The Nuclear Option

Or how I learned to love my inbox again

So, I’ve been making some changes to how I deal with Substack. I love it here, but there’s a lot of noise. So much advice on writing. I’m sure its well meaning, but it’s also a bit needy and grabby. I’m here for the fiction, not the hustle.

To that end, I’ve been unsubscribing from substack emails. I’ve tried to be judicious about who I follow. It’s hard to do, but I thought it would limit how much noise I was getting. I’m looking for signal. But even that strategy was getting spammed pretty hard.

The fix has been simple: if the post I find in my inbox isn’t fiction, I press the unsubscribe button. To be clear, I’m just unsubbing from the email, not their substack—I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s precious subscriber numbers. I’m not a monster. (Also, I get the irony if you are reading this non-fiction piece from your inbox. I apologize.)

The daily spam blasting became my inciting incident for what happened this morning. Amongst the writing adivice which I was busily unsubbing myself from, I received an actual short story from Caitriana NicNealcail. I don’t even know how really. Probably through the Lunar Awards. Don’t care. It’s why I’m here. Thank-you Substack.

Her story, In Memoriam, which appears on Sum Flux (also my on my list of exciting discoveries of the day), was the first thing I read today, and it delighted me with its writing—real writing, not non-fiction advise on how to write fiction. Her writing rolled over me like waves at the beach, delightful lines of prose followed by another and another. And it teaches much more than the non-fiction stuff does.

She starts bravely writing second person. I raised an eyebrow at this. In lesser hands, it’s usually a disaster, but NicNealcail nails it. The opening sunk its hook in the back of my mouth.

You open your mouth, a little embarrassed by that troubling molar, but the priest doesn’t mind or see, and neither does the blood and body that slips wet-soft from the spoon past teeth and tongue and down the slither-slide of your gullet. You smell garlic, your own breath’s or the priest’s or both, and the heaviness of incense.

If you want to teach ideas like ‘narrative debt’ — show, don’t tell. Show me how you do it, like NicNealcail does. Just look at that troubling molar. The reader is looking into ‘your’ mouth. What’s wrong with that tooth? And the words, ‘slither-slide’ and ‘gullet’. Such great choices. I’m in. Tell me more.

And she does, the waves start building. Shown, not told.

you pull your collar high, scratching your stubble, eyes side to side. It wouldn’t do for any of the comrades to see you here.

Eyes side to side. Love that. And the word comrades does so much heavy lifting to establish setting. Now all she needs to do is set some stakes, and when she does, I know this is going to be a gut puncher.

She’s slicing onions and potatoes by the sink but turns to smile at you, sunlight igniting golden curls. It’s early still, the day stretching out like a field of grain. A walk in the park. A picnic by the river. Your boy runs in, you spin his body in the swarming air. Low mass, velocity high as you can handle, he’s feeling that momentum like a centrifuge. Night shift this week. Treasure these daylight hours you have with them.

I love how she smiles at you, and the word ‘igniting’ tells me that we are in love. Then the boy runs in and we are a young family. I can feel the pull of the centrifuge as I whirl the boy about. The second person has me. Damn, I’m getting dizzy.

So this is what I have to lose: a happy family.

She also breaks the short story into numbered parts. This is something I’ve been playing with lately, and I love seeing it used with such well executed effect. In part 2, we get to see what the job is.

And without ever telling us that it’s Chernobyl, she shows us that it’s the night that things go horribly wrong. Her prose verges on poetic.

In the water, a bubble of vapour, a void. Then another, another, another, unseen and unavoided. Heat and more heat, growing with nowhere to go, unevacuated, exponential.

And we know what’s at stake. The tension in the story, like the heat in the reactor, builds with nowhere to go, no escape from the coming disaster. Masterful storytelling.

It’s brief, beautiful and shows more than it tells. It lets the reader’s mind fill in the rest.

I’m tempted to pour every line of the story out here and point at it, yelling, ‘Look, just look at how great this is. This is how you do it.’ But I don’t want to be that guy on Substack.

Afterall, we are here for the fiction.

By part 10 (they are very short parts, sometimes a single poetic line), it’s a new millennium and the long term effects of radiation continue to cause harm. NicNealcail bridges time with a clever repeated image of an egg shell.

A new millennium, fresh as a baby. There’s an egg, speckled and broken, at the edge of the pond in the park, near the birch trees inside the railings. Shards of shell in tiny non-Euclidean triangles lie scattered in the mud. A mother coot is leading her long-toed children through the grey water and you pray the egg was one of them and not some other bird’s disaster.

Yeah, she said non-Euclidean. Love that. All the way through she expertly blends her knowledge of physics and poetics. And in this last line, ‘some other bird’s disaster’ is really what’s killing the new ‘you’ character, now a woman who is dying of cancer.

You know inside the cells are spread like head-blown dandelion seed. The drugs nibble on the edges, but those cells don’t die, not while you still live. One two four eight, how do we proliferate? Undying ain’t supposed to be like that.

But what about the troubling molar, the ‘narrative debt’ she took out at the very beginning? Fear not, she Chekov-Guns us with it at the end, but subtle.

And so it’s dark in there, beneath varnished wood and beetled earth and patchy grass re-rooting, re-routing. After more time than you’d think, the bones sag and untie. Humerus parts from radius from ulna, femur from tibia, vertebrae sit freed and lonely. All but the teeth. The jaws grip them even in death, mercury-filled molars and undressed incisors all in a naked grinning row.

The stink is gone now. And the sting?

Yeah, the gut punch hits. It hits in waves. Again and again. This is what I open my inbox for these day. Something that makes me feel the human condition.

Have you made it this far hoping for a moral to this story? Fine. But it was in the title. Go nuclear. Blow up your inbox. Irradiate all the spam. Kill the cancer, if you can. With a little luck, what remains will be the stuff that keeps us alive.🙭

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The story In Memoriuim by Caitriana NicNealcail was published by Sum Flux.