. The food was largely untouched, a bowl
but not wide and boat-like the way he wished. They didn’t make those
of grits three-quarters full, one piece of buttered toast, and some dry,
cars anymore, those long Buicks and Cadillacs that seemed to stretch
hard eggs. Only the plastic container of applesauce was empty, the lid
out like a city block, the kind that he wanted when he was Reggie’s
curling backward over the rim. “Have y’all been messing with his meds
age, the kind that men in his neighborhood steered around corners
again? Why he so tired? It’s nine in the morning.”
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23
The woman gave him a stony look. “I don’t believe there’s been a
It took him a minute to notice the usher in his crisp white shirt and
change in his medication,” she said. “But if you want to check, you can
gold name tag, a flashlight dangling in hand and two cops at his heels.
go down to the nurse’s station.” She cleared the other trays from the
They stood in the aisle, squinting, their eyes not yet accustomed to
table and walked away.
the dark. He felt their gaze rove over him and hold a moment before
“Pop, you still hungry?” he said, shaking the man’s shoulder.
His father stirred but didn’t open his eyes. “C’mon, Pop, you need
to eat a little more, and then you can lie down.”
The man opened his eyes for a moment. A slit of gray iris struck the
turning toward the grunting couple. The employee flashed his light
on and off, on and off, as the cops approached them. Rodney’s breath
caught. He wanted to run but felt frozen. He let the frozen part take
over, knowing it was better to remain still until the couple left. He tried
light as he peered at Rodney. A chill came over him. It felt like all of
to concentrate on the silly movie, but he heard the woman protesting,
creation was looking at him through that eye. He had been seen, caught,
her shrieking pitch rising above the sound coming from the speakers.
and it was only a matter of time before he was taken whole.
“This is a mistake!” she yelled as she and her lover were shuffled past
Rodney stood up from the table and backed out of the room, trying
him. He didn’t look their way. He just waited for their voices to recede,
to escape that eye. He hurried down the hallway, ignoring Ms. Russell
focusing on his body—his feet sticking to the floor, his fingers gripping
calling after him, and slid into his car. He sped out of the parking
the hand rests, a bone in his leg aching suddenly, an itch over his ear
lot, driving fast, until he hit the last of morning traffic merging off
he wouldn’t raise an arm to scratch. He was here, and if he was here,
the expressway. He headed north, just driving, stretches of concrete
he couldn’t be there, those many nights ago, under a clear night sky,
speeding toward him. The sun dipped down, brighter now, but still
rolling over on the concrete with blood in his eye, his mouth tasting of
hidden behind the clouds. Another gray eye.
metal. When the credits began, he didn’t move. He didn’t even get up
He decided to go see a picture. He wanted to hide somewhere
when the soundtrack listing scrolled past. Only after the lights went up,
dark and closed in. But after the flick was over, he wasn’t ready
the screen went white, and the employees moved in with trash cans and
to go home, so he snuck into another. There were only a few other
brooms did he rise and stagger toward the exit. He drove home in a daze.
people in the theater this early, and he wondered what they, too,
The house was still too quiet. He turned on some music. Something
were avoiding.
loud with a hard beat that made it difficult for his mind to wander. It
A couple was making out in the right corner a few rows over. They
was still light out. He stood with the refrigerator door open, searching
clearly weren’t teenagers. A pale woman in a wrinkled blazer, a blond
for something to eat. On the bottom shelf sat a raw pot roast, red and
man with a receding, thinning hairline. Was this an affair or the bored
thick, water beading underneath the plastic wrap. He could be useful,
and joyless seeking a thrill? He tried not to watch them, but he was
he thought. He pulled out the meat and set it on the counter. He put
curious how far they would go. Their pawing wasn’t laden with the
the oven on preheat and got to work. When it was in the oven, the meat
desire of the young but the sweaty desperation of the fallen. He knew
seasoned and surrounded by peeled potatoes, he was proud of himself.
