Twenty Questions
Did you take out the trash? Did you water the ficus? Did you cancel the cable? Did you take my black sweater? Did you tell the neighbors? Will you get the friends? What about the cat? Will you send me a Christmas card? Will I tear it up? Did you know that I suspected? Did you know it was obvious? Did you want it to be? Should I have confronted you? Would you have stayed? Did you think you could do better? Were you right? If I killed myself, would you come to my funeral? Did you tell her I'm crazy? Did she believe you? Is that why?
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Author's Note
A short-short that kept suggesting itself to me, so I wrote it down. I wanted to see whether I could describe the end of a relationship, and suggest why it ended, without any of the usual he said/she said.
Other stories by Jennifer Howard
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"Will you send me a Christmas card? Will I tear it up?"
an interesting play on twenty questions, the tension builds, the questions get farther out. . . and then directly to the point. wonder, if the 'yes' wasn't there, would the silence be more resonant
I agree--cut the "yes."
I like that you got away with telling a story all in questions. This works very well.
I find writing in questions to be a really freeing exercise. I started it in a class where the teacher kept assigning us photos to describe, and I got so bored with that exercise over and over that I wrote out a list of questions about the photo. He liked the questions so much he had us doing question exercises at the end of the semester--which got kind of tiring too.
Anyway, I've wanted to write a story in questions for a while and have never been able to do it--I can start that way, but in the rewrites the questions come out.
You, however, have succeeded in making a story that works in this format.
You succeeded. It's a page out of life.
P.S.: I agree with Jon: "Cut the yes."
Thanks very much for reading and for the comments. It's great to have feedback so quickly. And I've done away with the "Yes."
Nice. I like this very much. It stings and it sings. I'm not sure I wouldn't put this into an even more tightly constructed linguistic box of some sort just to make the tension even more springy but it works beautifully as is.Very neat.