Left with a Dead Body
Cut from The Girls' Almanac:
"You just don't expect anything like this," Jenna
says, her voice in a hush to Jay. They're out back, still
looking, waiting for help to arrive.
Emily Franklin
explains:
This was to be part of The Girls’
Almanac (William Morrow, Oct. 2006) as the opening sentence.
I never finished this story, but had I completed it, I suspect
the entire thing would have been cut. The book morphed form
a short story collection to a novel in stories when I realized
I was writing about the same characters from different angles.
The above line was the start to a chapter/story in which Jenna
meets her in-laws for the first time while a body falls from
the sky. I’d still like to use the story for something,
but it pulled the book too far out of its arc.
Originally, a couple of the stories were in the first person:
Suburban Solstice, 1979
Next door, Alex’s mom has a bag of pot in the kitchen
junk drawer, but we don’t know that yet. With blonde
hair that swings hip-length, Patti, his mom, is the first
grown woman aside from my mother that I will see naked, but
I don’t know that, either. I am twelve years old at
the solstice. By autumn, I will turn thirteen, just when the
days are hemmed into mucky, unfireflied evenings that start
mid-afternoon.
This was cut. Then reinstated in the
third person. Now it reads like this:
Suburban Solstice, 1977
Next door, Alex’s mom has a bag of pot in the kitchen
junk drawer, but they don’t know that yet. With blonde
hair that swings hip-length, Patti, his mom, is the first
grown woman aside from her mother that Lucy will see naked,
but she doesn’t know that, either. She is twelve years
old at the solstice. By autumn, she will turn thirteen, just
when the days are hemmed into mucky, unfireflied evenings
that start mid-afternoon.
Fishing hooks, their prongs splayed like ventricles, loose
twine, Halloween candy left too long, chocolate Marathon Bar
flakes, and M&M’s their edges whitened, bits of
dried grout, pencils, hair ribbons, and nails--all of these
Alex and Lucy have taken out from the orange Formica-paneled
drawer. Lined up, a deformed and ill-combined army, the stuff
sits on the counter in a row until they tire of sorting through
it and slide it all back in along with the unsifted items
at the back. They take the quarters found at the drawer’s
bottom and head outside.
I’m not sure why I changed the
year--think to make the ages and dates make sense in the novel.
Third person worked better and is now consistent throughout
the novel. Several stories were snipped out – one called
"The Corner of Main and Maybe," about Lucy’s
mother as a teenager, and two about Jenna, the other main
character (who above is in new Jersey, about to meet her in-laws).
I liked Lucy and Jenna so much that I could have kept writing
about them--and that’s why I had to start cutting. With
revolving characters, there was always room for one more story
in my mind and on my computer, but not in the book. So as
it stands in The Girls’ Almanac, Jenna never
meets her in-laws, and I’ve left her (as written above),
with a dead body, waiting for help to arrive. I have a dose
of authorial guilt for stranding her, but maybe someday I
will go back to her and find out what happens next.
