THE LONG WALK BACK: COMMENTARY
THE LONG WALK BACK is a short story that I wrote—one of the many over my life, but one of the first serious ones—back in probably 2019 or so. It might have been earlier; I took some creative writing classes at Pima (the community college here) back in somewhere from 2016-2018, so it very well could be eight or nine years old now. I’ve only ever submitted it to a few places online, mostly because it went through a few iterations before becoming what it is in its final state. I’d actually be interested to go back and find my original draft of it. The earliest version of it that I can find is in a GoogleDocs file from 2019, but I’m pretty sure that’s newer than the first version.
Anyway, I think this set the tone for a lot of the work that I do for shorts. I really love surrealism blended with horror and existentialism. I’m almost always having an existential crisis, and I love the imagery of big black dogs as an omen. Stylistically this was something I was trying out: you’ll notice that there’s no quotation marks around any of the dialogue, something that I haven’t necessarily done in other short stories that I’ve written (as you’ll see later, when I eventually post those here). Inspired entirely by Cormac McCarthy, who famously does not use quotation marks, this was a bit of an experiment to see if it was as satisfying to write as it can be hard as fuck to read. I think it works—this is entirely personal preference, of course, but I think it adds a sort of ambiguity and melancholy to the work when it’s not quite so clear where the dialogue ends and the narration picks back up.
This is also the first entry in my portfolio that I submitted to Emerson, so I’d like to think that in some part it’s what got me accepted. It is also the first time I have ever posted this in its entirety for public consumption. Or anything of mine for public consumption, actually. Being that becoming an author is something that I’ve set my heart and soul on it seems as though I do have to, in fact, actually start sharing my work with people. Can’t keep it locked up forever and showing the same three people.
—J.
