Mika Yamamoto | October/November 2016

Brian Evenson

EXCERPT

Brian Evenson is both an academician and an author of over a dozen books of fiction, including Immobility (2012) and Windeye (2012). He is the recipient of many awards, including the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009 (Last Days), The International Horror Guild Award (Wavering Knife), three O. Henry Prizes, and an NEA Fellowship. He’s been a finalist for a Shirley Jackson Award, an Edgar Allan Poe Award, and the World Fantasy Award. Last Days and Fugue State were both on Time Out New York’s top books of 2009. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Slovenian. His newest book is A Collapse of Horses (2016).

He also writes nonfiction and translates work from French to English. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, and others. Evenson teaches at CalArts.

Mika Yamamoto: I was lucky enough to be in a craft session you taught at the Juniper Institute titled, “Characters and People.” What you said about character altered my thinking on the topic in a way that was liberating to me so I’m hoping we can continue that conversation here.

Brian Evenson: I hope I can replicate that experience! But, yes, character is something I think about a lot as a creative writing teacher. It’s something that people think is essential to writing—for better or for worse—so rarely does a class session go by without somebody bringing it up.

Yamamoto: I’ve always heard that character is the most important element in fiction.

Evenson: I don’t think that character is always the most important thing in fiction.

I think it is in certain kinds of fiction. Sometimes it’s essential to have realistic and lifelike characters. However, even realistic and lifelike characters are constructed of words. So the thing that you need to never forget is that, when it comes to fiction, everything is made out of words. What you end up with serves as a catalyst—it’s a series of words that interacts with the mind of the reader to create something that feels like a real person to them.

Yamamoto: What purpose can character serve in fiction?

Evenson: In addition to fiction workshop, I also teach a class on form and theory, a class on the history of how fiction developed. It’s really interesting to see how the way in which people think and talk about character and fiction changes over time. For example, in 1911, Arnold Bennett said in an introduction to one of his novels that it’s “an absolute rule that the principle character of a novel must not be unsympathetic.”

In Virginia Woolf’s 1924 essay, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” she talks about how all fiction begins with an old lady in the corner opposite of you when you are riding in a train and you start to speculate about the life of that person and make these stories based on little cues that life gives you.

As you move forward in time, you have people who feel a lot of dissatisfaction with those sorts of views. You get someone like William H. Gass in the late ’60s talking about character as a noise, a proper name, a system of ideas. He also talks about character in a way that suggests that a character doesn’t even have to be a person: it can be a place or a thing. It can be anything that organizes the ideas of fiction. The usefulness of this is that it allows you to open up what you thought you knew and see it in a different way. It also makes you pay as much attention to other parts of the fiction as you’ve been paying to character.

When you get to the New Novel—Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and others—they are just very resistant to the idea of character in general. There is the idea that character is dead, that fiction is no longer interested in depicting character, or that if we are going to express character it should be truer to the more fragmentary nature of our existences... that there’s something false about the way in which we decide that we’re consistent and developed humans.

It’s interesting for me when I start to read over these ideas because I realize that everyone has strong opinions about character and these opinions are all valid within certain contexts. I do think that the novel about character (in which character is primary) is never going to die. I still read a lot of books because I’m interested in the characters. I think everybody does to some degree or another.

However, we do have all these other possibilities. There are novels that minimize character, novels that present character in a strange way, and metafictional novels that start to show their own constructedness. So to answer the question—character can serve any purpose.

I think the question the young writers of the next generation have to answer is: What else can characters do? What can characters do that hasn’t been done before? And even as you go back and do some of the same things people before you did, you figure out new things to do as well... you ask yourself, “How does character speak to me in a way that it might not have spoken to writers before?”

Yamamoto: You mentioned Arnold Bennett’s quote about the likeability of character being a necessity. How relevant is that rule today?

Evenson: For a long time people thought that likability was an important thing—even a primary thing in some ways. This has changed as time has gone on.

“[T]he whole modern tendency of realistic fiction is against oddness in a prominent character...” there is so much contemporary fiction that is not in agreement with that. Although sympathetic characters can be very productive, people are equally fascinated by characters that are not sympathetic: characters that are difficult, complicated, or anti-heroic in some way. I think that likeability in character is a great thing for certain kinds of characters in certain kinds of books, but it’s not an absolute rule. It’s something that a lot of contemporary writers are going against to positive effect.

