Alyson Mosquera Dutemple | April 2024

You know you have one: a story you and your family tell over and over at holiday gatherings, one that never fails to get everyone around the table laughing, even the surliest among you, one that never gets old, or less funny, no matter how frequently it comes up over the years. In my family, the story that never fails to have us rolling in the aisles begins a little something like this: “Remember the time Dad went walking at night and fell into a ditch?” Or, more specifically: “Remember the time Mom and Dad got into a big fight at that restaurant and Dad decided to walk home and fifty yards out of the parking lot he fell into a roadside ditch filled with standing water and poison ivy and biting ants, and he broke his ankle in three places and needed emergency surgery to insert a steel plate and a handful of screws in there?”

This story never fails to get a laugh from relatives and, full disclosure, me, too. But what, from a storytelling perspective, makes this narrative amusing? The fighting parents? The indignant father storming out of the restaurant? The nighttime ditch swallowing him up? Or the fact that he now has a Frankenfoot cobbled together with nuts and bolts? The more I thought about the usual reaction to this family chestnut, the more I began to realize that, individually, none of these details are particularly hilarious and that, perhaps, given a less callous crowd than my own family, apparently, such a story might not be so amusing. Because, after all, the break my father suffered was a bad one, the surgery long and complicated, the recovery even longer, bringing with it a whole different set of complications, such as lost hours at work, pain, frustration, and a chapter in my father’s life that involved quite a bit of painkillers and reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger. Though family members don’t usually bring it up when retelling the story after a couple of glasses of wine, there was real danger in my father’s situation that night. The area was fairly remote and very dark. The ditch was just far enough off the side of the road that there was a possibility he might not have been discovered where he fell, had he not managed to prop his body up high enough to flag down a passing car. In fact, by the time my father was actually discovered and the ambulance arrived, his body was going into medical shock. If we look at it more objectively, this story could have ended tragically, its retelling meriting a little melodrama. So why does our telling never veer toward the sentimental?

How do we tell a story about terrible things happening without slipping into sentimentality? I want to write about terrible things, but I want to elicit complicated emotions, avoiding melodrama and cliché. One of the most effective ways to draw out those emotions from the reader involves suppressing, rather than expressing, the emotions of characters. Before I examine how one does that, a spoiler: my father is fine and so is his foot. All’s well that ends well, and there is only a small possibility that he will be indignant to discover that I used his personal misfortune (and our family’s heartless teasing) as a jumping-off point for this essay. 

 *

In William Trevor’s story “Sitting with the Dead,” a woman whose husband died a few hours ago is forced by her own politeness to entertain a pair of elderly sisters who specialize in a sort of homespun hospice. Though they have arrived too late to sit with the dying, as is their custom, the widow, Emily, takes the sisters in and offers them tea. Through dialogue and flashback, the reader sees the evolution of Emily’s emotions, which run the gamut from the natural shock of being freshly widowed, to anger at her late husband, to painful regret over the way her life turned out. But as the story progresses, and much to the visiting sisters’ chagrin, Emily’s grief never manifests itself as one might expect, and the hospice workers are ill-equipped to handle Emily’s complicated emotions. The story’s twist is that Emily herself has been living as if she were already dead, and that, through her husband’s death, a small part of her snuffed spirit has been rekindled. The story concludes, 

In the neglected room she regretted nothing now of what she had said to the women who had meant well; nor did it matter if, here and there, they had not quite understood. She sat for a while longer, then pulled the curtains back and the day came in. Hers was the ghost the night had brought, in her own image as she once had been.

                  Though Emily’s reticence with the sisters eventually gives way to candor, Trevor reveals much to the reader that the sisters do not see, preparing us for the story’s reversal. “Sitting with the Dead” begins with a suggestion of the unexpressed. We find evidence of it in the first scene, when Emily’s not-yet-dead husband announces he wants to see the stable-yard: “Emily’s expression was empty of response. Her face, younger than his and yet not seeming so, was empty of everything except the tiredness she felt.” When she helps him get ready, she is similarly tight-lipped: “She brought his cap and muffler to him with his overcoat. A stitch was needed where the left sleeve met the shoulder, she noticed. She hadn’t before and knew he wouldn’t wait while she repaired it now.” 

