Excerpt: “Fictions” - Winner of the CWA Book of the Year Award for Traditional Fiction

By Ashley Honeysett

I wrote one that was based on me and my mom and my grandmother, and in real life my mom hated my grandmother and eventually cut ties with her. In the story, we all go shopping at an outlet mall in Indiana, in Michigan City, which is the site of a nuclear power plant. So of course that’s mentioned in the story, which has lots of foreboding imagery—the reactor looming over the parking lot, a store full of glassware where something is just bound to get broken, and most of all, a bad forecast, a blizzard warning, the first flakes of snow falling in the first scene and gathering force as the tension mounts. We abandon my grandmother at the end, in the blizzard. I mean, she’s fine. She’s sitting with a concerned man in a warm truck that has a snow plow attached to the front.

            The first draft, which I brought in to workshop, ends with my mom driving home and me in the passenger seat—I’m like ten or so, and I don’t have any say in what’s going on—and it’s dark and we’re driving into the storm and all you can see is the headlit snow flying at the windshield.

            The instructor said it was a good story and I should keep writing about my mom and grandma, that there was a lot of material there and I shouldn’t be worried about repeating myself. But he also said the whole time he was reading he was thinking, I hope she doesn’t end on the snow.

            I thought about what he might mean. Abandoning an old woman a hundred miles from home with no warning when you were all supposed to be out on a girls’ shopping trip together is a big deal. Snow is a soft, blurry material. Does it blunt the force of the story?

            What’s the story called? the instructor said.

            I said I was thinking of calling it “Albedo,” which is the word for the measurement of light reflected off of snow. He said something like, That’s an interesting piece of trivia. Our fact for the day. Some damning thing. Then he moved on to the next person’s story.

My mom told me that her mother said terrible stuff to her all the time when she was little. Like what? I asked.

            Like I wish you’d never been born, she said. Can you imagine saying something like that to your kid? I would never say anything like that to you.

            But I was a kid myself and didn’t really wonder what kinds of things I might think or feel if I were a parent someday.

I wanted to write a story about what it was like when I was a kid, and they had all that history behind them, but all I saw was how my grandma was around all the time and Mom was always angry at her.

In the story, although I don’t know where Michigan City is and I don’t know what an outlet mall is, I’m excited to go because my mom is excited. And then she feels obligated to invite Grandma, and after she invites her she’s not excited anymore.

In the story, Grandma does the kinds of things she really would have done. For example, in the store that sells glassware, she knocks something onto the floor and breaks it.

She has been going around the store, flicking everything with her fingernail to see what sound it made. I am bored at the outlet mall and want to do what she is doing, but instead I borrow a phrase from my mom and say, Look with your eyes, not with your hands.

My real-life grandmother was clumsy and scattered. Every time something happened, my mom made it into a story. Even when I was there, I can only remember my mom’s version. Like the time Grandma used the bathroom at our house, locked the door while she was in there, and then couldn’t unlock it. My dad had to take the door off the hinges. This kind of thing enraged my mother. In the early drafts of the story, I tried to explain my mother’s anger by showing that Grandma was really malicious, or at least cunning. I guess I laid it on pretty thick. After that, one of the guys from the workshop praised every story I wrote as a leap forward. Usually your stories have a clear villain, he would say, like the evil grandmother.

            In the revision I dialed it back. I simply showed the way they acted around each other and showed myself watching it. Grandma sets Mom off right away and we almost don’t go at all, and then Mom decides to be stoic and make the hour’s drive even though the weather forecast has gotten worse. At the end of the story, Grandma locks herself in the car. Mom and I are locked out. The mall has closed early because of bad weather. We have to walk 20 minutes through the drifts to a gas station to call for help.

Mom always said she didn’t have sympathy for people who repeated cycles of abuse and poverty. I could see that my family life wasn’t normal, she said. I saw normal families on TV.

            We were a normal family. She took good care of me in the way that kids find stifling. In the story, I commit a tiny act of rebellion, leaving my winter gloves on the table at our house before we start the trip. Now, walking through the snow to get help, my mom takes off her own gloves and puts them on me. She is wearing high-heeled boots and a long skirt that drags in the snow. Her heavy shopping bags are dragging, too. When my grandmother’s behavior reaches its climax and we find ourselves locked out in a blizzard, all the anger goes out of my mother. I show her taking care of me. I show her injured, and sad.

The writing instructor was from Northern Ireland and had probably never experienced the kind of snow I’m talking about. When the snow is rushing at you like that, if your mom is the one who has to worry about driving in it and you can just sit there and look through the windshield, it’s thrilling. It’s like the second before the Millennium Falcon goes into hyperdrive. That’s part of why I wrote the story, because I wanted to write about that snow.

            The locksmith has come and jimmied open the door and found Grandma in a swoon, which the story implies she’s faking—OK, I guess some evil grandmother stuff survived all the revisions. Grandma’s getting warm in the locksmith’s truck and Mom just drives away. Mom’s bare foot in its wet nylon stocking is on the pedal, and as I was working on the scene I Googled frostbite symptoms so I could drop some dire hints for the reader. I ended up trying to just show that it doesn’t matter if my grandma is objectively evil or not, my mom is making a choice and my loyalties are with her. It doesn’t end with the snow anymore, even though I’d been told you’re supposed to end a story with an image. It just ends with a statement—that my mom knew so many things I didn’t.