Anne

One of the first stories I wrote while pursuing my MFA in creative writing, a fictional short story titled “Anne,” published last month in Volume 5 of Switchgrass Review. Back when I drafted “Anne” in 2016, my friend Rachel Yingling had passed away not long before. Rachel was in my thoughts often, and so I created a fictional character, Anne, inspired by her. I hope Rachel would appreciate my fictionalized interpretation of her spirit. Or, at the least, I hope she'd appreciate that the story includes her family's moonshine. 

That sounds like a joke, though in fact I think she would appreciate that. She found humor inside the “casual horror…of diagnosis, treatment, and perhaps peace with it all,” as our mutual friend Corey Nielsen put it. In short, Rachel found the funny where it wasn’t supposed to exist. Rachel endured such suffering that I used to wonder if I could ever do what she did—live with cancer without any possibility of a cure, all while still observing the funny.

It has now been some time since Rachel passed. I think about her less often than I used to. I think it’s cool this story got published now because it has led me to re-remember Rachel.

I hope you enjoy reading Anne, and remember this character is fictional, just a character inspired by Rachel and is not intended to be her.

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Anne, as published in Switchgrass Review

End engagement to the Spaniard because he’s not right. Reassure myself of that decision by calculating he’d leave 127,757 dishes in the sink according to his actuarial life table. Call Mom like I do every evening from my attic bedroom I can barely afford as a legislative assistant. Prepare for her to say, “But Anne, you’re twenty-six.”

Think after she speaks, Wow, she actually said that verbatim.

“Yes, Mom.”

“Your father and I married when I was seventeen, you know. By the time I was your age, I’d had your sister, brother and you.”

“Mom,” I begin, but catch myself before saying my next thought aloud. By twenty-six, she’d also had my younger sister. It wasn’t that Mom forgot about Emma Lee. Rather, her mind was just too full of worry to remember everyone. Nobody else in the family had strayed far from Winslow, Arkansas. 

“Attic bedroom” sounds worse than it is. It’s really just the least expensive room in my group house. That sounds worse than it is, too. “Group house” just means “One-hundred-year-old rowhouse occupied by eight twenty-something transplants who can’t afford apartments in Columbia Heights but won’t move because the neighborhood is the perfect mix of ethnic eateries, dive bars, and leafy parks.” Keep reading Anne in Switchgrass Review…