#NationalShortStory Month Feature: Laura Rock Gaughan
Here and There Wars
By Laura Rock Gaughan
Rain-soaked news slams the front door. Another on-time delivery: tap the virtual tip jar for the grey-haired woman cruising the streets in a beat-up van. You like getting a daily paper; it makes you feel attentive to the world. And you appreciate small services that make each day hum at a pleasant frequency. How easy it would be not to think about this woman who rises at 4 am to bring the paper to your door.
Wake up, parse headlines with the first meal of the day. It’s all triumph over sorrow this morning, indigestible fruit of far-flung maneuvers, nauseating. You didn’t expect to be laid low by words on a page invading your kitchen. A mediated account, to be sure; an abstract description of pain inflicted at a safe remove. Over there, yet undeniably here: formless, spreading, and funded by you, citizen, while the planet heats to boiling and no one does a thing to stop it.
A sopping paper must be read slowly, each page lifted with care from the spongy mass below. Fact and fiction run together, reports of humanitarian food drops mixed with rocket-red-glare. Ink bleeds into the tablecloth. Coffee gulped with mass destruction burns on the way down. Sugar’s ill-advised, though there’s no lack of sweets here, as pastry boxes littering the table would attest if they could, those damning witnesses to excess: get moving.
So, it’s onto the chores with weeping. Clear away the wreckage of breakfast, sweep clutter into piles (a life’s worth; what’s a life worth?), fill the dog’s bowl with high-priced diet kibble, put out small fires set by the children, howl at a bureaucrat blocking vital paperwork (your call is important), howl at the sky. Eat something else. Poor you.
And if you can wail in your plenty house, then what about the sister you invent who’s trapped at nightfall, pinned by rockfall? Where was her son playing when the kitchen exploded? The story doesn’t say. Her son your son’s age. Why don’t they report that? Small boy lost in the ruins of home.
And this sister, does she marvel when the ashen sky rains meals-ready-to-eat? Does she raise her voice in song, thankful for gift-wrapped consolation bombs, sudden soft persuasion bombs? This is how a victor tests the air on the ground: pack meals-ready-to-eat into canary-yellow crates, stamp with greetings in a wrong language, push from planes, watch them fly. Freak birds in free-fall, scattershot crumbs of laughing gods. Hunger the soft underbelly of winning, but the papers sell a different meaning: see how we help; they will be helped. Today’s top story.
A sister is as true as the news. You’re no eye-witness, but sitting at home, sheltered on a rainy day, drinking coffee, you feel it. This is what happens.
No, she won’t sing praises as her sustenance hits the ground. She doesn’t even know about it. Live-buried in rubble, she claws her way out with filthy hands and a serving spoon, a lucky catch as the wall crumpled. Progress is measured in spoonfuls of grit, but she pretends they’re mounds of rice, warm and fragrant. To pass time in the tunnel she’s digging to her boy, to pacify her ghosts crowding round so greedily, she feeds them the way you used to feed your infants—spoon in, in again, lips ajar to mime the joy of eating.
—written by Laura Rock Gaughan in response to newspaper headlines of October 11, 2001, about US food drops following bombardment of Afghanistan. This piece appeared in CutBank in 2021, runner up in their flash fiction contest.
The women who populate Laura Rock Gaughan’s debut collection, Motherish, veer from playful to distraught, reckless to restrained, anchored to unmoored. Gambling grandmas, athletes and organists, pregnant bus passengers and punitive bank tellers are pushed to the brink by Gaughan’s distinctively precise prose, while they grapple with what it means to mother and be mothered. With various perspectives, Gaughan creates box after box—and actual chicken coops—for her characters to explode from, hide in, emerge out of, and ultimately transform.