Chairs

Abstract

What drives prose if it isn’t the story? Or rather, what is a story? Anton Chekhov’s famous rule of storytelling suggests that a gun should not be included in the first act if it is not going to be fired in the second, but life is full of guns and most of them don’t go off. Seemingly-important encounters go nowhere. This piece examines and attempts an opposite approach - one of loose ends, insignificance and absence. Using vignette form, small moments are celebrated and the space between suggests movement. The fiction portion, like life, is a series of emergencies of varying degree - there is only room for what is most pressing, and then we go on. The fiction portion is followed by an examination both of works that reach in similar directions and works that push back against.