Because

 

Because you were so fat that I could count the rolls through your T-shirt, and know that they’d build across my belly and back in the exact same way.

Because you spent the check every month, and you never gave me a penny, not even if I needed a new eraser for school. "You just ask your fancy teacher for one. Go on, ask."

Because I had to ask, and their eyes would burn me with their pity.

Because you’d spend hours painting your nails, but never let me touch any of the bottles, just because I broke one when I was two.

Because I hated the sound of your crinkling chip bags.

Because when Daddy said he was leaving, you said, "Go, then," and let him walk out the door, even though I screamed and cried.

Because when they put an eviction notice on our door, you just smoked a joint.

Because you made us move to Butthole Town, U.S.A.

Because I have to get out of this place, away from the fucking cows and the falling-down barns.

Because there aren’t any jobs here unless you want to shovel shit or ask, "Would you like fries with that?"

Because the other kids are always in my face, saying who’s having sex with who and who got so shit-faced drunk that he banged his head on the bathtub and didn’t wake up for six hours.

Because of every single "uncle" you put me through.

Because I thought I’d kill myself until I met him.

Because he laughed when he saw you for the first time. Just a little snort, but I heard it, and it made me want to cry.

Because when you met him, you giggled and said, "He’ll never stay."

Because the clouds have wiped out the sun, and all I see and smell and hear is rain.

Because our apartment roof drips, drips, drips, and I’m the one who has to wake up in the middle of the night and dump the water out of the coffee can while you keep snoring away.

Because the snow has melted, and it’s easier to hitchhike in the rain.

Because you wouldn’t let me call him.

Because you took my cell phone away and used up all the minutes.

Because last week, you slapped me across the face in WalMart, in front of the photo counter, when I dropped your coffee.

Because he’s the one person who’s never raised a hand to me. Not once. Not even as a joke.

Because he thinks I’m beautiful.

Because I knew you hid your money in the freezer.

Because he had a gun.

Because he said he would do it, and I didn’t have to look.

Because he loves me.

 

Originally published in Fiction River: Crime, 2014

 

***

 

I wrote "Because" when I was strung out and exhausted at Kris Rusch and Dean Smith’s mystery workshop in Oregon.

Perhaps a month before the workshop started, Kris asked us to e-mail her which historical time periods we were familiar with, even if it was through the movies. Then she asked for our areas of expertise.

For the first, I wrote, "World War II, Nazi Germany." I lived in Germany when I was ten and used to read World War II books for fun. Maybe this explains a lot about me.

Then I chose three areas of expertise: "Emergency medicine, motherhood, yoga."

Kris’s next pre-workshop assignment was to write a crime story set in our well-versed historical period. Bonus points if the crime was illegal at the time, but no longer. For example, selling booze was illegal during the Prohibition, not now.

Ah. I’d given myself only one option. Time to research the Nazis. I wrote a story that evolved into "Blood Diamonds" for Jewish Noir.

At the workshop proper, Kris told us to write a crime story based on one of our areas of expertise.

Eric, the youngest and keenest member of the group, said, "Can we write more than one story?"

"Sure!" said Kris.

Grr. Competition meant that I would now have to write at least two stories at once; exhaustion meant that it would be a grind.

Normally, I have a ton of energy. But I live three time zones away, in South Glengarry, Ontario, a rural area between Montreal and Ottawa. Between my jobs as an emergency physician, a mother of two small children, and writing, I live my life on a razor wire of time division as it is. So add in this workshop, with mystery novels to read beforehand, my own novel to finish, stories to write, stories to critique, a flight across the continent and a two-hour drive down the Oregon Coast, and bam.

I don’t want to complain. I’m a lucky woman who can afford the time and money to go, with a stellar husband who will work full-time and wrangle our kids for a week. But when I wake up at 3 a.m., Pacific Time, and we’re still workshopping at 1 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, I don’t have a lot of reserve.

And in hindsight, just like my answer on the historical periods, I should have offered myself more choices for areas of expertise. I was winding up my most complicated medical mystery yet, Terminally Ill , with three different plots, so I was temporarily burned out on medical writing. My mind refused to write about the emergency department.

I wanted to explore yoga. Specifically, murder and yoga, because they’re such diametrically opposed subjects. Or so one would think.

I pounded the anemic Internet connection at the Anchor Inn. (I love the funky, indie Anchor Inn, but twenty writers simultaneously pummeling your wireless access can and will smash your download speed.) I read and read as much as I could about the "dark side" of yoga. And I wrote "Om," which ended up getting published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

But I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that I was tired and no one might like my writing. For my first class with Kris and Dean, the Master Class in 2003, pretty much none of my classmates did like my writing. I can say this with confidence because when we’d do group critiques, only Jerry Weinberg liked my men’s room story (now called "Ninety-Five Percent Porn and Spam") and Jay Lake chose "Dog Island." That was IT. Out of a dozen writers and multiple stories written and pre-written at the workshop. We pretended we were editors, and my classmates would tell me their "editor line," where they stopped reading. They didn’t choose my stories for their hypothetical anthologies. Blah.

