MIR-YASHAR SEYEDBAGHERI

Story and Structure

The flash fiction czar told me to start my story from the inciting event, the fatherly abandonment that led to my becoming a perpetually inebriated college student, trying to express myself. An eloquent, yet stupidly inebriated soul, he labeled me. I was drunk then because it let me drift into dreamworlds and because I sought out inspiration in the sweet Amaretto Sours, the creaminess of White Russians. This was in a college workshop, where the czar dissected our stories, his baritone voice like Gregory Peck. He was a professor, demanded to be called czar. The story was not autobiographical, for the czar decreed that autobiography was sin. Cardinal sin.

He said I should start with the father leaving his son and daughter for a woman, a rector’s daughter at that. These were in no way my older sister Nancy and me. I changed the names to something else. What the names were didn’t matter. They were expendable, throwaway names for story's sake, names the flash czar loved.  We'll call them Mikhail and Tatiana even though my sister and I were and still are Americans. I can give that small scrap to the czar who let me in his class. He encouraged me to find outlets, albeit fictional, for my past. For the things I didn’t have.

But back to the tale of the tale I was writing. I thought it better to start with the happy days, the days of the father taking his children bowling, laughing as they rolled strikes, relishing a kind of familial communion. Father, son, daughter, graceful figures, rolling brightly colored balls. That was an image I could relish, an image that came to me when I drank. I could relish the father teaching his son the power of words, the art of story, the sister and brother exchanging crude jokes hunched beneath the moon's luminous smile, the father joining in.  The father, avoiding the truths about their mother, whom he loved, and who had disappeared.

I even wanted to insert an image of the mother who left when her son was only six and whom the father spoke of constantly. She wasn't my mother, of course, as far as the czar was concerned. She said the world had crippled her, but she crippled the father with the mysteries of her unhappiness, her foul-mouthed rants. He was spellbound by her intelligence, an ability to speak six languages fluently and to pontificate about philosophers, namely Locke. She was an ethereal vision with flame-hair who wore lavender dresses twenty-four seven. She called the father "provincial," and inexplicably sang Cole Porter's "You're the Top," as a bedtime lullaby to her son, a song laden with innuendos about bottoms and tops. She called the father a tyrant, a man of many expectations, a man who demanded emotionally. And yet, this was a woman the father conjured as "perfection," and "sheer class," night after night to his children, especially in the months before he left. He'd smile sadly, imagine her return, fantasize about it with his children, who left the room in disgust, invariably.

The czar vetoed that. There was room for happiness in flashback, he said. Trauma was the best way to go. Trauma established what was at stake as if starting with the happy days would ruin things for people, people who thrived upon pain, who inhaled it like pot smoke or drank it like wine in the glasses of Episcopalians at upper-crust cocktail parties. Trauma, he said, was the leitmotif of this story, and therefore pain must be established in line one.

I knew the czar thrived on it. He was stimulated emotionally by the father who pined for his long, lost wife. The lady in lavender, he whispered, mystically to me. He wanted the father to search for the wife, personally, rather than wasting his time on a "tawdry young woman" as he put it. But the czar profited from the protagonist's pain too.  The czar relished the images of the protagonist who wasn't me, chasing after Dad's car as he left, the rector's daughter riding shotgun, trying to convince him that he could be good. The protagonist, of course, thought the cause for the abandonment was so simple.

He wanted to feign sympathy when my sister pulled me back into her arms, convincing me it would be all right, must be all right, had to be all right, murmuring the words like a soft and tender and pathetic liturgy. The czar wanted to cry and gasp without investing himself emotionally in me. His real family had left him. I know, I know, this sounds like pure coincidence, but I knew things about him. Perhaps this was why I couldn't hate him.

The czar also demanded I use the past tense. I thought present commanded more immediacy, especially in the moments after the father left. I begged, I pleaded. He looked at me as if I were nuts. The past tense, he said, allowed my purely fictional narrator to reflect on the world, older, wiser. A trope as tired as tea in Turkey. But I wasn't a wise, older narrator. I was a college student who played his life over and over like a tired tape. I wanted to feel that pain, that sense of something having run my sister and me down. I wanted to be in the home again, the two of us waiting for someone to come, to rescue us. I needed to feel all that, to combat it, to dissect it myself. I needed to be there when my sister and I decided to run off when we burned our father's collection of Hemingway, which he'd left behind, inexplicably.

I stuck with present tense; the czar threatened to fail me. Fail me, I said. He kept dissecting the story as if his ego were under assault. The ending, in particular, enraged him, agitated him, to be more precise. The flashforwards to the narrator in college were cheap, he said. More interiority was needed where the siblings were concerned. He wanted to know more about what happened after the siblings up and left. He wanted scenes from the road. Sometimes, I argued, less is more. There were a few lines here and there about their path. Surely that conveyed just as much as the things left unsaid. And that included drowning images of my weary sister, working low-end jobs as ticket-taker and secretary. A sister who put her faith in me, in my writing, who gave so much, but to whom I could give nothing in return. I didn't want the czar to read this, to see the narrator's ultimate failure. An inability to reclaim things, to take back some power for the orphaned siblings. The czar demanded that I say more and more until I felt the tears rise, gave way.

I finally told the czar it was all autobiographical. He was stunned. But I felt a kind of power, a sort of ferocity, at my father, my mother, the people who left. I felt an anger, a bewilderment, and a whirl of pity for my father, lost in his love for my mother. I felt a tender love for my sister, and I felt an abiding bewilderment towards the world. I lashed, I lunged at the world. I felt like I was playing chicken with a train, a train full of rules.

In the end, I started the story with the happy times. The flash fiction czar was overthrown by a revolution shortly thereafter. Or to be less Romantic, he had a sexual liaison with a teenage girl. I prefer revolution.

I kept that story. I held onto those moments, the early moments of the story. My sister's smile, my father's laugh. I held onto those moments, no matter how the subsequent czars tried to rearrange the story. In the end, once upon a time there was a happy family, to the dismay of a czar behind a typewriter. And the family lived unhappily ever after. Everyone got screwed and the son wrote a story. The czar would appreciate that.

 

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