The Brooklyn Rail

In Fictions, Ashley Honeysett intersperses the self-doubt of short story submission with the trials of motherhood—or possibly the other way around. Like Lucia Berlin, there's a shadow of cruelty, if not outright violence, lurking in scenes of domestic routine. Formally, the intercut sections of memoir and meditation embody a great insight in Berlin’s work: balancing a creative career with conscientious parenting means that one must always steal time and write whatever scraps emerge, often written down on literal scraps of paper (be it an envelope or the back of a grocery receipt). Honeysett’s narrator conveys the emotional heft of a hard-won life in progress.

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You could do drive-through banking in Michigan when I was a kid. There were three or four lanes for cars to drive up and send money and checks through pneumatic tubes. There weren’t as many ATMs back then. Sometimes you had to wait in line behind other cars, and Mom and I had a lot of conversations just sitting there.

I used to have these visions of myself throwing you down the stairs, my mom said to me once while we waited. You were just a baby and you were so helpless, and I would think, There’s nothing she could do to stop me.

Then we got to the front of the line, and she took the metal cylinder out of the machine, found the deposit slip and a pen inside, filled out the slip, endorsed a few checks, and put it all in there with her driver’s license. I knew not to talk when she was concentrating.

The cylinder came back with some cash and Mom’s receipt and a root-beer-flavored sucker for me. I looked up at the plate glass window where all the tellers were lined up, wearing headsets, and one of them waved to me.

Sometimes other people were surprised by the things my mom said to me. But my mom had never actually thrown me down the stairs or done anything to hurt me, so I could take what she was say- ing in the matter-of-fact way that she said it.

She said she’d told her sister about the visions, because they scared her. And her sister said, I used to think things like that too. It’s because of how we were raised.

By the time Cathal was born and I suddenly had recurring, intrusive visions of myself crushing his little ankles, I was not surprised that imagining things that scared me was a burden that came with caring for my baby. If it happened to me, too, then when my mom and my aunt thought these things it wasn’t because of how they were raised. But my mom told herself it was, and maybe that made it less shameful for her and made it possible for her to talk about. And that might have helped me be prepared when it happened to me.

But I also think that the story might make my mom feel lonelier. I think some anxious people have thoughts like this. They’re just thoughts, and you can try to detach yourself from them. But in my mom’s version of the story, this is another way her family damaged her.

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There was one about a factory in Michigan. The factory makes powdered cellulose, which is ground-up paper. Mixed with preservatives and Annatto color, it is used as an anti-clumping agent in the cheese you can buy pre-shredded at the grocery store.

The story’s about a temp who is learning how to do the tests. She is checking to see whether a batch of powder has too much moisture or whether the particle size is too large, though this never happens.

I kept killing off the temp. She was based on someone I knew who was hit by a truck. In some drafts I got as far as the funeral. I kept cutting it back, until any mention of the accident was gone and she never even knew she was in danger. Instead she’s wearing her borrowed lab coat, using a long pair of tongs to take little crucibles out of the oven.

The stories I wrote in that period were so short because I wrote the first draft of each one in a day, and because I kept cutting each one back to just one scene if I could, rather than adding car accidents and funerals and everything. I thought it would be good discipline to try keeping them below a thousand words. I would include only what was necessary.

In the last scene, the temp is up on the roof, reading a pressure gauge or something on the smokestacks. It’s winter, and she’s gone up without her coat. It’s heavy on description: the looming storage silos, the metal catwalk, the billowing vapor. I was trying to get transcendence at the end. Something about the magical moments in a dull life. But I kept getting the descriptions wrong.