Because We Were Assigned to Write Bad Fiction

We were trying to write something bad, to explore what makes bad fiction. The woman with hair like olive branches wrote to her grandfather, a kindly old man who whittled wood on his front porch. The letter she wrote was filled with the voice of the young girl she knew he imagined when he thought of her. She read it to us slowly, as if she had to articulate that this was clearly not the woman she was, that clearly the tone in her voice carried the weight of each unspoken word. And, to be honest, it worked. When she looked up from the small notebook she had written it down in, an obvious concern she had for her grandfather’s need that it be written by hand, the room was silent for just a little while longer. We each envisioned him opening that very letter, his whittling set aside, the knife blade sledding through the glued lip of the envelope flap, the starling he had been carving, waiting patiently in his lap. And in the silence, the obvious pain of her love rose into the air. What the letter didn’t say was this: that the olive tree loved a woman, that she never planned to marry, that he would never raise her children into the very lap his starling rested in just then as he read. And then each of us imagined the letter we would write, how it would keep from saying the same thing, too. The omission branding our love no matter where or whom we loved, no matter how well or how poorly we loved, no matter the season or the day, the earth rotating us away from that very moment rapidly, blindly, dislodging us wherever we sat for the rest of our lives, if we felt the slightest pull from it at all.