it well, could recognize it anywhere. He tried to watch the movie, a
He had turned it around, but now what? He wasn’t one for washing
silly slapstick comedy. The acting was bad, and most of the jokes were
dishes, but he could do some laundry. He went upstairs and dragged
well worn. He wanted to laugh but found he couldn’t. Even when the
the dirty clothes hampers down to the basement. He threw a load in
shiny-suited Wall Street dude fell in shit, couldn’t get up out of it, and
the washer. When he reached for the detergent, his eye caught a glint
it was all over his back, his front, smeared across his forehead and lips,
of something down on the shelf below. Buried beneath old cleaning
he could do no more than chuckle and watch the couple out of the
rags was a small bottle of dark liquor. He held it up to the light. Did he
corner of his eye, the woman then mounting the guy, the two jerking
hide this, or was this Vera’s? She never drank around him, for obvious
in succession as the score broke into song.
reasons, but he knew she enjoyed good liquor from time to time. He
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t r ac e y r o s e p e y t o n
25
slipped the bottle in his pocket and finished adding the soap to the
up and now it wasn’t. Maybe he forgot a step. As he stared at it, he did
clothes. He wanted to be mad, but wasn’t sure whom to be mad at. He
remember that Vera often used those clear roasting bags, maybe that
went upstairs to the kitchen, opened the sliding door, and stepped
was the missing piece.
into the backyard.
He heard the lock turn in the front door. A cacophony of sound rose
The yard wasn’t huge, but it did have a patio and a pool. He hated
up behind him as Vera and the boys came in the house, leaving a trail
the pool. Maintenance was a bitch and he couldn’t even swim that well.
of the day behind them, the boys immediately separating themselves
He bought it as a big fuck you after the settlement. Well, that’s not true
from shoes, jackets, book bags right there in the hallway. Vera stepped
entirely. He blew most of the settlement money, but the reality show
out of her heels and went upstairs to peel off her bra and girdle.
that he did after rehab, that’s what he used to buy this house. Sure,
he heard what people said about him back then. How they laughed
“What’s that smell?” she asked, returning to the kitchen in blue
sweats.
at him, in his face and behind his back, on television, and in grocery
“Delicious pot roast? Can’t you tell?”
stores. Idiots at the mall who’d stop him, saying, “Can’t we all just get
“You cooked?” Her eyes widened. He knew what she was thinking.
along?” Or worse, asking him to say it, like he was a sitcom star with
Work or no work, she usually had to be flat on her back with fever for
a catch phrase they couldn’t go without hearing. What better revenge
him to cook anything. “What did you do to it?” she asked, drifting over
was there than a big, stupid house with a pool? Granted, it wasn’t that
to the stove and peering down at the roast like it was a strange and foul
big. Not MC Hammer big, MTV Cribs big, or even gated-community big,
creature he had dragged into the house.
but it was larger than anything he had ever lived in. Now he was just
trying his best to hang on to it.
He could see the water level in the pool was a foot lower than it
should be. He pulled down the child-protective gate and stepped
closer to the edge. He kept the pool filled to the minimum level, just
high enough to stop the pump from running dry, but the water had
“I cooked it. What do you mean what did I do to it?”
She walked away, went back to putting the kids’ things in their
proper places. A few minutes later, he heard her on the phone in the
living room. “Yes, that’s right. Okay, thanks.”
Then she was standing next to him again, staring at the pot roast.
“Put it in the fridge. I’ll see if I can make a soup out of it tomorrow.”
evaporated and was getting dangerously close to the skimmer. He
“What about tonight?” he asked sheepishly.
unraveled the hose and turned the spigot. The pool took forever to fill
“I ordered Chinese,” she said with a toothy grin. “Would you mind
the inches he needed. He knew he had to talk with Vera about getting
rid of it, filling it in with dirt or concrete. As frugal as she was, she was
going to get it?”
When he settled into the car, he felt the bottle poke his hip. He
reluctant to let it go. The symbol meant something to her. And on the
pulled it out and stuck it underneath the passenger seat and tried to
few occasions when they invited family over for barbecues and watched
forget he had ever seen it.
the kids splash around in the water with their cousins, he knew it felt
like they had won something, stolen something they were never meant
————————————
to have. Only an ungrateful asshole would give it back.
