“Ghosting” by Nathan Grover / Sundog Lit
“Did you really not see me there?”
Why does Short Story Shoutout fixate on new short stories, you might be wondering?
Especially when there are so many exemplary works out there, written across hundreds of years by acclaimed masters of the craft, all of them having withstood the test of time.
The simple answer is that we’re putting aside stories of old so that we can focus on today’s world and how the short story form is evolving to accommodate everything that springs from it.
What about the carnival of now, after all, and the fire-hose-blast of data, of pretense and portent, that’s dowsing us daily?
This week’s story feels like it could only have been written over the last ten years, maybe over only the last ten minutes. Give some time to Nathan Grover’s timely “Ghosting” (2,350 words) in Sundog Lit.
As writing goes, there’s plenty to recommend it. It’s succinct—a miniature—at the same time that it’s robust and universal.
Our Main Character is Jon, his partner is Victoria. They’re very kind people who think too much and work too hard. John is in the midst of a personal crisis. He’s convinced that he’s becoming invisible.
“I thought I was being pranked, but now I understand,” he said. “They don’t see me. Like physically see me.”
They being his fellow humans. To the point of Jon being inadvertently driven off sidewalks by other preoccupied pedestrians. To the point of Jon playing second fiddle (third fiddle? fourth fiddle?) to his parents’ befuddlement with high-tech, especially their cell phones.
The phenomenon seems to descend on everyone he crosses paths with, even the coworker (Fernando) he’s earnestly relating his angst to:
Across the table […] Fernando gorged himself on a falafel wrap. Muscles pulsed at the hinges of his jaw. His nostrils flared, discoloring the etches of his nose. Upon working the food down his throat, he looked thoughtfully at Jon and cleared his mouth with his tongue as though to speak—then dove in for another bite.
There, Jon thought. It’s happening again.
A really well composed and uncomfortably funny turn. Like many of the uncomfortably funny turns in Inoesco’s great play Rhinoceros, like many of the terrifyingly uncomfortable turns in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Jon’s invisibility even gets to Victoria. While making dinner together one night, she’s so preoccupied that she inadvertently sloshes a pot of boiling pasta water onto Jon, who’s standing between her and the sink. He immediately strips down to avoid a scalding, is literally and emotionally naked before her.
“Jesus, Vic. Did you really not see me there?”
“I know I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“I was right there.”
“I know!” she said.
Victoria offers this sort-of-apology, maybe the best summation yet for what the world has become since humanity’s me-ification, since the brain-rewiring that accompanied the introduction of the smartphone:
“It’s not that I didn’t see you. I knew you were there. But for a few seconds all that mattered was that I needed to get the pasta to the sink. It was like I could make the fact of you standing there untrue because I needed it to be.”
Jon and Victoria are a great couple to build the story around. They are kind to each other and compassionate generally. They’re on the same team, and their us against the world connection puts us squarely on their side.
But neither of them are immune to the world of invisibility, and the possibility of that coming between them provides the tension needed to have the story’s larger theme cohere.
Grover uses a simple framing device to kick off and end the telling.
In the opening paragraph, he introduces a “she” and a “him” (Jon and Victoria, who are introduced soon after,) playing out the beginning of what will prove to be the closing scene of the story. “He” throws something warm over his sleep clothes while “she’s” still in the shower, gets in his car and drives off to a multi-leveled parking facility:
As he pulled into an empty space, his phone buzzed beside him. He dropped the fob onto the passenger seat, got out, and hurried away between the sleeping vehicles, leaving the phone to convulse and float like an air hockey puck across the center console.
An “uh oh” moment.
It’s a very disconcerting place to start a story, like someone showing up at the beach fully-clothed, then stripping down and swimming out to sea naked.
The closing scene brings us back to that tableau, and it’s beautifully realized visually. Read “Ghosting” and drink it in. It presents Jon as a kind of sleepwalker, as a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. But what he’s really become is one of Ionesco’s Rhinoceroses.
He’s been body-snatched.
Sundog Lit is “committed to publishing pieces that engage with tension, introspection, empathy, considered positionality, thoughtful form play, emotional courage, and musicality.”
Aesthetically, they believe “there is beauty in scars on smooth skin, in the small fissures where things begin to break apart. Sundogs are not the sun itself but phantom stars appearing on the horizon, illusions produced by the play of the sun’s heat with crystals of ice. They shed their light all the same. Many are tinged with color.”
They want writing that “attempts to salvage something pure from the collision of warmth and cold, that says what it can about the world it finds itself in. We seek a diversity of voices speaking from visceral, lived experience. We like truth we can stare at until our eyes water, words so carefully chosen we want to reread them as soon as we have finished.”
They publish two issues a year (October 1 and March 1), and take general submissions from 10/1 – 12/1 (they’re currently open) and 3/1 – 5/1.
Contributors are paid $50 upon publication.
Submit short stories of no more than 3,000 words or up to 3 flash fictions of less than 750 words each in a single document.
~*~
Nathan Grover is the lead contributor for the new collaborative press, Puzzlegrass. His stories have been published by Epiphany, X-R-A-Y, ergot., and Whiskey Tit, among others, and links to them are provided at nathangrover.com.
Many thanks to Nathan Grover and Sundog Lit for the wonderful “Ghosting,” a story for our times.
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