Though this is the story’s opening and we have no backstory about their marriage, the reader feels Emily’s disillusionment through her mannerisms. Her “empty” expression, her silence as she hands off his coat, her failure to mention the fraying stitch, suggest defeat before we know any particulars of her life.                 

Later, when the sisters pass time with Emily, Trevor attributes to Emily another series of small gestures that imply a current of unarticulated emotion. When one of the sisters mentions that they once passed Emily’s husband on the roadway, for example, Trevor writes: “A feeling of apprehension began in Emily, a familiar dread that compulsively caused one hand to clench the other, fingers tightly locking.” Still later, Emily responds to an impulsive comment by shaking “her head in an effort to deny what she’d said, but that seemed to be a dishonesty, worse than speaking ill.” Both examples show Emily’s body taking over for her. The “apprehension” she feels is physically manifested through the clenched fist; the internal conflict she has between saving face in front of the women and being honest about her unhappy marriage plays out in the shake of her head. Throughout the story, such gestures demonstrate Trevor’s ability to convey emotion without naming it, to employ subtlety and restraint, particularly for an emotion too painful for words. The trickle of emotion soon gives way to a deluge, and Emily’s unburdening becomes so strong so quickly, in part, because it has been suppressed. If the emotion had been explained with words, then Emily’s gradual unburdening might not be as powerful.

But Trevor doesn’t only allow gesture to stand in for words where Emily is concerned, because as Emily gathers momentum, becoming more and more forthcoming as the night goes on, the sisters have the opposite trajectory. It is evident in their reactions that the two sisters are unnerved by Emily’s frank catalog of offenses suffered at the hand of her husband. Though they do not contradict Emily as she speaks, neither do their actions imply empathy. They are quiet while she talks, too quiet, we intuit, for a pair who specializes in dealing with families of the grievously ill. As Emily speaks, the sisters become quieter, and in their quiet, we read their discomfort:

“I didn’t go out and about much,” she said because a silence in the conversation had come. Both visitors were stirring sugar into their tea. When their teaspoons were laid down, Norah said:

“There’s some wouldn’t bother with that.”

“He was a difficult man. People would have told you.”

They did not contradict that. They did not say anything.

This exchange recalls the silence with which the story began, but the tables have turned, the situations flipped. Emily has begun to reveal her feelings, and the sisters, the grief counselors, have begun to hide theirs. Trevor implies this through frequent fiddling with silverware and crockery. The women’s preoccupation with tea is a physical manifestation of their unspoken reaction to Emily, as we see in lines like “The women sipped their tea, both lifting the cups to their lips in the same moment.” The repeated emphasis on the motions the sisters make with their teacups effectively scans as desperate and anxious. The sisters are not up to the task of being Emily’s confidants. To avoid interacting with her, they busy themselves with gestures, and the reader gets the feeling that they would like to concern themselves with something else, anything else, other than what Emily is saying to them. 

*

Those familiar with Joy Williams know that her stories are weird and dark, and often darkly funny. Whereas Trevor traffics in emotional restraint, Williams’s restraint can be more stylized, often as a flatness in her characters. This flatness can arise from a failure of a character to put forth recognizable reactions, or can occur when the emotional responses in the story are at odds with the story’s circumstances, a disconnect that makes Williams’s stories so satisfying.

Williams’s stories don’t shy away from heavy subject matter that could veer toward sentimentality: death, divorce, addiction. And yet, her stories never become maudlin or melodramatic, because of the flat way these subjects are presented. She circumvents purple prose with an almost eerie evenness that keeps the story from sinking under the weight of its emotional content.  

Likewise, and counterintuitively, that same insistence on flatness that suppresses melodrama can call attention to the emotions the flatness is trying to suppress. The reader can see through such pretenses and recognize in such deliberate flatness that the story may be suppressing stronger emotions under its reserved surface. Williams’s flatness doesn’t erase the presence of emotion so much as “dam” it, allowing it to build below the surface. The characters are not without the capacityto be emotional, but rather, they are presented in a way in which the expression of their emotions is purposefully limited, and tension is created between the presence of emotion and the outward expression of it. Behind the flat facade, we can sense the waters rising, the pressure building, the ever-present and alluring possibility of break. 