When he popped back into the house, it was nearly dusk. He now
Later that night, after they’d eaten and put the kids to sleep, he climbed
remembered the pot roast, the smell of burnt meat filling his nose. He
into bed beside Vera. She yawned and pulled the covers up to her neck,
opened the mouth of the oven and the roast stared back at him, dry,
turning to face the wall. He listened to her breathing, but he couldn’t
all the water cooked away, the potatoes shrunken and hard. He pulled
fall asleep. Instead, he felt the air compressing, the ceiling lowering,
it out and put it on the top of the stove. He hadn’t been outside that
the streak of moonlight growing dimmer and dimmer. A tomb, it was.
long, he thought, but he had no way of knowing. The sun had been
Everything led back to that. Vera coughed. He eased over to her side of
26
a m e r i c a n s h o rt f i c t i o n
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27
the bed, pressed his body against her back, and shifted himself so she
he knew he didn’t want water’s memories, he just wanted to give his
could feel his hardness. She didn’t respond. He grazed his hands over
up, have them disappear like those people on soap operas who get
her body, kissing her neck. Her fingers reached out and grabbed ahold
amnesia like most folks get the flu. He wanted amnesia for himself, for
of his, tightening around his hand. “Hon, I’m really tired,” she said.
others. Isn’t that a baptism? The washing away of sins. That whatever
He sighed and pulled away from her. He wanted to say something
happened before is no longer.
more, something that would make her see that he needed her right
He turned the bottle upside down, felt the warm medicinal liquid
then. That her arms, her kisses, might be the only thing that would
ripping down his throat, searing his chest. A baptism is all I need. He
keep his thoughts from returning to that shiny bottle outside in the car,
stepped down so his feet were on the pool floor, the water rising up
underneath the seat. But she had saved his life so many times already,
to his thighs. Make me clean. Make me new. He drifted toward the
did he have any right to ask her to do it again? Besides, he knew she
deep, darker end of the pool and the water climbed higher and higher.
was tired. Not just in her body, but in all the other parts, too. How long
He lowered himself into it, first his shoulders, then his head. Just a
before she washed her hands of him altogether?
moment now, and then one moment more. When he came up, it would
He crept downstairs and out to the car, where he retrieved the bottle
and put it into his jacket pocket. He returned to the house and wandered
into the backyard. He kept the overhead lights off but turned the pool
lights on. Most of the bulbs were blown, but two were still working, and
they caused the water to glow in this way he found mesmerizing. He
removed his flip-flops and rolled his pants up to his knees. He stepped
down into the shallow end and sat at the edge, dipping his feet into
the water. It felt cold at first, and he realized he hadn’t brought a towel
or anything.
He pulled the bottle from his jacket and set it in his lap. It gleamed
in the dim light. He twisted off the cap and put his nose to it. The
familiar smell rushed inside him. It had been almost two years since
he had been this close to it. He poured some out on the pavement. “For
the brothers who ain’t here,” he muttered. When he was a young man,
sharing a bottle and shooting the shit with his father and the rest of the
old heads, he found this ritual upsetting—the waste of good hooch on
pavement that couldn’t enjoy it nor put a few dollars in on the next—but
once he got older, he understood, observed it religiously, even when
he was drinking alone.
His thoughts returned to the morning, the moments in the convenience-store parking lot and the face of the man he saw in the paper.
He poured out a little more liquor before taking a long deep swig. He
stared at the water. He did a talk show once where he heard someone
say water is always remembering, always trying to get back to itself.
It was funny to think of water with memories. “Can we trade?” But
all be different.
8/26/2019
Eight rules for writing historical short stories – The Writer
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Eight rules for writing historical
short stories
What one writer learned from a decade of trying to write historical short
fiction.
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The idea, I suppose, first came to me 13 years
ago, as I was driving across the country, touring
for my first book – a set of linked short stories
that my publisher presented as a novel.
I was moving through Texas, nearly a thousand
miles of pavement churning beneath the wheels
of my rental car, when I began to process the
lessons of a 36-city book tour. My book, The
Australia Stories, was based in part on my own
life. I’d lived in Australia. While there I’d fallen
in love with a girl, the Australian
culture
and
their laidback way of viewing life. It was,We
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Eight rules for writing historical short stories – The Writer
Somewhere around San Antonio, where the I-10 began to cut north, I had the notion that,
for my next book – my next set of books, really – I wanted the fiction to be based in history.
In short, I wanted my next efforts to have the appeal of both fiction and nonfiction.
By then I was aware of a softly growing trend in literary short fiction, authors who were
taking on historical research for short stories. Research had always been a component of
historical novels. In Ragtime, the author E.L. Doctorow presented so vivid a picture of preWWI New York that some reviewers referred to it as “documentary fiction.”
In Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden presented the first-person account of a young woman
living in midcentury Kyoto with such authority many reviewers wondered how a male
American writer could so effectively cross gender and cultural divides.
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Works such as these not only required a tremendous level of narrative skill but also
significant research abilities. By 2003, a small group of literary writers were consciously
trying to incorporate elements of the research-based historical novel into the short story.
At the forefront of this movement was Andrea Barrett, author of the collection Ship Fever
that presented stories largely set in the 18th and 19th centuries. The title effort in this
collection relates the experience of Lauchlin Grant, a Canadian doctor who ministers to
Irish immigrants afflicted with typhus during the great famine of the 1840s. The New York
Times praised the collection for its “considerable research” and stated that its “overall effect
is quietly dazzling.” Later that year, the book won the 1996 National Book Award for Fiction,
beating out such luminaries as Steven Millhauser and Ron Hansen.
From there, a small literary movement was started.
Barrett was soon joined by other writers who consciously mixed heavy long-form research
with the concision and directness of a short story. Jim Shepard, a writer primarily known for
his short fiction, produced a series of research-inspired stories, the best-known of which is
“Love and Hydrogen.” Anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2002 and later the
title story in one of Shepard’s collections, “Love and Hydrogen” presents a love story
between two crewmembers of the Hindenburg on its final, tragic voyage, the narrative
drama unfolding amidst a historically accurate and realistic setting. Ethan Rutherford
published The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, with its title effort a fictional retelling of
the Confederate soldiers who pilot the first military submarine, the H.L. Hunley, during the
Civil War. Ron Rash set his lead story in the collection Something Rich and Strange during
the Great Depression.
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Eight rules for writing historical short stories – The Writer
From these stories – and many others – literary fiction had taken on new depths, creating a
brand-new sub-genre: the deeply researched historical short story.
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EIGHT RULES FOR
WRITING HISTORICAL
SHORT STORIES
Setting out to write my own historical short
fiction in the years following my rental-car
revelation, I wrote a series of short stories set at
Hollywood studios as the Golden Age of
animation came to an end.
Along the way, I’ve discovered many things about research, about art, about the desire to
employ fiction in such a way that readers have the lovely sense that they are standing
shoulder-to-shoulder with great screen artists of the past.
The finished stories, which are a book-length collection I’ve just turned in to my literary
agent, have individually started to appear in journals. Here’s what I’ve learned from a
decade of trying to write historical short stories: my eight rules of historical fiction.
1. Small details matter more than large ones.
The art of fiction is, in large part, the art of small-scale illusions. When I first lowered
myself, by those soft ropes of early ambition, down into my project, I believed that I would
largely need to know how the mechanics of animation worked in the 1940s and 1950s, the
tasks of an inbetweener or an inker. Though this information was useful, it also wasn’t the
dreamy material out of which compelling stories are constructed. Far more important were
the small details: the weight of a pencil in an animator’s hand when held the right way, how
images ghost up through a stack of drawings when pegged onto a lightboard, the sound a
moviola makes when a reel of new film stutters across its screen. It was those observations
– the small daily details – that I most needed to build a believable historical setting inside
fiction.
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2. Period characters require
more than period clothes.
Similarly, just as the exterior world requires
research to establish believable, small details,
the interior world of a character requires
research as well. Good historical stories promise
to not only transport readers to a historicalWe use cookies on our site to personalize
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heart
andsocial
aspirations)
of a character.
For me,

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Eight rules for writing historical short stories – The Writer
some of the large questions here had to do with
interior perceptions: How did men and women
in the 1940s think about romance? How were
their professional desires different than for
artists today? What language might they use in
their thought life? The answers, in large part,
came from personal writing: letters and diaries.
Yes, it might be awkward to ask a living person
to borrow his or her diary. But many people –
particularly those who have achieved some
modicum of career fame – often leave their
letters and diaries to university archives and
special collections; such archives are generally
open to the public.
With the help of friends and the Internet, I was
able to find letter or diary collections from about
10 artists working in animation in the 1940s and
1950s. More than any other source, these
documents presented the thought language and
inner aspirations of the men and women who
worked for animation studios. Though none of
these individuals became a character in my
stories, collectively, their writing helped me
understand how the inner life of an artist working in the middle of the 20th century is
different than that of an artist today.
