From the Ground Up, Part Two: Setting
Find ways to use setting – physical, temporal, and cultural – to develop your characters, expand your story, and develop your plot.
In this series, I’ll take you step-by-step through my process for writing a short story. I’ll be thinking out loud, so to speak. In each installment, I’ll include the next piece in the process. Find part one here. In part two, we’re exploring the world of this story. Our narrator is going for a walk.
Grampy cursed the Mortimer family that summer when I was nineteen and I won’t ever forgive him for any of it, but least of all for getting my dog killed. When I was little, I thought grampy and his rocking chair were all one hard, angular, creaking body. He did sit in it so long his spine fused to it, Dr Follett remarked when he came to collect the wiry, tawny body. Grampy would rock in that chair from the time mammy helped him out of bed at nine every morning until dinner time. He would complain about his catheter constantly but never did anything to have it removed. She would bring him his orange juice and his knife and a piece of wood to shave. He would sit and whittle and squint out over the dusty, yellow fields out front of that house, and count the cars that drove past Potter’s Field Road all damn day. Him and his colostomy bag, his Mexican cigarillos, and his inexhaustible cooler of Coors light.
I’ll only ever be able to imagine my grandfather on that porch. Not that time in the kitchen, a cigarette tucked in the crook of his mouth, when I saw him smack mammy. Not the way he lurched down the road from the farmhouse to our trailer to tell my mother to stop dumping her brat on them. Not when he died, in the casket, his gray lips slightly apart and the wrinkles on his skin rigid and still uneasy. I’ll see him always on that porch, tall up in his rocking chair.
The porch was wide. The broad planks made it feel even more expansive. A long roof sloped overhead so that the sun only touched its very edge on the highest summer days, so mammy’s potted tomatoes and green beans lay in square rows in the grass below the porch. There was a gap in the tessellated wood around the porch’s foundation. A family of skunks had lived under the far corner of the porch for as long as we had. I don’t understand why grampy let them stay there when he hated everything that walked on four legs. When we took on the house Tom wanted to fix it. I don’t know either why I asked him to leave it.
It helped me understand my grampy, taking on this house. I’m not sure that was a good thing, though.
Grampy cursed us like this, real simple:
I lived with my mother still—she refused to move back into the big house until grampy died. We shared a run-down, swampy trailer on the west corner of grampy and mammy’s land. I’d been sitting on the porch all day, counting cars, working up the courage to stick the cigarette I’d stolen from Jared-Amos’s pack into my mouth and light it and had failed. I was going home.
“One more thing, sweetheart,” grampy murmured, “before you go. Would you take this box and drop it off at three?”
“Three?” I asked. “Is it a bomb?”
“No.”
It was a shoe box wrapped in brown paper with a twine bow. Nothing was written on it.
“You sure?” I said. Maybe grampy had gone senile at long last. The MacDernmotts owned three. “Why you want to give them anything?”
“It’s nothing,” he said. He puffed his cigar and squinted down the long drive to the road. Gleams of the MacDernmott’s white house shone through the thorny raspberries mammy had planted there, years ago, and let go feral.
I did as I was told because I only did as I was told. My shoes crunched the gravel of the long drive and a few times I shook the box, trying to figure out what was inside. It was heavy, and filled up the box so it bulged a little. Had mammy wrapped it? It felt too heavy to be a bundt cake. And why would food be in a shoebox? Maybe it was poison.
Back then, I thought it would be pretty lousy to make me deliver poison to our neighbors, even if they were the MacDernmotts. Nowadays I think it was downright evil for grampy to make me drop the MacDernmott’s dead cat on their doorstep.
I had to walk out to the road then curl up their short driveway because the prickers were so thick between the houses. A shock of exposure zapped through me as I came up the drive, like Mary-Jean was watching me through one of the upper rooms. A curtain moved, but it could have been because of the wind. I only put one foot on the steps up their porch; I wanted nothing to do with being up there. I chucked the box and it struck the porch boards with a heavy thud. I turned and walked, trying not to run, back to the road. The door creaked open but I didn’t look back. I didn’t look back until I had reached the road and the door had whacked closed. I didn’t see whichever MacDernmott brought their boxed dead cat back into their house.