Up

Assistant Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: Whenever I read or teach a piece of fiction, I always think about movement. As a reader, what pulls me through the piece? What keeps me racing toward the end? In Tanya Whiton’s “Up,” movement works on both a literal and figurative level. The piece begins with physical movement, the narrator rising and falling on her swing. When that same upward momentum transforms to a figurative ascent at the end of the story, the transition feels both wonderfully surprising and inevitable.

Hear Tanya read the story:

 

Up

I grip the chains, tense my thighs, and point my toes. Repeat. My feet go up, they go down. Up, down. The girl next to me is a flying blonde cloud, a nameless blur with a new box of sidewalk chalk. When we get bored with swinging, we return to our squat brown apartment building and draw roundheaded hoydens in triangle dresses, cubist dogs, and other ciphers all over the stairwell.

Later I will wash the pastel figures off our concrete steps with a bucket of soapy water and a scrub brush. I will remove any traces of what my dad calls “graffiti.”

 We don’t write our names on walls. That girl has ugly plastic toys. She eats too much candy. Her father is a salesman who nightly drops one shoe . . . then the other.

We lived below them. We worked hard. We moved up.