SmokeLong Quarterly

The narrator decides to leave out significant aspects of their best friend’s life when writing his obituary. Who do you think the narrator was considering when making this decision?

I admire this question. It furtively asks who the narrator’s setting out to protect, themself or the deceased? How this question is answered might color the way readers interpret the narrator’s motivations, as it should. To me, the narrator is thinking of everyone but themself and the deceased.

You’ve portrayed a dichotomy between the narrator and their friend. How do you imagine these two met, and when do you think their lives began to diverge?

If I imagined how they met, I’d have written a different story, a longer one, probably. What I do know is where they met, and it was in a world that abated their full potential for self-actualization. Every person in the story, even those barely mentioned, is stunted through little fault of their own. As for divergence, the friends’ lives never diverged for me because they were unable to truly converge. Instead, they were in a kind of orbit or symbiosis, like a stone skipping atop water—gravity forcing a transient connection, the world pulling them apart, then gravity again, and so forth.

There’s a tenderness in the narrator that the friend also possesses by the end of the story. Do you think many people in the friend’s life were able to see this side of him?

I’m so appreciative you noted this because it’s important to me that readers reflect on this dichotomy, this emotiveless flatline of a man who vulnerably displays a modicum of praise and intimacy in a single brief moment. That moment is everything for the narrator and to the story itself. But no, I don’t think others saw him behave tenderly. And to be honest, I believe others might find the entire story untender in itself, and that’s fair, too. But where I come from, this is tenderness, often expressed only in brief shimmers and muted ways.

The final line carries a quiet understanding, filled with a sense of longing. What led you to end the scene there, rather than taking it a step further?

I feel stories invoke the sincerest sense of longing when they provoke it in their readers, best done, perhaps, by leaving the ending unmoored. That said, I don’t always do that, and I don’t always believe it’s right for every story. I do, however, believe it’s appropriate in “Obit.” The characters’ lives lack ideal endings; therefore, so, too, does the story. Besides, we need more fiction that forces us to ask questions, that leads us to the threshold but then walks away. We live in a world where the “answer” to everything is in our hands. Whatever the question, just Google it. Fiction of value must do more, at least some of the time.

I could speculate on this story’s final sentiment—the intimacy of their bodies creating torque. There’s an unspoken connection: perhaps the friendship could evolve, or maybe the friend carries an immense burden due to his shortcomings—possibly both are true. Has this always been the nature of their friendship, and did they each get what they needed from one another at this moment?

Yes, I believe their friendship has always been “just on the cusp of,” if that makes sense. And I love the last part of your questions. I think they got what was necessary from each other but not what they needed, and certainly not what they wanted or perhaps deserved.