"Ancestral Milk" by Paige Kaptuch / The Rumpus magazine
Doing it the pioneer way.
Serious short story writers are endlessly laboring over the opening words, sentences, paragraphs of their work because they know they only get one chance to turn an editor’s head.
They’re constantly working to make the telling of their stories clearer; by establishing their main characters precisely, defining their story locations in just enough detail, setting an appropriate tone, and figuring out the best way to pose a crisp thematic question.
Well, here comes Paige Kaptuch and her story “Ancestral Milk,” (5,300 words) in The Rumpus, in which we spend the first few pages as readers being deliberately unsettled, to great effect.
Kaptuch takes what is essentially one woman’s struggle with pregnancy and childbirth after a cross-country move and elevates it, through a special brand of expository pyrotechnics, to a kind of time-travel-lite. To four-dimensional story telling.
I would strongly encourage you to hold off on reading this column until after you’ve had a chance to take in this great story without any more preface, just so you can experience the thrill of discovery that I did. Please find twenty minutes in your busy schedule and do that (via the link to The Rumpus above) and revisit with me when you can. I’ll just hang here, all restless-leg-syndrome-y, tapping my watch face until you return.
Oh, hello! I didn’t see you there :) Welcome back.
So you’ve read “Ancestral Milk,” yes?
I know, right?!
Let’s get to it…
The opener is effectively one long scene, covering a solid quarter of the entire story, and it washes over us like those famous-movie-director “oner” shots—the no-cut / single-take that goes on and on, Steadicam-ing alongside a character so we can get their particular, close POV.
That character is our new mom, Zoe. She’s nursing her two-month-old daughter, Pippa, on the floor of a “white canvas tent” so that her baby’s screeching doesn’t wake up the sleeping teen girls that surround her. She hears a crack crack cracking outside the tent (is it gun fire?) followed by the “thunderous sound of hoofbeats” and the “whistles that cowboys make in a roundup.” She’s rightly terrified, and we’re right there with her. What, exactly, is happening here?
Kaptuch is already dropping clues for us. The crack crack cracking sound reminds Zoe of “the paper white party snappers she threw at the pavement as a kid,” so we know this is a contemporary tale. But her friend, Susan, is in a “white long-sleeved nightgown” and shouting “Oh my heck! Girls wake up!” to the teens—both the nightgown and the exclamation are decidedly old-timey.
It turns out Zoe, Susan and the girls are in the middle of a historical reenactment of the settler migration that brought Zoe’s ancestors to this Utah location more than one hundred years ago—an effort to educate the kids (and an unsuspecting Zoe) about how hard scrabble life was back in the day, and how much they have to be grateful for now.
But that fact doesn’t alleviate the stress of the situation. It could be an actual dangerous “mob” that’s attacking the camp. Kaptuch yo-yos us back and forth between what feels like genuine threat (“A bottle whizzes through the air, nearly missing Pippa’s head,”) and the oblivious horseplaying of teen boys and eye-rolling of teen girls who are soooo “done” with the whole deal.
In the midst of all this, and Zoe’s foggy, sleep-deprived state, we get a one-paragraph thumbnail of Zoe’s troubled marriage to Ben, who’s busy working a thirty-hour shift at the local ER. Ben seems to be in the nascent stages of an affair while his wife is “doing what–breastfeeding their child? Changing shitty diapers?”
Kaptuch exits the scene, finally, with Zoe taking a harried moment to pee behind a tree, after escaping the Orwellian-eye of a drone that hovers briefly in her face amidst the mayhem.
If this all went down in a movie theater, I’d be slow-clapping along with the rest of the audience for the audacity of the framing. Serious props to Paige Kaptuch for having the courage to deliberately not settle a reader into her story, to keep us off-kilter for a thousand-plus words.
Beyond the opener, the setting of the historical reenactment continues to pay off like a hot Vegas slot machine by offering up one connection after another between the past and present—about childbirth, the passing of a parent, marriage as an institution—some of them grim and others hilarious, often both. As the day we’re witnessing lengthens and heats up (with temperatures into the 90s), the creeping fear brought on by little Pippa’s failing health on this unforgiving pioneer trail keeps the stakes high and the pages turning.
And floating over all this is the fantastic creation that is Zoe’s new friend Susan; the older uber-mom who is the force-of-nature behind the historical reenactment, as well as everything else that seems to operate effortlessly in the world.
Susan (“draped in Lululemon, glowing from spin class”) provides the perfect counterpoint to Zoe’s fear and trepidation—just the kind of character-mirroring that turns the heady idea of thesis-antithesis into a fully living, breathing dramatic dynamic on the page.
Kaptuch effectively goes all Grapes of Wrath on the story’s close with a powerful breast-feeding reference that flips the end of Steinbeck’s masterpiece on its head. As Susan’s old-school maternal capabilities kick in to high-gear, the exhausted Zoe is laid out in the grass at the reenactment journey’s end, and the hands of the reenactors are laid upon her (in prayer? to hold her down?) as if she’s the corpse her mother has recently become, as if she’s the embodiment of all the great, great grandmothers that have come and gone before her.
“Ancestral Milk” is a great, great grandmother of a story.
The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. They publish new work five days a week. Their mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. They lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers that readers may already know and love. They want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.
They are open for fiction submissions now and pay $500 per prose piece. In the future, if you do not see a category listed on their Submittable page, submissions to that genre are paused while they catch up on their reading.
The Rumpus is “interested in stories that have layers, with elements of surprise and unexpected stakes and points of tension running beneath. Rumpus stories have an edge and feature unique, indelible voices. They tackle emotional depth while not being at all sentimental.” They “love it when a story's language, plot, and characters feel palpable and dynamic on the page, and a strong sense of place goes a long way.” Show them “something new, bold, brash, alive.”
Thanks to Paige Kaptuch and The Rumpus for the new, bold, brash and alive “Ancestral Milk.”
~*~
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