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dallonm-archive · 4 years

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Lemon Teeth | Short Story Updates #2

cw for death and murder talk, and fire imagery (and one mention of sleeping pills)

Hello hello!

I’ve really wanted to share another short story update ever since I posted about Ammonite, but my process became a little ~messy~ since then and now - jumping between different projects and struggling to focus mainly, but I have a system now that’s working well. I’ve also been working a lot on redeveloping my initial collection idea from nearly two years ago. It’s been going great and I like where it’s headed, but my main struggles are a) title?? never heard of her and b) oops! I created a very broad but clear tone and atmosphere for this collection and started coming up with stories that go completely against that. I’m hoping to talk more about it in the next update as the next two stories I plan to draft next are very much in line with the idea I’m going with. But this story is as well, so for now lets talk about a house, an unhinged couple, and lemon cake! Because this post has been half finished in my drafts all month and it is! Haunting me!

In Lemon Teeth, a house narrates the nights its inhabitants decide to burn it down, and struggles to understand the human condition.

Genre: literary short fiction, might be surrealist (?) POV: 1st person present tense / inanimate narrator (the house) Atmosphere: TV static in the background, dusty wood, stuffy summer air, overfilled ashtrays, cigarette burns, smoke inhalation, bitter citrus flavour, lemon cake

This was originally called Lemon Cake and Gasoline and that was the title for most of the drafting process, but I’d juggled between that title and Lemon Teeth with my only rejection for Lemon Teeth being that I had No Idea what it meant. But I always found that title to be much more interesting and with a story where not a lot makes sense, it’s actually a perfect fit and I’ll use the editing process to figure out it’s full meaning. This image has been in my mind for a year and a half now, of a couple standing in front of a burning house, and it remained stagnant until I realised it wasn’t just about the fire and that the narrator was the house itself. This draft ~sucks~. Finding lines I wanted to share was really a needle in a haystack moment, but I have a lot of hope for this story and I really like it as an idea! There is such a chaotic vibe to it that I really want to highlight in further drafts. Also it is 2020 and we are loving and embracing drafts even when they suck!

I was designed for cosy Christmas mornings and ardent family dinners. For boisterous children who crayon the walls and grow up to be doctors and lawyers. But not everyone wants that. Some people thrive when they’re on fire.

(In this episode of oh my god just because the story is about fire doesn’t mean there has to be all this fire imagery but this part really cemented the house’s voice for me. This story also definitely takes inspiration from the American Dream and I wonder if the house dislikes its inhabitants not because they’re bad people, but because they reject expectations and traditions.)

The most interesting part of the process was creating a voice for the house - this is my first delve into inanimate narrators and I’m lowkey obsessed. The house is petty, sarcastic, and looks down on the inhabitants - Lawrence and Frances. My idea was that the house’s knowledge is limited and only influenced by who lives there, but it knows everything about these inhabitants, how their minds work, and secrets they’ve repressed deep inside. I really like the cold, distance “observer” nature of the narrative, which leads the house to struggle to understand why Lawrence and Frances act the way they do, and why they decide to burn down their home. That’s where the heart of this story is: it’s full of contradictions, unanswered questions, and nonsensical decisions from the characters, and the aim is not to explain or justify any of it (not that I’d want to with characters like these two who are just. very morally fucked up).

Lawrence and Frances are awful people, but they are super fun to write. They’re married, but they’ve known from the start that they don’t love each other in that sense. They shout, fight, challenge each other, try to kill each other, but they don’t hate each other. There is this sort of mutual respect between them, that they both know the type of people they are and have no interest in improving or redeeming themselves, so are perfectly content in this messy, tangled “harmony” they’ve found together. But also they would definitely kill each other for the life insurance?? And there’s probably an unspoken competition over who can get it first? The chaos of it all!

Frances imagines baking Lawrence’s favourite cake - her famous lemon drizzle - and pouring the contents of his ashtray into the batter. She daydreams of crushing his sleeping pills into icing sugar. She’ll collect his life insurance with a funeral veil in time for New Years and kiss the neighbour’s wife at midnight.

Frances is textbook Unhinged Gal and one of my main goals to improve this story is to really push her boundaries because she already has little to none. She locks herself in the bathroom and pretends to fall asleep so she can berate Lawrence for not checking on her, she daydreams about poisoning him with baked goods, she has an affair with the neighbours wife. That being said I don’t think I’ve figured her out on a deeper psychological level, and I plan to focus on her specifically in the edits. The house takes a particular dislike to Lawrence because he only got the house via inheritance and is again, awful. Lawrence is a liar first and a human second but it’s like he doesn’t even try to make those lies believable, my personal favourite lie of his being when he pretended to be a war hero to gain the respect of neighbours and be invited to parties so he could steal ashtrays and other little trinkets (pack it up magpie). He gives me the impression of someone who doesn’t care if he isn’t believed, because he probably believes the lies himself.

He grins to nobody, licks non-existent blood off his lips from non-existent prey.

My favourite part of the story is the ending even though it has been SO difficult to navigate and it needs the most work. What I love though is there’s a distinct tonal shift and it gets very intense. Not to go to town with the fire imagery but the story really feels like holding a lit match and not thinking much about it but the flame keeps growing and growing and suddenly its burning your finger and oh geez how did the fire get that big so quickly. But overall, very fun story, very chaotic, needs a lot of work. I don’t really know when I’ll go back to this, I’m lowkey dreading it, but I would love to give this messy story justice!

To summarise:

Frances:

unhinged but it’s kinda hot??

good morning i am wake and ready to cause problems

literally would not endorse her in real life but like it’s my story and i’m allowed to have fun with the chaotic female characters

what if we were neighbours in loveless marriages,,,, and we are both girls?

makes a mean lemon drizzle cake tho

Lawrence:

clown man

literally being bullied by a bunch of wood

was a magpie in a past life and now he’s not even that good at it

why is everyone mean to me???? all i did was be the worst

honestly surprised he’s not dead yet either from his wife or his own dumbassery

The House:

kinda savage

why do humans feel emotions they are so complicated and annoying

longs for the boring white picket fence but also it is a bunch of wood and cannot have dreams or desires and all of this is based on taught traditions and false ideas of worth

??? what are the rules for when your oc is a house ???

there are none. go wild

And that’s it for now! I would share the playlist but it is literally 3 songs, and all the moodboards are just Houses On Fire And Maybe A Lemon Tree. As I said this has post has been sitting in my drafts unfinished for most of September, so I’m just happy to get it out there. I do love this story a lot but it needs a lot of work, and I’m real excited to talk about the stories I’m working on currently and hopefully (!!) where my collection is headed.

-Chloe

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