Back Story: Rescue by Lou Gaglia
The idea for “Rescue” came from looking at an old photo of me coming out of my grandparents’ cellar. I wrote the story all the way through the first time and liked it.
Hooray! Finished!
Soon after, though, I hated it but didn’t know why for a long time except that I felt there was too much past and not enough of the present. Gradually, as it swam around inside me, the past events of the story took over, until eventually, almost the entire piece became the story of the kids, Rosemarie’s and the narrator’s. I could only finish writing it when I realized that the narrator’s reaction to a past memory was the story, and that the memory had to be clear. All of this took me many rock-headed months to figure out.
Rosemarie was a composite of some people I’d known, which is why I liked her best, because I saw them in her. The boy was an eleven-year-old who really only wanted to play and watch baseball. He had no idea who was in front of him, suffering. The hardest part of writing the story, really, was staying out of it—letting Rosemarie suffer without interfering. There was nothing the boy could do, and there was nothing his older self could do, eleven years later. There was nothing I could do as the writer, either, except let her get walloped and just take it.
Lou Gaglia’s stories have appeared recently in Bartleby Snopes, Breakwater Review, and Lowestoft Chronicle, and are forthcoming in Sheepshead Review and Spilling Ink Review. Read “Rescue” in the fall 2011 issue of Rose & Thorn Journal. And contact Lou at lou.gaglia@yahoo.com.
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