Of all the stories in The Visiting Privilege, Williams’s collection of new and selected works, “Preparation for a Collie” is perhaps one of the most obvious choices to turn to in a discussion of flatness. “Collie” centers around an unhappy, uncommunicative family (Jackson, Jane, their son David, and their unnamed dog) who struggles to thrive economically and emotionally, living a cobbled-together, almost transient existence, that feels to Jane “as though in a seasonal hotel.” Though they share a roof, their lives are silent and separate from each other, lending their house a sad, chaotic quality: “The house is always a mess. It is not swept. There are crumbs and broken toys beneath all the furniture. There are cereal bowls everywhere, crusty with soured milk. There is hair everywhere. The dog sheds.” While the main action of the story concerns Jackson’s decision to get rid of the dog, the collie never goes anywhere. Instead, when strangers start replying to the ad Jackson puts in the paper, Jackson refuses them all, delighting in the power of leading on and then rejecting each prospective adoptive family. When Jane, who is herself consumed with unarticulated worry over the emotional and psychological well-being of their son, can no longer abide the game her husband makes of giving the dog away, she tries to poison the dog. The dog survives, but the family grows more emotionally distant. The Drano-infused kibble ends up uneaten in the sink, and the story leaves us lingering in a disturbing family tableau moments after the distressed boy, not unlike a puppy, urinates on his father and refuses to meet his mother’s eye.

On the surface, this seems like difficult subject matter. The characters, especially the parents, are careless with each other and their son. The story contains instances of emotional abuse, parental neglect, marital strife, and an attempted murder of an innocent dog. And yet, the story does not get mired in its dramatic action. The drama feels muted, subdued, and at times incongruously funny. Williams’s language buoys the potentially overwrought emotion of the situation in the story. Her syntax and word choice keep it skimming the surface instead of sinking under the weight of melodrama. 

The story’s shallow emotions allow the drama to remain lighter than the subject matter, and it achieves this primarily through its short sentences and crisp, unadorned language. Consider the opening: “There is Jane and there is Jackson and there is David. There is the dog.” The language couldn’t be simpler, and with such a curiously stilted introduction, Williams allows the unadorned prose and the rudimentary, almost childlike syntax to set the tone; its emotional temperature, the reader intuits, is firmly locked at cool. Though none of the story’s particulars have been revealed, the reader is still able to register that such economy, such bare-bones narration, will temper any inclination toward feverish emotion, no matter the plot. 

The flatness is also evident in repetition within the story. Because repetitive language and syntax is not something most writers typically aim for, the blatant repetition that Williams employs in the first two sentences also signal a stylized effect. As a result, the tone of the storytelling takes on a wry, almost winking quality. By drawing our attention to the repetitive syntax, Williams is both clueing us in to the dull and repetitive nature of the marriage itself, while at the same time recalling the flat language of primers about Dick, Jane, and Spot. By using the name Jane and including a dog, Williams evokes these iconic books while also pushing against the expectations of the tidy domestic dramas they are associated with. She uses language that echoes such sanitized scenes of domestic life to present a distinctly unsanitized version of domesticity: See Dick drink. See Jane poison Spot.

Aside from the language, though, there is nothing neat or simplistic about “Preparation for a Collie.” The characters, and their motives, so unlike those from the 1950s primers they recall, often come across as strange or inscrutable. There is little interiority in this story, and by limiting access to the emotional realm in this way, Williams makes the medium the message. The economy of language suits this story because the lack of emotion, the inability to articulate the despair the characters are gripped by, caught up in, is the stopped-up source from which the events of the story flow. 

The economy of language is also reflected in the parts of speech employed in the story. There are nouns and there are verbs. There are few adjectives or adverbs. There are rarely modifying clauses. Many of the words are single syllable ones, and figurative language is almost entirely absent. The sentences read as simple and repetitive:

Jane and Jackson lie in bed. 

“I love Sundays,” Jane says.

Jackson wears a T-shirt. Jane slips her hand beneath it and strokes his chest. She is waiting. She sometimes fears that she is waiting for the waiting to end, fears that she seeks and requires only that recognition and none other. Jackson holds her without opening his eyes. 

It is Sunday. Jane pours milk into a pancake mix.

Here Williams uses minimalistic language to reflect the stingy emotions of the couple’s marriage. Though an intimate situation is introduced by Jane and Jackson lying in bed together, and Jane stroking Jackson’s chest is an intimate gesture, the spare, almost clinical way it is presented negates the intimacy of the situation and gesture. 

