THE ART OF THE SHORT STORY by NEIL BOYD
I am old now but in my final years I’d like to pass on to prospective authors, young and old, a few things I’ve learned in a lifetime of writing.
When I was young, publishers told me to forget about writing short stories. Even Graham Green’s, they said, are no longer selling.
If so, this is a tragedy. Many great writers cut their teeth on such stories. To name a few: Chekhov, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf. Tolstoy’s are among his best.
I advise budding writers to begin with short stories. The Japanese are famed for expressing a complete experience in a Haiku of seventeen syllables. Great authors aim to put a lifetime’s experience in a short story.
These stories teach brevity and simplicity. Words have a life of their own. The ideal story is one from which you can’t remove a single word without “hurting” it, to some degree.
I’ve never published books of short stories but I write them to keep my prose fit and lean. I give an example below. In my next contribution I will discuss this literary form in more detail through the work of Hemingway.
A LOVING DAUGHTER
Selina Russell had one ambition: to find her father and kill him. It took her a while but she finally made it.
Her mother, Christine, was only seventeen when Selina was born. The father was a G.I. in England, preparing for D-Day.
Selina was born two days before he was drafted. A case of touch and go. He put his name on the birth certificate. Even chose her name.
He promised Christine he’d return when peace came and marry her. He never did.
Christine never got over it. She had two live-in boy-friends who beat her up. When Selina was twelve, the second of them tried to rape her. In anticipation, she hid a pair of tailor's scissors in her belt.
One night, when he approached her drunk, she dug them in his hand but they didn't pin it to the table as she intended. In retaliation, he beat her unconscious, then cut off her hair.
Her mother came home to find him pouring gasoline over her. When Christine tried to stop him he knocked out her front teeth and beat her unconscious. Then he struck a match.
With third-degree burns to half her body, Selina had to wear a surgical body suit for three years.
The pain of her skin grafts, the fact that she could never wear a bathing suit or a short-sleeved blouse or expose her body to prospective boyfriends she blamed mostly on her father. If he hadn't lied to her mother, she wouldn't have been born in the first place.
Being a fighter, she performed well at school. Afterwards, she trained as a nurse, winning the Gold Medal in her final year.
Her mother didn't do so well. She went on the game to feed her drug habit. One night, she went missing. Selina, who knew her regular haunts, found her body at 3 one morning in a skip behind a nightclub. She had bruises all over and bled to death from a ruptured spleen.
Selina found her mother's few effects in an old carrier bag under her bed. There was her early diary and some love letters from when she first met Private Mark Pietropauli, bound in pink ribbon. There was a picture of Selina, a new-born, in the arms of a dark handsome G.I. It made her feel contaminated by his touch, especially as his smile was like her own.
He had written on the picture: "Chrissy, Take care of my little sweetheart while I'm away."
He left her a note that spoke of his "unswerving love". Soon as the war ended, he’d come back and take her home to his folks in Texas.
He never did. Was he alive or dead?
Three years passed before a letter arrived. He apologised for the delay. He was back in the States where he'd fallen in love with an American girl who was carrying his child. They were married now. He begged Chrissy to forget him, find someone else and settle down. He sent her a cheque for a thousand dollars in atonement. He apologised from his heart for all the pain he had caused and promised he'd pray for her and Selina every day of his life.
Selina had always been upset that her birth certificate showed she had a traitor for a father. On her 40th birthday, she swore over her mother's grave that she would kill this man who was responsible for her death.
It took her ten years to find him. The U.S. authorities said they were deluged with similar requests and their war-time records were in disarray. They had knowledge of several Pietropaulis, none of whom was called Mark.
Eventually, through an agency called ‘Trace’, Selina was told of a 70-year-old ex-G.I. Marcellino Pietropauli now living in Florida, precise address unknown. The date of his birth matched a reference in her mother’s wartime diary.
So the bastard was living in luxury in the Sunshine State.
She had no clear idea how she was going to kill him. With scissors or a baseball bat, if need be, whatever the consequences.
In Florida, she couldn't find him in the phone book. She sent a copy of her birth certificate to the Department of Motor Vehicles. They told her no one of her father’s name had a current licence. She left her hotel number, hoping they would come up with something and they did.
A Mark Pietropauli had been licensed to drive a Chrysler until five years ago. Since she had proof she was his daughter, they gave her his last address and phone number.
Was he alive or dead? she wondered. If dead, was that good or bad? Selina had only wanted him alive so she could kill him.
She telephoned.
"Mark here."
She gulped. "Pietropauli?"
"Who else?"
"This is Selina."
There was a long pause. "My Selina?"
That "my" made her want to scream.
She said: "I'd like to see you."
"Wouldn't be wise, sweetheart. Your mother –"
"She's dead."
"Oh no!" It sounded like a moan of pain.
The cab driver said, "You sure you wanna go to this place, lady?"
She looked around her. Her father was not living in an expensive condominium overlooking the sea. Served him right.
She had bought a pink handgun as easily as a jar of jam in an English supermarket. The storeowner had even given her a free lesson on how to use it.
“Lots of women pick that little beauty,” he said.
Fingering it in her pocket, she prayed Mark’s wife and kid (or kids) wouldn’t be around. And afterwards? She didn’t think or care.
She rang the bell.
From afar, a quavery voice called out, "The door's open."
She thought, The shit can’t even bother to come to the door.
As she went along a short dark smelly corridor, her hatred rose to new heights. At least there was no sound of a wife or children. If he had any, he must have sent them away.
She paused a moment to stop her body shaking before entering a room dimly lit and with bars on the window like a jail.
He was seated with a dressing gown on. He didn't even bother get up. Then she saw he was in a wheelchair.
"Now you know why ... "
She had imagined him still twenty, sturdy and handsome, when he was bald with a straggly beard and – as her eyes adapted to the gloom – with no legs.
"Kiss, sweetheart? Shake? Don't blame you."
On the wall was a grainy blown-up picture of him in uniform holding her as a child. Another showed him in about his forties, standing upright.
She gestured to where his legs should be. "A motor accident?"
"No, sweetheart. Lost 'em in the war."
"Vietnam?”
He smiled. "D-Day. World War II. Trod on a mine first day."
"But that picture –? And you drove a car."
"I can't wear prostheses no more."
"I don't understand."
"Why I stopped writing?”
She nodded.
“Chrissy, your ma, was an angel and a real good-looker.” He cleared his throat. “She deserved better."
"You never married?"
"Never did."
"No other children?"
"I lied. You were the one and only, sweetheart."
The heavy burden of hate she had carried over the years lifted. She hurried to embrace this beautiful self-sacrificing man.
She picked her father up like a child. Legs must be very heavy things, she thought, if he's so light.
“If you only knew,” he sighed, “how much I missed you all those years. You're just like your mother, sweetheart."
This from the man she'd wanted to kill.
And kill him she did. But not with a gun. He had cancer of the spine and diamorphine no longer eased the pain.
She nursed him round the clock for three months. Such sad sweet days.
Then, one day: "I can't take no more, sweetheart."
He begged her to do him the kindest favour and increase the dose.
It broke her heart, but how could she refuse? She was his loving daughter.