“Independent Living” by Hannah Kingsley-Ma / The Drift
- Short Story Shoutout
- Jul 9
- 7 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
I’m sorry, she said. Can you remind me who you are?
If pressed for one defining characteristic that has run across the two-dozen wildly different short stories I’ve written Shoutout appreciations for this year, I’d note the outstanding execution of a particular story element in each (character development, let’s say, or theme, setting, point-of-view) that likely raised each story above other submissions enough to get them published.
This week’s story bucks that trend in a great way. Hannah Kingsley-Ma’s “Independent Living” (5,200 words) in The Drift magazine’s latest does more than frame a love story well. I’d say it contemporizes the idea of the love story. And there’s no single story element that functions as a flashy lure to gather our attention and tease us in. It’s simply a tale that is so well told that it effectively takes you by the hand and walks you through the length of it.
It’s surprising that “Independent Living” comes to us as a short story. It reads like a novel, and I’d have been happy to watch it grow out, to see it propagate past the boundaries of its trellis, just to see how many more blooms it’d produce.
The story is focused on the relationship between a woman (Margaret), her unnamed boyfriend (our narrator), and Margaret’s grandmother. Right from the start, we’re in a triangle of connection that sweetens the telling. Margaret’s relationship with her grandmother is an integral part of the story, and the parallels between them account for much of the story’s propulsion.
We’re introduced to our triangle during a visit to Margaret’s grandmother’s retirement home. The opening sentence (“My last trip to the retirement home before Margaret and I broke up was a pleasant one”) is an anti-invitation in to a love story. We spend some time casually taking in the lunch options in the retirement home’s dining room before we get to the heart of the telling:
“My grandma is like me, Margaret often said. And when I would ask her why, she’d only say: you’ll see.”
And we do, soon enough. But first we flash back to Margaret and her boyfriend’s meet-cute at a party. There is an immediate friction between the two of them, and their conversational jousting is both entertaining and telling; we learn a lot about the pair from it. When they happen on each other again nearly a year later at a movie theater, the coincidental reconnection is called out as the “contrived province of romantic comedies.” But there’s something thornier going on. Margaret is at enough of a remove that the soon-to-be-boyfriend feels it:
“It was the first and only time in my life I felt the urge to play my cards right, the first and only time I really knew how. Margaret was a woman who needed a little convincing, which meant that she was entirely repulsed by the coercive feeling of being convinced.”
The idea of a woman “needing a little convincing” is at the heart of the old-world definition of courtship; that through effort and charm and consistency, a suitor can win the heart of their…beloved? Is that still the word? The object of their affection? Their target, maybe? The world has changed.
Now that the table is set, Kingsley-Ma goes about the work of dismantling the romantic construct almost completely. We go back to the retirement home post-lunch, where we get more of the grandmother’s history. She has lived alone for twenty-one years—after a divorce, we learn later—and insists that was her strong preference. As she got older, her son (Margaret’s father) tried to move her towards the retirement home for a host of good reasons (“What if she needed help? What if she fell? Wasn’t [her home] too much house for one person?”) But what got her there was the home’s dining plan:
I’m done making dinner, she’d said, according to Margaret. I’ve spent my whole life making dinner. Sometimes I have dreams where my sons are still young, but teenagers, you know, and they are yelling for dinner, and I’m making more and more of it, and they can’t stop eating it. Which is basically how it was. I couldn’t make enough food for them. They were ravenous.
Margaret’s grandmother is done, as she says, with this type of care. The feeling is mirrored, not surprisingly, in the relationship dynamics at the retirement home, where older men are depicted—kind of lovingly, but also with a hint of frustration—as childlike. In the story’s opening paragraph; “Margaret’s grandmother couldn’t stop laughing because her boyfriend Hal kept getting beaten at pool by a man who had gone legally blind.” A little later we meet Ned, one of her neighbors, and the boyfriend / narrator notes; “When we stepped into his apartment, I noticed a partially emptied plastic container of gingersnaps by his recliner and was flooded with affection for him.” Ned is about to be transferred to the memory care unit, and Margaret’s grandmother notes; “He has a girlfriend here […] She keeps trying to break up with him, but he doesn’t remember it, really. So.”
The women in “Independent Living”—Ned’s girlfriend, Margaret’s grandmother, Margaret in short order—seem to have had enough of the burden of care. Early in the story, the boyfriend points toward what he sees as the root of the connection between Margaret and her grandmother: “They saw each other as they truly were: people who cared about freedom.”
