Nothing Remains Still: Stories and a Novella

Abstract

Nothing Remains Still is a collection of short stories and a novella. The series of short stories, "The Assortment 1-4" chronicle the childhood of a young girl, her siblings, and her mother, and the lives they lead in the gated, but impoverished, community, in which they live. The tone of the stories is meant to be surreal, approaching the dystopic, as a way to reveal the underlying horror of growing up in low-income housing. The story, as so many of these stories do in their real life correlates, ultimately ends in tragedy for the central family. The novella, Nothing Remains Still, is an epistolary tale of a young woman who rediscovers her mother, and herself, while training to become a psychoanalyst. The novella is about movement and stagnation, or false or artificial stagnation. In this context, the Heraclitus quote, "All entities move, and nothing remains still," which acts as the novella's epigraph, serves to introduce a kind of cosmological conceit concerning bodies of matter and how the study of physics situates inanimate objects. I had my narrator apply this conceit to people, as well, and to situate human bodies as also being physical objects subject to the same physical laws. The quote is meant to signal that the narrator's journey is in constant flux -- there are no endings, happy or otherwise, just a transfer of energy into one thing or another.