PRISM is please to present an excerpt our 2016 Short Fiction Contest winning piece, “You Can Do Better” by Taryn Pearcey. Taryn is a baker by day and a writer always. Her fiction has appeared in Maple Tree Literary Supplement and The New Quarterly, winning their 2014 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award for “Flash Forward”. She was Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s first Creative Writing Major, where she also served as Pulp’s Associate Literary Editor. She lives in Delta, BC, and definitely didn’t sneak that last cookie while you were reading this. Check out Taryn’s interview with PRISM Prose Editor Christopher Evans below the excerpt.
To read Taryn Pearcey’s winning story in its entirety, order a copy of PRISM 54:4 online!
You Can Do Better
By Taryn Pearcey
The boy and his mother live down the hall. They are the only neighbours Emma has seen in two years of renting the apartment. In the beginning, others left notes, welcomes, a jar of peach jam or small squares of fudge wrapped in parchment paper. Emma bundled them all up in an old plaid blanket and threw them out with the trash. As her own mother said, a stranger is a stranger, no matter how kind.
The boy and his mother did not leave anything. Emma can’t say for certain, but she knows. The mother is too young, walks too quickly in or out of the building to notice anything but her own velocity.
Emma almost doesn’t answer the door when she knocks. It’s still early—everyone should be off at work. The super would have called first. Someone could have let a salesman in the building. Then comes the mother’s voice, so firm and loud Emma is sure she must be speaking from inside the apartment. “Excuse me, ma’am? I know you’re there. I saw you pick up the newspaper. Please, I’m desperate.”
Emma’s slippers never leave the floor as she shuffles toward the door. She cinches her robe tighter and peers through the peephole. They’re both there, the boy and his mother.
“Oh, thank you,” the mother says, hand to her breast, once the door is open. “You’re my last hope, really.” She has a mother’s shape, all soft curves and strong bones.
Emma holds the throat of her robe closed. The skin there has only just started to sag. “What do you want?”
“Please. His daycare got shut down. No one else is around. I’m late for work. Please.” The mother’s hair is pulled back but still overwhelms her shoulders with tight ringlets. She wears a skirt and blouse, one frayed, the other stained. Her skin is shined copper.
Emma remembers a long-ago slumber party, the look on the other girls’ faces when her mother came to pick her up not an hour after she’d arrived. “You don’t know me,” she says.
“My work won’t let me bring him in.” The mother’s leg bends slightly at the knee. Without more restraint she may have even stamped her foot. Her clothes could be mistaken for a private school uniform. “It’s just for today, I promise. Please, I’ve got no one else.”
CE: One of the things I really like about “You Can Do Better” is that it initially reads as quirky—which it is—but then slowly shows itself to be dark and kind of desperate, with a lot of the damage happening outside of the frame of the story. How do you know where to stop when revealing action? Is it hard to be so restrained?
TP: Restraint is a skill I had to learn, and I’d be a horrible student if I didn’t give credit to my education for helping a lot with that. When I come up with characters I find interesting, I have this urge to write down a bunch of scenes about their lives to help fill out their details. Often I’ll write more content than actually ends up in the final draft, but it helps to have that extra knowledge of a character so they come out more well-rounded. Even if I happen to love what I’ve written, they sometimes need to be cut. “Kill your darlings,” so to speak.
It usually depends on what I’m trying to achieve with a certain story, but my general rule is to use as little words as possible while still getting my point across. Not only do I find that this helps to tighten the writing, it also adds an air of mystery that I love because I want to keep readers guessing and drawing their own conclusions. I’m a huge horror movie fan, and I always say my favourite films are the ones that don’t show you everything, the ones that trust that your imagination will do the rest.
I can see a link between “You Can Do Better” and your 2014 Peter Hinchcliffe Award-winning piece, “Flash Forward”, in that both pieces contain a narrator that places themselves in a theoretically better life, where the problems of the past and present have been resolved or just don’t exist. What is it about this viewpoint that interests you?
While not nearly to the extent that my characters do it, the tactic of projecting yourself into a different or better life is something I’ve done since childhood. For the most part it was a form of entertainment for a kid who had an overactive imagination and spent a lot of time alone. As I got older it became more of a coping mechanism—when things got tough I could retreat inwards, and although that didn’t solve any problems it did give me an escape. It’s the same reason I often lose myself in video games or books about the history of Westeros.
This is a piece of myself I can instill in my characters, but it’s also an interesting way to explore a character and their motivations. The life a person wishes they were living can say a lot about who they are and the way they’re living in the present. It’s also just really fun to play around with the “what ifs.”
When you’re writing, are you working on more than one piece at a time, or do you write single-file? How do you keep narrative voice consistent?
I constantly have multiple projects on the go at the same time. I can’t seem to write any other way, and this can be both beneficial and crippling to my writing process. On one hand, even if I’m stumped on one piece I always have something else to work on, though having the time to work on those pieces is a different story. It’s rare for me to hash out a complete draft without putting it away for awhile so the ideas can simmer on the back burner. So I end up with a constant rotation of stories and poems and larger projects. The biggest downside of writing this way is that it can take me a long time to get any piece completed. I also write everything longhand, so that tends to add time to an already long process.
To keep voices consistent, I try to make each one distinct enough that they’re easy to slip back into. I find that using the words and sentence structures themselves as a method of conveying the narrative voice can be useful in keeping myself on track. But, so long as I get back into the rhythm of it by the final draft, I try not to worry too much about it. That’s what editing is for.
What does your dream writing day look like?
My dream writing day is a solitary one, with no one around to distract me or for me to distract myself with. Outside it’s raining, and I have the window wide open so I can hear the rain on the roof and smell it on the earth. For once, my back and shoulders don’t hurt from work. I have both the time and patience to sit down and get some writing done. And most importantly I have that feeling, that creative urge to tell a story, the one that’s been with me since I was young and filled notebooks upon notebooks with my ideas even though there was no one but me to read them.
Christopher Evans is the Prose Editor of PRISM international. His work has recently appeared in EVENT, The Impressment Gang, and The Maynard, and is upcoming in Isthmus, Feathertale, and the Little Fiction|Big Truths music anthology, A Mixtape of Words.