Margaret’s mother is effectively the opposite of her grandmother. According to the boyfriend, who loves her, she’s tolerant of everyone, is hospitable. She’s in a stable and longstanding marriage. “She was the nicest woman I knew,” he says. Margaret’s mom is someone who enjoys margaritas with her realtor friends on a neighbor’s porch—a life that Margaret does not want. By extension, Margaret doesn’t enjoy visiting the home she grew up in:
“Here, she had to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that she came from somewhere, not nowhere. A somewhere in which [when younger] she had yet to discover the indisputable rush that came from disavowal.”
Is there hope for Margaret and her boyfriend as a couple? Well, we knew from the opening line that a break up was coming. The anticlimactic argument that brings on the end arrives, not surprisingly, at mealtime:
“What would we eat that night? We had to think about that question every single day. For the rest of our lives. It exhausted Margaret. […] No more choices, please. There were always too many choices. Margaret looked at me and told me she couldn’t do it.”
The prospect of having children never comes up between Margaret and her boyfriend in the story. The idea of owning a home together is similarly dismissed, and with good reason, as is the case for most these days. Towards the end, we get this heartbreaking pronouncement from the boyfriend:
“But I’m making it all a lot more complicated than it needs to be. I think I just loved her more than she loved me.”
A legitimate response, and a universal one. That is, according to the old rules. As the new rules go—rules increasingly written by men and women as equals on nearly every plane—what does “love” mean, at least in the functional day-to-day? At its root, love revolves around the desire to be with someone. But how? As good company? To address the fear of being alone? To fill the need to be seen, heard, pushed against, sympathized with? There are precious few imperatives left.
And so, independent living. Which is one thing when you’re thirty. Another at seventy-five.
One of the joys of this story is Hannah Kingsley-Ma’s capable depiction of the boyfriend as narrator. She’s in his head and, speaking as a man, for the character as she’s drawn him, I think she nails it. The telling from both sides of the gender divide is nuanced and balanced, but it’s not without a strong, guiding opinion. Consider what the word “little” does in the following thought, delivered by the boyfriend near the close:
“I could think of worse things than a nice life. A nice life in a nice home, a nice life with my lovely little wife.”
There’s nothing in the telling that implies that’s meant to be taken ironically. As such, it’d be good reason on its own for Margaret to sign a lease on a studio apartment yesterday…
I’m only scratching at the surface here. The pleasures in “Independent Living” are many and varied. Can I say that I love this story? I can. Maybe I’m old school, but I’m fully ready to commit to it.
The Drift is a magazine of culture, literature and politics. As they describe it, they aim to introduce new work and new ideas by young writers who haven’t yet been absorbed into the media hivemind and don’t feel hemmed in by the boundaries of the existing discourse.
Their issues, published three times a year, feature longform essays and cultural criticism, short fiction, poetry, interviews, dispatches, and extremely abbreviated reviews.
In their words:
They want sharp, surprising interventions; socially engaged cultural criticism; class-sensitive analysis; pieces that point out what’s being avoided or talked around in politics, media, arts, or even academia; upbeat cynicism; un-self-serious screeds; generous takedowns; entries from the margins; fiction; poetry.
They don’t want anything that toes a party line (any party, any line); highbrow name-dropping; attacks on easy targets; dispatches from The Right Side of History; finger wagging; false binaries; anachronistic historical critiques; thoughts on Heidegger, Nietzsche, Foucault; hot takes on the latest 24-hour Twitter scandal; Marxist critiques culminating in statements about the base and superstructure; anything written by A.I.
They’re bored by your love life; chalking it up to neoliberalism; chalking it up to late-stage capitalism; open marriages; whatever’s on Netflix; performative pessimism; “downtown”; wokeness; anti-wokeness; burnout; trauma; gender essentialism; the political and psychological effects of social media; zoomers and sex; hot girls; lifestyle choices; contemporary fiction.
They pay $500 - $1,000 for short stories.
Submit fiction to fiction@thedriftmag.com Attach your work (no word limit) as a Word doc or pdf titled “lastname_firstname.”
Read more of Hannah Kingsley-Ma’s great work at her website.
Many thanks to Hannah Kingsley-Ma and The Drift for gifting us with an adorable little place of our own in “Independent Living.”
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