"Psssst, Are You Listening?" by Olga Katsovskiy
Prose
I dreamed I abandoned a gibberish talking squirrel-sized orange creature. Walking away, I could hear him scurrying behind me, chittering on and on about something, his voice dropping and rising as he hopped down the curb. I couldn’t get away.
On my teaching nights, I text my husband as soon as I get on the bus to give him time to leave home and meet me at the bus stop. I look for him, crossing the street, standing on the sidewalk. The back door opens, and I leap out for a hug. He puts my hand in his coat pocket, and we walk. I tell him about my day. We often walk an extra block so I can finish my stories, sometimes it takes two.
I saw one of those Instagram reels where a man impersonates his wife, poking fun at the fact that she doesn’t have any girlfriends to talk to. She slams her Stanley cup on the counter and recounts her day in excruciating detail. He makes noncommittal sounds and when she stops to catch her breath, he says, “That’s craaaaaazy,” and she starts up again.
I started teaching flash essay in-person and ironically, the course description is full of meandering sentences about how to be concise. In the first class, I spent quite a while praising Brenda Miller’s exquisite flash, how we can breathe life into a story through negative space, in what is said, and what isn’t, and how run-on sentences can speed up the pace, if done right, and yes you can break the rules of grammar if doing so would carry the story forward and not just to break something.
It’s easier to talk when we’re walking. We stop here and there, observe a rabbit chewing in the dark, shine our phone flashlight inside a free little library, pick up a peculiar shaped leaf, time ourselves to run in between two cycles of a sprinkler. All the while, I can’t stop talking, trying to convey how I felt about this and that, and asking questions. So many questions. When I start to think I should stop, he says, “tell me more” and squeezes my hand.
I’m the kind of person who ends a phone conversation by saying “And one more thing…” When mom drives away, she rolls down the front passenger window and we continue to talk until the honk behind her makes us say goodbyes.
I am fortunate enough to have a few friends who appreciate the written word as much as I do, who respond to my epic emails, and the PS and PPS on the back of my snail mail.
What does it mean to be self-contained? Someone asked me recently in context of creative nonfiction. Essays are curated exhibits of our lives, searching for meaning among the fragments of who we once were.
The little creature was relentless. His words seemed to outrun his little feet, tripping over himself, getting his paws dirty, propelled by the sheer determination to tell me something. I picked him up, feeling his hummingbird heart beating against my chest, going on and on. I don’t know what he said. It sounded like it meant everything and the least I could do is hold it close.
Olga Katsovskiy, writer/editor/educator, works in healthcare and is a writing instructor at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and Writers in Progress. She serves as Managing Editor & Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor at JMWW, CNF Editor at Minerva Rising Press, and reader at Reckon Review. Her craft essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in the Brevity Blog, Pithead Chapel, Short Reads, true magazine, and elsewhere. For more: theweightofaletter.com
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