3. Use common names, not technical ones.
America is a cinematic culture. As a people, we are familiar with the conventions of film,
perhaps more so than those of fiction. For a film, an audience is largely a collective witness
to events that unfold on the screen. But in fiction, readers enter the world, almost always,
through the perceptions of a central character (or perhaps a small group of characters). With
this, fiction is the more intimate art, the one in which the perceptions of an individual
character are the means by which readers engage the narrative world. To deepen this
connection between the reader and the protagonist, it is almost always helpful for the
narrative prose to present the common names – not the technical ones – for elements in
the story. For example, animators in the 1940s would never call a studio screening room a
screening room, they would call it a sweatbox, as that was where animators sweated as their
work was reviewed on screen. Likewise, animators – at least on the Disney lot – would
never call the Ink & Paint Department the Ink & Paint Department: they would call it the
Nunnery, as it was primarily staffed with women. These “insider” terms not only help
solidify a strong reader connection with the perspective of the protagonist, they also
suggest that the fiction is offering a rare and authentic glimpse into a foreign world, one
incased in the past.
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Eight rules for writing historical short stories – The Writer
4. Immerse yourself in the culture.
To write historical fiction of any kind – short stories or not – you need to be able to close
your eyes and have the past blaze up around you.
When I first started writing in a historical mode, I didn’t understand the large investment it
would take to inhabit the past. I started with Sears’ catalogs from the 1940s and 1950s, as
well as a book about American culture during WWII. It soon became apparent that these
resources were utterly inadequate to help me inhabit, with a storyteller’s precision, an era
that ended decades ago. The basic question aspiring historical writers need to ask is this:
What documents of the era exist to demonstrate daily life in a chosen time period? Note: I
said of the era, meaning created during the era. In ways, I had a little bit of luck fall my way.
My chosen time period was a filmic one, also one in which publishing houses produced
endless books. For about two years, I restricted most of my visual media to films of the
1940s and 1950s, as well as most of my reading to books of the same period. This helped me
to understand the visual and cultural nuances of the era: bicarbonate with soda, a popular
cure for a hangover; red caps, train porters with crimson caps, easily spotted to help with
luggage; the DuMont network, an early TV network soon put out of business by NBC and
CBS. As I read, as I viewed, I made copious notes about the details of mid-century American
life, with each noted detail attached to a specific year.
5. Find experts.
As a writer and an English professor, I am an introvert by nature. I’m most comfortable at
my laptop or reclining in a club chair, book in hand, dog resting at my feet. So my first
attempts to understand the techniques of animation were through books – not a bad start,
but also one that didn’t yield the best results. I started with field overview texts, which were
informative, but not the best place to find an intimate understanding of an animation
studio. Next, I found stacks of published interviews with early feature animators. These –
especially as they were cast in the voice of animators – were much more useful. If pushed, I
likely could’ve crafted stories set in a production studio just based on these interviews
alone. But by far the most useful resource was people – experts I could call whenever I had a
question. Though I’d read a textbook on effects animation in the 1950s, I didn’t truly
understand the nuances of the field until I spent a day with Dorse Lanpher, an effects
animator who worked at the studios in the 1950s. Again, I was lucky, because I was able to
meet men and women who lived in my chosen era. But even if I was writing about ship
building in the 1850s or Colonial American life, I suspect making contact with subject
experts would be the best way to quickly understand the nuances of a historic culture.
6. Balance details and drama.
Hemingway once compared a successful story to an iceberg: The visual peaks of an iceberg
are supported by a much larger structure beneath the surface, much in the same way that
the details in the text are supported by a vast amount of research and knowledge that
remains, largely, invisible to the reader. This, I believe, is particularly true for the writer of
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maybe even 95 percent – of what I’ve learned about
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Eight rules for writing historical short stories – The Writer
California and studio culture in the 1940s and 1950s never shows up in my fiction. But that
information was essential for me to confidently create characters that occupied a time
before I was born.
One skill of historical fiction, then, is knowing which details to include, observations that
will evoke time and place without slowing down the reader. A good set of details, such as
“She emerged from a Fourth Avenue cab in a pillbox hat and a hemline that nearly exposed
her knees,” can set a scene far better than a long list of weaker details. Likewise, a line of
dialogue, like “How’s it going, pally?,” says big city America in 1945 as clearly as “What’s
the rub, buddy?” says that same location 10 years later.
