Performed by Val Cole
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Get to know the writer:
1. What is your short story about?
I like to have the reader tell me what it’s about when they read or hear a piece of my writing as I think we all have different things we take away
from writing.
For me, I’m interested in the moments when people change, when what they’ve been doing for a very long time suddenly shifts,
it’s no longer satisfying or no longer works, and they take a turn. In this flash fiction piece, Della literally takes a turn from driving to work, to driving to a new life for herself. Think of those moments for yourself, when did you take a detour and shift something in your life? Della’s life hasn’t worked out as she intended. She wanted children, didn’t have them, and has had to be self-sufficient, working the same job dutifully for years.
2. What genres would you say this story is in?
Flash fiction.
If you want to see skilled flash fiction writers, watch for the work of Kathy Fish or Charmaine Wilkerson.
They are truly adept flash fiction writers and Kathy teaches flash fiction workshops.
3. How would you describe this story in two words?
life change
4. What movie have you seen the most in your life?
Planes, Trains and Automobiles
The scene outside the motel as the John Candy and Steve Martin are headed to “the people train” was filmed in Braidwood, Illinois, a motel you pass often on I-55 if you’re traveling through Illinois.
5. What is your favorite song? (Or, what song have you listened to the most times in your life?)
Anggun’s “Snow on the Sahara”
I first heard Anggun during her performance on David Byrne’s “Sessions at West 54th”
6. Do you have an all-time favorite novel?
So many. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
7. What motivated you to write this story?
I love tipping points, when enough is enough. Tipping points are salient, liminal spaces: the person moves from one room of their life, into a hallway of sorts, where the options are limitless for them. They could go to another room, they could go out the door, they could get in a car, they could run away, etc. What prompts a person to get to this tipping point?
Is it a sudden trauma, a swift shift, or an accumulation which eventually prompts a change of direction for the person? What prompts a change for you?
8. If you could have dinner with one person (dead or alive), who would that be?
Um, I’d expand the table.
A fuller table would include Dave Grohl, Hugh Grant, my great great grandmother Hattie Hays, my dear friends Nora Ross Ward and Dirk Ficca, the Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, my maternal grandparents, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rumi, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Jane Kenyon, Julian of Norwich.
If just one person, I’m eating dinner with Jesus.
9. Apart from writing, what else are you passionate about?
I love to dig in the dirt and plant flowers and prairie plants.
I care deeply about the environment and working to restore it. I read and write poetry.
I love my spin class crew.
I am ten years into being a dog person, after being a cat person all my life, and I get it now. I’m a wife and mom, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a friend,
all of these fill me up every day.
10. What influenced you to enter your story to get performed?
I love to hear people speak, tell stories.
I’m a Presbyterian minister and I believe in the power of the spoken word.
When I was a college instructor< I was very aware some of us prefer to hear something rather than read it.
Either way, I think a story can come to us in a new way when spoken.
It’s hardwired in us to sift out meaning in stories, to appreciate when someone can tell a good one, one that’s memorable for us.
11. Any advice or tips you’d like to pass on to other writers?
Write for the love of it. Rejection and acceptances are part of the turf,
but the connections you make when writing, the “aha moments” for yourself or your characters, those are gifts, hidden until you happen upon them.
Remember to shift gears if a writing project isn’t working.
If you’re writing a novel and you get stuck, shift to poetry, an essay, or a flash fiction piece.
Cross train in your writing like you do at the gym, use all the muscles.
Your writing voice matters. Maybe we haven’t heard your story yet?
Brew a strong pot of coffee, I’m going with Folger’s Black Silk coffee, and hit the keyboard or journal or cell phone notes, and begin again.
Della One Morning
Word Count: 695
Della’s spine eeked pain all up and down it as she walked to her car under Bonita Spring’s morning starlight. Della realized she no longer carried keys in her hands with keys pointing out between her knuckles, to prevent an attack. She was sixty-three, didn’t think anyone would bother now. No fear of pregnancy if they did.
Della looked back at her apartment building and saw Luna’s light on. Luna and her husband Jeremiah and their kids would be up, going to work and daycare early, so they could make their shifts.
Humidity in the air was hanging like regret, like the dress on the door that should never have been shed with the wrong man, a guy who wouldn’t remember thanks to Jack down his gullet, and here it was, water in the air that would make her car gummy and grumpy and coughy, like COPD or worse. Had Della had children, she’d have been able to call one, if they lived close, for a ride, if they were early risers, if they’d taken after their mama, but she had no kids, and an Uber felt like defeat, a sign you didn’t have anybody to call in an emergency.
Della’s Corolla coughed and caught, the sound she’d prayed for, and she reached for the wooden Mary from Fatima, standing in her car cupholder to protect her. She told herself it was like a doll, yet Della put Mary the doll in every car she ever borrowed or owned. Mary had been Aunt Glenda’s, and Mary protected Aunt Glenda from all sorts of harm.
The handsy customer got transferred out of Florida, thanks to Della’s prayers to Mary, and a season in which Mary the doll even went into the diner with her, in her apron, such were the advances of the man with the thick hands and halitosis for days.
Della scooped hair out of her eyesight while the motor warmed. Maybe a breeze blowing in, maybe rain.
She’d worked this shift at O’Briens diner for seventeen years. When Mark needed her on her day off, in she came. In seasonal surges, Della was in place, clean, ready, serving with a smile.
But hurricane Milton— when she’d had to evacuate to a Motel 6 near Ocala— when storm surge threatened to flood the whole area, up to eight feet, Milton was something else.
Della had a wad of cash on the lower level of the armrest storage spot, down in the false bottom, cash that regulars slipped her around holidays.
Della’s new boss Steve was a jackass, with beach volleyball dreams. Della could feel it in her back how his talking made her tense, her shoulders up to her ears with him around.
At the stoplight, Della could see she was the only car among contractor trucks, going to paint, restore storm damage, replant gardens, make things right again after.
Instead of getting into the left turn lane off Tamiami, Della didn’t indicate.
She got all the way over and headed right, onto Bonita Beach Boulevard. She had ten minutes to go look at the Gulf. It was dark, but enough moon to see water. Her engine was making no coughs or sputters, warm and ready, it could go all day, which prompted Della, instead, to go straight, north.
Della could leave the dream of the child she thought she was carrying when she was thirty-eight, the one she thought was making her abdomen bigger only to find out it was a fibroid and nothing more. She could let go of Steve’s hovering. She could put miles between herself and her aching knees, both needing replacement. Mary felt warm in her hand from her perch above the wad of cash hidden below. Luna could send her what she needed from her apartment, Della’s lease had only two months left.
Mary the doll, like a dousing rod, could point the way up and out of these flood zones. Maybe the water she needed was the Mississippi? Maybe she could head west to New Orleans and go north there, have some oysters, heck, the world was her oyster. The heat from Mary seemed to be agreement.
Festival Reviews 