But writing is a lot of whistling in the dark. It’s one of those things you do because you love it, even if you get kicked in the teeth, over and over. Like medicine and motherhood, actually.

I kept writing, fuelled by stubbornness and some key one-on-one feedback from Kris at the end of that 2003 Master Class. She’d said, "You are the kind of writer they have to create a new category for."

My eyes had bugged out. Kris and Dean had explained in their lectures that periodically, a writer comes along and creates a revolution in the publishing world. For example. Lawyers and thrillers. Who would have thunk it?

Scott Turrow did. After Presumed Innocent, readers sudden clamored for this brand new category, legal thrillers. Scott had his hands full with a legal practice and couldn’t immediately whip up books for them.

Enter John Grisham and a whole new publishing world order.

Before that, we bowed down Stephen King, who nursed a generation or two or three on horror and became his own brand.

After Kris had told me I was uncategorizable, and I’d recovered my voice, I’d said, "But…no one liked my stories."

She’d made a face at me. "They’re confused. You need to learn information flow. Read bestsellers. Read Jeffrey Deaver." She’d also mentioned, "You are so direct, it makes people uncomfortable."

Okay. So, ten years later, I was at another writing workshop in Oregon. After "Om," I had just enough juice to eke out one more expertise story to throw down with Eric.

Because I’d unwittingly limited my own topics, it had to be about motherhood.

I remembered "Extenuating Circumstances," the Joyce Carol Oates story in the hard-hitting anthology, Sisters in Crime 5. That story had lingered in my subconscious for over two decades.

I started typing.

It’s not difficult for me to stare at the dark underbelly of motherhood. Everyone likes pastel-coated, Pinterest-worthy parenthood, but the truth is that it’s a relentless, endless task that delivers both the purest joy and the greatest devastation.

As dusk fell, I stopped and stared at my laptop. The story was short. Under 500 words. I moved around a few paragraphs, but I had nothing to add. It was finished.

It was the first story (and actually, only) story I wrote at that workshop that immediately felt right. Even if no one else liked it. Even if no one else theoretically bought it. It was correct.

I printed out "Because" and brought it to the jury of my classmates.

Nearly everyone ‘bought’ "Because."

And then Kris asked to buy it for real, for the anthology Fiction River.

As someone who’s studied Buddhism, I try not to get blown away by life events. Good things and bad things happen to everyone. I did consider it a validation that, in ten years, I’d gone from only two of my peers selecting my story to something like 80 percent of discerning readers and writers not only choosing it, but many of them placing it in a position of honour in an anthology, as the opener or, more often, the closer story.

I wrote down their comments. Kris encourages us to write down the good and bad comments because we tend to remember only the bad stuff.

Inside, I glowed, but not too brightly.

Equanimity is what they call it, in Buddhism.

Some people liked it. Good. Keep writing.

And if they’d booed me?

Some people didn’t like it. How sad for them. Keep going.

Two classmate were concerned that Kris hadn’t bought any of their stories. My forehead pleated in honest confusion. I was like, "But that’s only one market. It’s the finger, not the moon."

Which was my turn to puzzle them. So then I explained how Buddha said, "I must state clearly that my teaching is a method to experience reality and not reality itself, just as a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself. A thinking person makes use of the finger to see the moon. A person who only looks at the finger and mistakes it for the moon will never see the real moon."

Selling one story to Kris doesn’t make you a writer. Getting the thumbs-up from your classmates doesn’t make you a writer. Those are fingers pointing in the right direction, that’s all.

Writing makes you a writer. Period.

Writing is the moon. And what a magnificent moon it is, full of shade and wonder and heartache.

Yesterday, at the end of my emergency room shift, I discovered that "Because" is a finalist for the Derringer Award.

In case you’re like me and don’t know firearms, a derringer is a pocket-sized pistol. A fine metaphor for the double-barrel wallop packed in a short story. So the Derringer Award celebrates the finest short mystery fiction published in the English language every year.

I felt walloped myself. My tiny story, squeezed out of competitive exhaustion, up for the Derringer Award?

Wow, wow, wow.

Time for me to tell you it’s an honour to be short-listed. But this time, it’s true. Thank you, Eric, for spurring me on. Thank you, Kris, for reading my work with clear eyes and an unsparing tongue (this is a good thing). Thank you, my classmates. Thank you, Matt, Max, and Anastasia, for letting me disappear for days at a time. And thank you, my readers. My writing wouldn’t regenerate or evolve without you.

 

***

 

Melissa Yi is an emergency physician whose latest Hope Sze medical thriller, Stockholm Syndrome, lasers in on a hostage-taking on an obstetrics ward. To decompress, she takes dance lessons and eats curry and Lindt chocolate.

 

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