7. Historical facts are not the storyline.
Initially, I tried to make stories about historical narratives. This is something that, having
written previous books of fiction, I should’ve known would be, at least for me, a disaster.
History, I soon learned, was the backdrop for drama – or perhaps the intensifier of drama –
but it is not the drama itself. For example, in one of my early stories, set during the
animation strike of 1941, I initially wanted to place the historical record as the centerpiece
event in the narrative – the battles between management and labor, the stump speeches for
the press as picketing exploded outside studio gates. Yet that wasn’t a story that would
ultimately satisfy readers, largely because it didn’t yet have a character driven by desire,
held back by fear. The story that eventually emerged from this research was that of a young
father, a man who once wanted to be a fine artist, who sought work in commercial
animation to provide for his wife and son, a man whose troubles deepened when fellow
animators bullied him into participating in a long strike.
History is the context out of which fiction grows. Fiction is the examination of the human
heart as individual characters move through scenes that test – or perhaps change – their
souls. History is just the backdrop.
8. Don’t let research overwhelm the story.
Though a 300-page novel has the luxury of easing into the drama, Steinbeck-style, with a
lengthy description of place, short stories need to find ways to establish setting quickly,
often on the same page that they introduce character and conflict.
Jim Shepard’s master story, “Love and Hydrogen,” for example, offers one brief paragraph to
establish the historical period and the setting:
Imagine five or six city blocks could lift, with a bump, and float away. The impression of the 804foot-long Hindenburg gives on the ground is that of an airship built by giants and excessive even
to their purposes. The fabric hull and mainframe curve upward sixteen stories high.
After this, the story is on to character development, immediately introducing the two
lovers:
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Eight rules for writing historical short stories – The Writer
Meinert and Gnüss are out on the gangway ladder down to the starboard #1 engine car. They’re
helping out the machinists, in a pinch. Gnüss is afraid of heights, which amuses everyone. It’s an
open aluminum ladder with a single handrail extending eighteen feet down into the car’s
hatchway. They’re at 2,000 feet. The clouds below stand by and dissipate. It’s early in a mild
May in 1937.
Like most writers, Shepard knows that a short story needs to focus in on character, plot and
conflict early in its development, likely on the first page – even when a writer is also
enamored by his or her research.
Historical fiction never comes quickly. Often it’s a labor of love. For me it was an
opportunity to build a personal time machine, to sink myself down into a world I’d always
wanted to inhabit. I first had the idea to write these stories in 2003. At that time I thought
that, with work, I could finish them in a couple years, maybe three. Though I started writing
in 2004, my early efforts were all junk, mostly because I hadn’t done enough research to
write with confidence about my subject. In 2005, to better teach myself about this world, I
decided that I would write some nonfiction articles about the history of animation, articles
that eventually gave rise to one nonfiction book, with a second on the way. Five years later,
I finally had enough information to write the stories I wanted to write.
During these years, I wasn’t idle as a writer: I published another book of fiction; I published
three textbooks; I edited a few anthologies. I always think it’s a good idea for writers to keep
busy. But I knew this: I wanted my animation stories to ring true, both in their historical
and character details. Each time I browsed through our local Barnes & Noble, I was
reminded of the thousands and thousands of books that existed in the world; I wanted my
books, even if they took years to complete, to distinguish themselves as among the best.
This seemed particularly important in less-popular and more artful genres, such as the
short story.
The meticulously researched short story is a relatively new form, a growing trend. Often,
authors see their efforts in this field as a large gesture toward art, one that occasionally
involves spectacle – a means by which they say: I will take you, my audience, to a
miraculous world, but to do this, you will need to agree to my terms, that the drama will be
tied to sentences, that characters will be defined in words and the wonders will exist in the
traditional way, with short stories that muscle across the page.
Todd James Pierce is the author of a half dozen books, most recently Three Years in
Wonderland. His short story collection, Newsworld, won the 2006 Drue Heinz Literature Prize,
and he is the co-author of Behind the Short Story, a creative writing textbook. Web:
toddjamespierce.com (http://www.toddjamespierce.com)
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Eight rules for writing historical short stories – The Writer
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