*Though the language of Akhil Sharma’s “You Are Happy?” isn’t as stylized as the language in “Preparation for a Collie,” it, too, has a kind of revelatory flatness that comes across through its own limited omniscient third-person narration. Tone, word choice, and syntax work together to create a narrative distance that constantly reminds us of itself. As a result, the reader’s awareness of this remove in the narration doesn’t distance her from the main character, but counterintuitively creates an even more profound sympathy for him. 

While studying many of the stories that I consider “flat,” there is evidence of some recently suffered trauma. The flatness in many of these stories manifests itself in a kind of “flat-affect” response to that trauma, a stiltedness that arises not from a lack of feeling but a surplus or enormity of it. The characters who feel emotionally restrained aren’t immune to emotion but are reacting to the outsized emotions their traumas elicit. The blunted quality of these characters is a direct response to unarticulated emotion. In other words, their feelings rob them of the ability to speak about them.

“You Are Happy?” subjects its main character, a child named Lakshman, to much trauma. Lakshman silently suffers through not only his mother’s terrifying spiral into alcoholism but also her murder, carried out by arrangement between his father and his mother’s own family while she is on a trip to India. But because young Lakshman cannot articulate the intense emotions elicited by such traumatic events, Sharma uses the narrator to function as the character’s mouthpiece. And the fact that Lakshman is being represented through this third-person mouthpiece highlights how overwhelmed he is by trauma. By blunting emotions from a narrative distance, Sharma emphasizes how painful they are. 

Sharma also flattens emotion through word choice and narrative style. There is a distilled quality to the language. The narrator is precise and succinct. As in Williams’s story, the sentences are short and direct . When the characters speak, they do so in a clear, articulate manner. It might seem that the story would have a naturalistic feel because of the lack of melodramatic language. On the contrary, the language comes across as clinical.

When the story veers into bodily descriptions, the language often becomes formal. Though the story gives us access to the point of view of a teenaged boy, the language used to describe the body does not come across as what one typically associates with a teen vocabulary or sensibility. There is a distinct lack of embarrassment in the narration surrounding sex and other sensitive bodily functions:

In India, on farms, pretty young women are as common as rabbits. It is easy to have sex with girls who are fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. These girls have nothing to trade other than sex and physical labor and often they are raped. On farms, when a girl goes alone into the fields in the early morning to defecate, there is a strong chance she might get assaulted. 

The use of the word “defecate,” as well as the cold, matter-of-fact way the assaults are presented, lend the story a feeling of detachment. And yet, even though the style is purposely detached, the effect of the clinical language is especially chilling to the reader because the tone does not match the emotional tenor of what’s described, further giving the paragraph a flat affect. Additionally, in the word “defecate,” there is a subtle recall to a traumatic experience in a previous section of the story when Lakshman witnesses his mother being hauled away to detox after spending days in her room drinking and “shitting and pissing” in a bucket. We understand that Lakshman has been traumatized by seeing his mother in this condition precisely because it is not discussed further in the story. The word hints that the memory has remained with Lakshman, though the narrator does not explicitly say so. Likewise, there is a similarly loaded implication in the description of the setting of the room in which Lakshman’s mother has locked herself. Though there are only four short sentences, their brevity suggests the enormity of the feelings Lakshman experiences but does not articulate out loud:

They pushed it open and the room was freezing and full of light. To Lakshman, strained and desperate, the light seemed inhuman, as if they were above the clouds where it wasn’t possible to survive. There was this light and there was the stench. The smell of vomit, urine, and shit was such that it did not seem thinkable that a human being ate there, slept there. 

Despite the terrible circumstances described, the narrator does not dwell on Lakshman’s emotions beyond mentioning that he is “strained and desperate.” Instead, the narrative spends more time illustrating how Lakshman distances himself from the situation, concentrating not on his mother, but on the light in the room and the specificity of the smell. The celestial focus of the interiority shows how Lakshman is putting himself at a remove. It’s almost as if he isn’t able to reconcile that it is his own mother in those foul surroundings. Rather than thinking of her as a specific person, owning their relationship, Lakshman distances himself from the bond, eschewing thoughts of “mother” or “she” for the more general “human being.” 

Sharma deftly uses distance to allow the reader to see the degree to which Lakshman is wounded by what’s happening in his family, and even in the places where the narration does close in on Lakshman’s feelings, they are presented fleetingly or passively. When he is left alone with his mother when she is on her bender, the language of the narration suggests a disconnect between Lakshman’s feelings and his ability to experience them: “He felt detached from himself, like when he was taking a difficult math test and he was frightened but his pencil appeared to move on its own, hopping over the sheet of paper, jotting numbers.” The detachment Lakshman experiences here is echoed in the syntax Sharma uses in phrases such as “Lakshman began to feel a nervousness overtake him” and “sadness filled him.” In these examples, Sharma’s language suggests these emotions are coming from outside of Lakshman, that they are external experiences that creep in from the outside, rather than the other way around. 

Even when Sharma does allow strong feelings to originate from within, because of the flatness emphasized throughout the rest of the story, even these emotions feel masterfully stunted, such as when Lakshman hears his father’s lover’s voicemail message and feels “furious”:

One fall afternoon when everything smelled wet, Lakshman came home from school and had to turn on the kitchen lights despite it being four. The house was quiet except for the soft sound of the TV in his mother’s room where she was probably drinking. He saw that the answering machine light was blinking red. He pressed play and there it was, the young woman’s voice. . . . She laughed and the phone hung up. Lakshman was furious. It was vulgar for her to leave a message. And she was a farm girl. She should know her place. He deleted the message. As soon as he did, he became scared his father would find out. 

The words “furious” and “vulgar” provide another example of the way Sharma purposefully does not try to make the narrative voice evoke that of a teenager. Teens don’t usually talk so formally, so these words help us understand how effectively Sharma is using a narrative filter.

Sharma does, however, allow for a crack of emotionality to break through Lakshman’s flat facade. The two sentences presented as free indirect discourse (“And she was a farm girl” and “She should know her place”) show the emotional temperature heating up. In these spots, the narrative distance moves us suddenly closer to the main character. We feel along with Lakshman in this moment, rather than being told what he feels by the narrator, and the sudden closing of that narrative distance lets the reader feel the fury, perhaps even more than the word “furious” does.

Still, this closing of narrative distance is the exception rather than the rule in the restrained story. For the majority of it, Sharma artfully keeps the distance more pronounced, and that downplaying of emotion through narrative distance leaves the reader feeling even more sympathy for Lakshman. The reader can sense, without being told overtly, that, not only is Lakshman in a heartbreaking situation, but he lacks the tools to fully express his emotional response to it. His anger and his desire to mourn for his lost mother are effectively swallowed up by Sharma’s deft use of distance, and, as a result, the reader feels the loss even more keenly. 

Sharma’s story demonstrates that a pronounced narrative distance can be especially effective in letting suppressed emotions bubble to the surface. In calling the reader’s attention to the distance from which the narrative is told, the author can convey, through the narrative filter, those feelings too terrible, too overpowering to speak about. Eschewing first person, or even very close third person, in favor of a cool and distant narrator can lend a story a narrative authority that moves the reader paradoxically closer to the heart of the matter.  

*

Which, in the end, is perhaps the reason why my father is never the one who brings up the story about the ditch in the first place. As I mentioned, it’s always someone else who tells the story. It happened to my father, yes, but in the eyes of the rest of us, it is no longer my father’s story. It’s become a third-person one, perhaps because that way we are able to better distance ourselves from the emotional undercurrents of the events. Maybe it feels safer to explore this story from the pronounced narrative distance of the third person; maybe it relieves some of our residual anxiety to poke fun of it, to treat it like a joke. Maybe it feels too dangerous, too scary, to address honestly what could have happened that night if my father wasn’t found by—this is also true—a passing pizza delivery person. 

If you were to listen more closely to those teasing conversations around our holiday table, you might hear in our constant telling and retelling of this story of my father and the ditch, evidence of us all acting a bit too much like Hamlet’s Queen Gertrude. Maybe by insisting on how funny the scary story is, we are all protesting a little too much, participating in our own version of suppressed emotions, and we may just be tipping our hands by doing so, showing how much we actually were shaken by that night, how haunted we are by the might-have-been, in our insistence on an unemotional treatment of it. Because, as we have seen, sometimes we can reveal just as much about what troubles us by not talking about it. Sometimes we can reveal even more.

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Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salamander, Passages North, Redivider, Arts & Letters, and the Cincinnati Review’s miCRo series, among others. She was a 2022 runner-up for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and one of her stories received a Special Mention in the 2024 edition of The Pushcart Prize. Dutemple teaches and edits in New Jersey, and she holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College.