Yamamoto: I’d like to hear your thoughts on two other common ideas people consider when discussing character. What do you think about believability and consistency? Let’s start with believability.

Evenson: Sometimes there are good reasons to have characters be believable—for example when you are writing something that means to create a certain reality. But I also think that believability is a very strange term. Things are always believable in a certain context. Things that are believable in one context are not always believable in another context or genre. Believability has to be taken with a grain of salt and thought about in terms of the specifics.

Yamamoto: Should characters be consistent?

Evenson: Consistency is a great thing in that it makes you think that a collection of words is coming together to make a person. If you want to think of words as people, consistency is a really interesting thing.

On the other hand, we are not all that consistent as people. A number of writers have pointed this out. For instance, Natalie Sarraute thinks about characterization as fragmented. If you are really trying to represent life, things are much more disconnected than most fiction presents life as being. I think even someone like Anaïs Nin feels the same way; consistency of character ignores the fragmented nature of experience.

So again, it’s a question of what you are trying to do with your fiction. There is a relationship to character and life, but ultimately there is a tension between whether characters have a kind of life or whether they are words on a page. Also, as writers, how do we keep both those ideas in mind in a way such that we can make the most of what we’re trying to do with a particular story or a particular novel?

Yamamoto: Writers often talk about characters as if they were real people who “took over” the writing. Do you think this is a real phenomenon?

Evenson: I have experienced this as well. If you create a kind of voice or a personality, then you can begin to feel and guess what that personality would do. It’s a kind of induced, safe schizophrenia. A good portion of the writing process is subconscious and your subconscious mind is arranging things before you see them on the page, so you do feel like a character is taking over at certain points. I think that is more a function of your mind anticipating things. You’ve created a constellation of words that have a living quality and they end up feeling like they have a life of their own. You can view that in two ways. You can think of it as making a machine that runs itself or you can believe there is an essential life to the characters you’ve created. I don’t know what the right answer is or if there is one. I think it’s probably good to believe whatever will encourage you to write.

One of the reasons a lot of us read fiction—including me—is that we respond to characters in fiction as if we are responding to people. We can have intense reactions to them. We can enjoy them as people. We can be appalled by what they do. But at the same time, when we have those reactions with people, there’s always a body that we can interact with.

With characters, that’s never there. It’s like hearing a lot about a person and never meeting them. If you never meet someone, it’s a little hard to verify what’s going on. You have to trust that a person who is telling you about a character is telling you the truth. You imagine this person that actually doesn’t exist but whom you can imagine being alive in some way.

Yamamoto: You gave a great example of this in the craft session at Juniper. You said that if you say about a real person named Michael, “Michael would definitely come over in the middle of the night if I told him I needed him,” you can verify it by calling Michael in the middle of the night and see if he comes or not. However, you might also say the same thing about a character named Michael—but there is no way to verify if the character Michael would come if you needed him because you could wait all night and he would never show up.

Evenson: That’s right. We can make predictions about our friends and what they would do in given circumstances. We know that someone might show up and help you on short notice. You know someone else who wouldn’t. There are also people whom you don’t know well enough to know the answer to whether they would or wouldn’t. We make the same assumptions about characters according to what we are told about them, but we can never verify those assumptions except artificially within the world of the fiction.

Yamamoto: What is the relationship between life and fiction?

Evenson: Fiction starts as speculation. Writers don’t go to the obvious speculation. Good fiction is not trying to imitate life or trying to reproduce what’s going on in life. Life serves as a catalyst, as a provocation that leads to something fictional that’s interesting. It creates a new world that has its own constraints, its own rules, and its own system that can really be interesting in and of itself. It can also come back and teach us something about life. There is a constantly circulating movement in the interchange between life and fiction.

Yamamoto: Would you say this is the point of fiction?

Evenson: I don’t know if it’s the point, but it’s one of the chief characteristics of fiction for me. Fiction is able to take life and transform it and make it into something else. By so doing, it allows us to see things about life that we wouldn’t have been able to see before.

Yamamoto: Is there anything fictional characters should do?

Evenson: It used to be that people had a strong opinion on what a character should do. In the 19^th century, it was very clear what was wanted of character.

Today, however, this is not the case. There are all sorts of ways to talk about character. We live in an age where possibility outweighs conformity and people are just interested in seeing what can be done. You can choose to write differently and still be read. I think it’s great for us to be living in a time when there’s such freedom.

Yamamoto: What should a writer be committed to, if not to depicting reality?

Evenson: Your first commitment has to be to the experience of the reader. Since fiction is something that’s created by words on a page, the way in which you express your commitment to the reader is by using the words on the page to make an effective experience that someone else can have. This may mean that it’s enjoyable, stressful, intense, or something else. It depends on what kind of writer you are. I see writing as intensive: something that you experience, something that has an effect on you, something that changes you. In that sense, it’s something that you undergo. It’s a different kind of experience than the experience of living, but one that still has relevance to the experience of living.

Yamamoto: What do you teach about character in your creative writing classes?

Evenson: So much of what gets taught in terms of character in creative writing classes is based on the stories and the novels of the 1950s when a certain kind of realism was prominent or on later works that accept the premise of such fiction as a given. Some of it this is still relevant today and it’s certainly relevant to certain kinds of work. It is not, however, relevant to everything—nor is it relevant to a lot of contemporary work.

My goal is to open things up as much as possible. This is because it’s most useful for writers to have as many tools as possible. If you have every tool available at your disposal, then you can make a choice of what tool to use. There’s no right or wrong to that choice except in the context of that individual work... and then there really is a right or a wrong in terms of what works or what doesn’t work. But it’s always context specific.

In the workshop, I always teach literature alongside reading student’s stories. I try to teach a mix: some work that’s realistic, some work that is experimental/innovative, some work that is very committed to presenting character as if it’s human, other work that plays with that/interrupts it. I try to show people the possibility of what is there and show them what’s available.

Hopefully, what you go away with is a large repertoire of things that you can do with character. Rather than putting someone in a position where they say, “Oh, I hate realistic fiction. That’s just not what fiction should do,” or, “I hate innovative fiction because it just doesn’t have any real characters,” I try to get them to think, “What do these kinds of stories have? What do they offer that others can’t?”

A lot of students come to workshop with preconceived notions about everything that fiction is or isn’t. You’ll have people who feel very strongly that they know what character is and what you have to do. They say, “Here’s what you do. You have a paragraph describing the character early on. You have a physical description....” There’s a whole series of things that people get in their heads about what they think they have to do.

Yamamoto: Can you give us an example?

Evenson: Names. For example, there was a period when the Atlantic Monthly would almost always mention the main character’s full name in the first paragraph... and often in the first sentence. That was something that the editor of the magazine probably felt he wanted or needed. Yet, you can imagine all sorts of stories where you don’t have to mention a character’s full name and it’s just as satisfying. There are stories where you don’t have a name at all. There are advantages to leaving out a name; there can be a deliberate confusion that is productive.

Then there are stories like Dickens’s where you have names that are highly symbolic. If you think about those highly symbolic names, in a way, they make the characters seem less real because they are artificial names. On the other hand, though, it does something else for you. For instance, a name like Luke Honeythunder says a lot about a character and allows you to grasp them immediately. It gives you something else you can bounce off of.

William H. Gass talks about the name and how it functions in fiction too. One other thing you can think about is that the name has a kind of sonic quality to it. So the name has a certain sound that goes with it. Hard sounds convey different sorts of things than soft sounds, etc.

In class, I try to talk about different possibilities. I try to make people aware of what’s going on in contemporary fiction and the choices that are there. I think it’s important to make students conscious of what they include and what they leave out. Instead of thinking, “these are the rules, this is what I have to do,” I want them to think, “I’m making this choice. I’m making this choice in regards to this story.” I want them to think about the ramifications of their choices.

Yamamoto: I’m hearing you say that economic principles apply to writing too? So for example, if you put in physical details, you are giving something else up. In order to gain something, you have to give up something and the job of the writer is to make those trades mindfully?

Evenson: That’s exactly right. In regards to physical description, in early 20^th-century fiction, characters were always given physical descriptions. There’s very little that doesn’t do that and often those novels stop their action and do it for a paragraph or so. There was a feeling at the time that that was important. I think what’s happened in later 20^th-century fiction is that people have started to feel that if they leave certain things blank, people will fill them in. So a kind of minimalist aesthetics—which is one way to approach that—would leave enough blanks so that people can connect the dots in different individual ways.

A lot of it has to do with what you feel as a reader when you are working on something. For example, do you like to know what a character looks like? Sven Birkerts has pointed out that a great deal of contemporary fiction has very little interest in telling us what a character looks like. You have these physical blanks.

Yamamoto: So how do you know when the choice you make is the right one?

Evenson: I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but I think you just know if it works or doesn’t work in regards to a particular story. It gets very hard sometimes to know if this choice is right or if this choice is wrong. When you are writing a story, you are thinking of character in relation to plot, setting, sound, and the whole shape of the story and the structure of it, so that everything comes together.

I think of a story as a hydraulic process. What you are trying to do is get all the levels right—all the water levels. If you make a choice in one area and it’s contradicted by a different choice in another area then the story weakens. You have a kind of permeated wall; things are leaking out. If you make all the right choices, things all rise to the right level and the walls all hold. Sometimes it is intuition, sometimes it is trial and error, and sometimes it is figuring things out.

I just revised a story that I wrote a while ago. When I first wrote it, I kept thinking that there was something that wasn’t quite right about the story and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I’ve written a couple hundred stories at this point and I teach writing all the time... so I should be able to figure it out. But when it’s your own work, it does take time, trying things, and patience. It ended up that just a couple of convoluted sentence structures early in the piece slowed the flow down enough to make something else not work. It took me a long time to figure out that’s what it was.

Yamamoto: Even after all that you’ve written it’s still not easy?

Evenson: Yes. Every story is a new story. There are some things that have gotten easier as the years have gone on. But also, I don’t want to keep doing the same things over and over. So if you take seriously the idea that each story might demand something different of you and you are interested in exploring something new and unknown, then you keep on having these little struggles. And they are funny little struggles in that it may just take a few words here and there to make everything better.

Yamamoto: I guess if you didn’t have the struggles, there would be no point?

Evenson: That’s it. For me, that’s the fun of it too. I love getting to the point when I’m writing where I feel like something’s happening that I didn’t know was going to happening. That goes back to the idea of the character taking over the story. Again, I don’t know that it’s the character taking over; I probably see it as my subconscious taking over the story or as something akin to demonic possession. Still, that feeling of arriving somewhere that you didn’t know you were going is a really satisfying thing.

Yamamoto: While we are on the topic of your writing process, you had a new book come out recently?

Evenson: Yes. Coffee House Press published a couple of different things. They reissued three novels: Father of Lies, Last Days, and The Open Curtain in March of 2016. They also just published a new collection of stories called A Collapse of Horses.

Yamamoto: I know your goal is to always do something different, but is there something you did in this new collection of stories regarding character that you think is especially interesting?

Evenson: There are definitely commonalities through Collapse. There are certain things that I come back to but hopefully I come back to them in different ways. My first book, Altmann’s Tongue, is very spare and stripped down. As time has gone on I have become a little more expansive and generous in terms of how I talk about character in fiction. I am very fond of that first book but I feel like I was figuring out how to do certain kinds of things in it.

This last collection has a lot of things that walk the line between genre and literature. It has some stories that are interiorly driven and other stories that are fairly flat in terms of how characters present themselves. It’s a pretty big range but I think the thing that holds them together is the way in which the reality of the world is under threat or is collapsing in one way or another.

The title story of the collection is about a man who becomes convinced that some days he has three children and other days he has four children and he can never tell until he wakes up in the morning whether he has three or four. That ends up being just part of this growing sense that he doesn’t understand the world and things are falling apart around him. I think that’s pretty typical of the stories as a whole. There’s a kind of humor to them that gets darker and darker as it goes.

Yamamoto: I do want to discuss how your work walks the line between genre and literature.

Evenson: I think what happened was that back in 2003 or so, I got word that one of my story collections, The Wavering Knife, was nominated for an International Horror Guild award. I thought, “That’s weird.” Then it won, which surprised me even more.

Then I really started reading in that field and realized that a lot of interesting writers on that side of the genre division are doing great things that feel very constructive and very literary. It made me rethink what I thought I knew. Around the same time, Conjunctions—which was a magazine I was working for at the time—did an issue called the New Wave Fabulists that Peter Straub coedited. He did a similar thing where he took a number of writers who were thought of as genre writers and published them in this literary magazine.

Suddenly, you start to think of these stories in a different way. So much of what we get from a piece of fiction is based on how we’re told to approach it. This opened up doors for me to writers like Liz Hand, M. John Harrison, China Miéville, and Gene Wolfe. Gene Wolfe is probably the most important of the group to me. He’s someone whom I’d read when I was twelve, had forgotten about, and then went back to maybe a decade ago. I’ve learned a lot from him.

I feel that part of my role in contemporary fiction and in the writing that I’m doing now is to further blur that line between literature and genre and blur it as effectively as I can.

Yamamoto: Genre-blurring is something you are doing deliberately?

Evenson: Oh, yes. Very deliberately. The deliberation comes from a deep love of reading and a deep love of reading different works. I think that genre at its best is interesting because it tells you what you want to read. At its worst it becomes a system of control. For example, I didn’t read Muriel Spark when I was younger. This was partly because of my own ignorance but partly because she’d been identified to me as a writer for women. When I started reading her and realized how amazing she is in terms of range and precision of prose, I was disappointed that I’d been pointed away from her.

When genre becomes a box that’s exclusionary like this and acts to redirect readers away from certain things, I think it’s problematic. If you call something horror or science fiction, many people think it’s not literature and won’t read it. I’m much more interested in thinking about writing that has its foot in both camps.

There are really good genre manipulators out there. I think that even George Saunders is playing around with genre in his fiction. Sometimes it’s arbitrary which side of the camp they are put on. Kelly Link is also a writer I admire a lot and I see her and George Saunders as much more related than putting them on either side of a literature and genre line.

Yamamoto: In A Collapse of Horses, did you work with or against genre fiction’s familiar tropes?

Evenson: It’s a combination. I’d say that they’re genre-related and they definitely are, but it’s a little hard to put them in certain boxes. There are some of the tropes of some of the genres. For example, there is a story in the collection called “The Dust.” It is a kind of science fiction and it has the trope of people being trapped in an enclosed space and slowly going nuts. However, it brings a lot of other things to it. There is a philosophical issue being addressed. Also, instead of having a menacing alien creature, it’s not clear if there’s anything there at all.

I play around with tropes and start taking them apart in various ways to see where they go. But I still want the satisfaction; there’s a reason why people read so much genre fiction. There is something interesting and exciting about it. Trying to capture what I like as a reader and still doing something that people recognize as philosophical and literary is a big part of the process for me.

Yamamoto: Is that harder? It sounds harder!

Evenson: I think it’s harder! I’d been doing it for a while unconsciously, until people began to say, “Hey, you are doing things that are relevant to horror.”

When I was doing it unconsciously, however, I don’t think I was doing it quite the same way as I do it now. I’m doing it now in a way that opens up a space for things to travel back and forth between literature and genre. That’s what I’m more interested in; how can these things interact? J.G. Ballard is a writer who walked the line between genre and literature early on. His stories do have this genre element that is prominent. At the same time, they have particular obsessions that make them something else when taken as a whole. That’s something I admire and want to emulate.

Yamamoto: So who else influenced you?

Evenson: When I was growing up, there was a used bookstore near my house that had a lot of old Grove Press books. They were really cheap, usually just a dollar. I was growing up in Utah in Mormon culture and there wasn’t much of a culture of people reading strange stuff. In a high school class, though, I read Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. In the introduction to that in our textbook, there was mention of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. That led me to Beckett and that led me to Grove Press and their work. Also, when I was fourteen, my dad sat down and read a couple of Kafka stories with me and then gave me The Basic Kafka. Beckett and Kafka were important in forming me as a writer and making me think about the possibilities of what writing could do.

Since then, there have been all sorts of writers. Flannery O’Conner, Barbara Comyns, Cormac McCarthy, and Thomas Bernhard were important to me at particular points in my life. The Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera, had a huge effect on me because his work was unlike anything I’d ever read before.

I write in a particular way that has a certain amount of menace and a certain amount of intensity, so people tend to suggest to me work that reminds them of me. Sometimes I like that work, but I’m much more interested in having the work recommended to me that I wouldn’t have thought to read, that nobody would have recommended. I think the things that have had the biggest effect on me are the things that I just stumbled across that do something that I hadn’t seen done before.

One of the greatest things you can do as a writer is to just read eccentrically. Read a lot, read in really strange directions, and read as a writer so you pay attention to how people do particular things. Ultimately, that’s going to have a great effect on you as a writer and as a stylist.

Yamamoto: So we should be open-minded about the things we read and seek diversity in our reading diet?

Evenson: Yes. Exactly. I think that’s absolutely essential. There was a time when I was young and felt I needed to protect myself from influences. As time has gone on I have become much more interested in seeing who else is out there, finding out what they are doing, and being part of the larger community.

Yamamoto: If you are a younger writer, is it actually important to protect yourself from influences?

Evenson: I don’t think so. I just think that people can feel that way. I felt that way as a young writer. I advocate reading a lot and reading different things. There are people who are really reluctant to read things when they are writing because they are worried that it will influence them. My strategy has been the opposite. If you read a lot of different things while you are writing, there are so many voices that none are going to take you over.

Yamamoto: Who are contemporary writers that you think do interesting things with character?

Evenson: My favorite contemporary writer is probably the French writer, Antoine Volodine, who publishes under that name and under several other names: Lutz Bassmann, Manuela Draeger, and Elli Kronauer. He’s had four or five books translated. He writes amazing and inventive postapocalyptic works. Not enough has been translated for people to get as clear an idea of what he’s doing as they might, though.

Yamamoto: You translate from French to English, right? Have you translated his work?

Evenson: I’ve translated some of his Draeger work. As Manuela Draeger, he’s published postapocalyptic children’s stories that may not really be for children (although children like them). My two daughters and I have translated and published them.

I grew up amongst the writers who were being published in The Quarterly—which was one of the first places I published. So people like Ben Marcus, Gordon Lish, and Noy Holland were all people I published alongside and whose work I really admire. Christine Schutt is another person whose work I really admire.

Amongst those I’ve found later is Victor LaValle. He walks the line between genre and literature—which is something that I feel a lot of interesting writers are doing right now. One of my favorite American writers right now is Jesse Ball. He has a distinctive voice that’s all its own.

Yamamoto: As we wrap up, I want to reiterate that what you’ve shared about character and genre writing has had an extremely liberating effect on me as a writer.

Evenson: That’s great. Teaching creative writing should be about teaching what’s possible and making that space of virtuality available to young writers. I don’t see my job as being someone who makes people write a certain way. I see my job as someone who tries to give students all the tools and then they can use them to surprise me.

Yamamoto: So you view your job as one that expands the writing student’s potentials?

Evenson: Yes. Some people find that scary. They like to be told the rules. What they should come to see is that it’s not that there are no rules. The rules are just always specific to context and you make the rules as you write each new piece. And ultimately, those rules are beholden to the enjoyment of the reader.                           

Mika Yamamoto has work published and forthcoming in NOON Annual, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Whiskey Island Magazine, Rumpus.com, Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, and others. She is a writer for ESME.com and teaches fifth-grade at the Renaissance Academy in Michigan.

Excerpt

from “Black Bark” in A Collapse of Horses

“A man found a piece of black bark in his coat pocket,” repeated Sugg. “He wasn’t sure how it had gotten there. It was just there.

“He took it out and stared at it. He wasn’t sure where it came from, what kind of tree, if it was a tree.”

“What else has bark?” asked Rawley, feeling suddenly very strange. Across the fire Sugg remained still as a statue.

“This man too was the sort of man who only knew about the bark of trees,” said Sugg. “Like you. And in his mind he went through all the trees he knew but couldn’t think of any with bark as black as this. Maybe that should have told him something. But he just looked at the piece of black bark for a long while and then tossed it away.

“The next time he put on his coat there it was again.”

“What do you mean, there it was again?” asked Rawley, voice rising.

“Just what I said. There it was again.”

“But he threw it away.”

“Yes,” said Sugg. “He did.”

“Then how did it get back in his pocket?”

“That’s not part of the story,” said Sugg. “That’s the part that gets left out. I’m telling black bark, and I know what’s part of it and what isn’t. Hush and listen.

“The next time he put on his coat, there it was again. He took that piece of black bark out and threw it down and then reached in his pocket and it was there again, back in the same pocket. He took it out and threw it into the fire and a moment later, there it was back in his pocket.”

“Why would you tell me this?” asked Rawley.

“No matter where he threw it, it came back to him. He thought he was going mad. Finally he took the black bark out of his pocket and set it on the table and picked up a hammer. But when he went to hit it with the hammer, it opened its eye and looked at him.”

“—its what?” Rawley interrupted.

“Its eye,” said the Sugg.

“Eye?” said Rawley, “but bark don’t—”

“—don’t interrupt,” said Sugg’s voice.

From “Black Bark” in A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2016).
Copyright © 2016 by Brian Evenson. Reprinted with permission.