Back Story: Because He Went Unshaven by Patricia Esposito
Flannery O’Connor said, “The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.” I was staring. He was beautiful. I stared long enough to imagine a world of possibilities around a man I didn’t know.
Writers aren’t the only people who people-watch. But they tend to get captivated by their observations, enough so that they find it necessary to devise a life for what they’ve seen. In small public exchanges, we can know only so much about a person, and the rest develops from tiny observations and what we imagine from them.
I’m reminded of when we played pretend as kids. The point of pretend and storytelling is to step into another’s shoes, to discover more about life, and in turn, more about ourselves. In pretend, think what a new prop did to the action at hand! Suddenly, a forest walk turned into a battle as a stick in the pathway became a sword to the imagining eye.
I was staring. I couldn’t know who the person really was, but I could imagine a creased brow was frustration at work, or a slight grin was fond remembrance of a night with friends. “Because He Went Unshaven” came about when a familiar person in a polite setting came in unshaven. Like a photographer wanting to take a new photo at every shift in lighting, here was a new detail, a prop that needed exploration.
So, like a kid on an adventure, I thought why not explore the exotic, why not imagine him in lands I’ve never seen? And yet, stepping into those shoes through the images, I found myself winding closer and closer to home, to what the man’s real life might be, an ordinary person in a familiar land. And it felt equally exotic. Maybe because staring does that to life, makes it fresh, makes it full of possibility.
Patricia Esposito is a freelance editor, the mother of two daughters, and is long-time married to "the boy next door." Her fiction and poetry have appeared in the anthologies Apparitions and Lights of Love, as well as numerous speculative and literary publications, including Rose and Thorn Journal, Not One of Us, Hungur, Sounds of the Night, Midnight Street, Karamu, Byline and Clean Sheets. She has recently released her first novel Beside the Darker Shore and has received honorable mentions in Ellen Datlow’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, as well as a Pushcart Prize nomination.
Read “Because He Went Unshaven” in the fall 2011 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal. Visit her at patricia-j-esposito or email her at esposito@yahoo.com.
Your article brought tears to me eyes. It is so true. When one gets too close to the magic, it often disappears.
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