Verisimilitude; Plus, a Sestina

[truepenny]

[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, August 7, 2010]

Last Sunday afternoon, I broke my ankle. (Posts with details here and here.) