Fiction Award: "Potboiler" by Laura Madeline Wiseman |
....Second person is a doorway into a character’s
complexity of thought, their motivations and desire, why they turn away from
something or ignore it, and why they focus their attention on one thing or
another.
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Laura Madeline Wiseman teaches English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry, including Branding Girls (Finishing Line Press, 2011). www.lauramadelinewiseman.com. |
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subject
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Again with the move. Again
you’ve boxed up your shelves of text books, your bathroom of
pads, deodorant, ibuprofen. Again your stained mattress crowds the flat
carpet and butts the walls of your mom’s apartment. The vinyl blinds teeth the floor with streetlight.
You’ve entered your mom’s tomb. Still she breathes. Hotdogs
boil in a pan of water on the stove. A roach scurries into the
corner behind the coffeemaker. Still the TV flickers before her glazed pupils
as she smokes. Still when she shuffles to the stove and stabs an aluminum
fork into the processes meat, her
toes crack.
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setting
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Through the thin apartment
walls, the TV murmurs at you. You read a novel. You write to
a dead friend who dropped out of school to marry and birth two sons. The
eldest squished kittens until something, their guts maybe, something creamy, churned
from the corners of their mouths. You think of heras you glance from the corner of
aluminum foil you’ve peeled back from the one window of the room. You examine
the night. Twelve cars with flat tires and rusted roofs stud the parking lot.
Six times you’ve caught teens fumbling on graffitied stairwells open to the
stars. Three times you’ve heard a scream, a crash, a Please stop, but always your mom has done nothing. And you, your mom’s
eldest, pressed your thumbs hard into your ears and waited for the noise to
work itself out and die.
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turning point
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In the morning your two adult
sisters arrive at the apartment. They share the other bedroom. You three
whisper together, lifting artifacts: a box of expired crackers, a dustpan of
bugs, a pipe with a film of resin,
black and warm. You say, She’s crazy.
I’ve got to get out of here, though you’ve just arrived, again. Your sisters nod and help you
plot. I’ve got a suitcase, says
one. I’ve got a ticket for a bus,
says the other, but they both freeze and flatten their mouths as your mom
shuffles into the kitchen for coffee. They exit to their room. You small talk
with her as the soaps parade and
commercials recommend dreams. For every one hundred words you
offer, she gives you ten.Then you return to your square
of foil, the handwritten letter to your dead friend folded over
and a novel with an ending you will anticipate by page thirty-three. |
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A Note from Laura Madeline Wiseman:
When I started graduate school, I was
admitted as both a prose and a poetry writer, but as my tenure progressed I
made a decision to focus on the craft of poetry. It wasn’t that I stopped
writing prose, but poetry was where I focused my attention, and yet,
there would be moments—especially during break or when I was a
writer-in-residence somewhere—I would be focusing on line breaks or the way a
sentence unfolds across a stanza and suddenly feel possessed to write something
that felt like prose. “Potboiler” was one of those pieces, a piece that
overtakes the writer, that overtook me, that demanded I write the first draft
of it from start to finish, that I follow the pulse of the narrative until the
last word.
“Potboiler” is in second person. I’m a little
in love with second person, with the rhythm and sound of the word “you” and the
way it lets the reader inside the head of the speaker. Second person is a
doorway into a character’s complexity of thought, their motivations and desire,
why they turn away from something or ignore it, and why they focus their
attention on one thing or another.
“Potboiler” is forthcoming in my chapbook The Puppet Wife (Pudding House
Publications). |
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falling action | Your sisters go. Your sisters
arrive. The scratchy pitch of them leaks in whispers through the walls. You
try to remain hidden, but your mom gives you the phone. You call in take-out orders:
five dollar large pizzas, egg rolls that ooze yellow drops of oil, diet cola,
lots of ice. You’re never hungry. Not even the one lone hotdog floating in
its pan of water in the fridge tempts you. A skin on the pan’s water
ripples when you open the door. Other than the hotdog, the fridge contains
black nail polish (your sisters’), a half-gallon
of skim milk (your mom’s), and a novel (yours).
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subplot | You move in. You move out. This
goes on and on for years. Each time you arrive with your mattress,
your sisters snigger. They wear chicer boots, more tattoos
spiral down their arms, backs, and thighs, another piercing appears in their
ears, lips, and tongues. You hear someone moan though the thin walls.
Sometimes the moans are singular, a tenor or alto. Sometimes there are a
multitude of voices. You imagine a city choir rounding their mattress on the
floor and your sisters there with their black eyes and thin
ankles swaying with the motion. You do not bring people into your mom
apartment. You do not even consider masturbation. Often you dream of the dead
friend who accompanies you on walks through the back doors of a stage in a massive
auditorium. A half dozen kittens trail behind you. Some with broken tails,
some with much worse.
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denouement | On your birthday, you enter
your room to find a warm pistol in the middle of your blue and
white flowered comforter. You’ve just delivered to your mom a diet cola, lots
of ice, a king sized candy bar, and a plastic
baggie of something else. The foil on your window has been folded back and
taped shut. The pages of your note are scattered like fish on the floor. A novel rests on your pillow. The
author is unknown to you. The language isn’t romantic. You nudge the gun with
a finger and realize with a lurch, the gun has always been there. Always it
has waited for a moment like this to glint in the hallway light from the
crack of your bedroom door. You pick it up, but find not a gun, but a kitten with
something at the side of its mouth. You place it on the pillow and peel open a
new corner of foil. You see lovers on stairs. You
listen to the murmur of the TV, to the crack of your mom’s toes,
and to your sisters’ moans. You pick up a pen to finish the
note to your long dead friend.
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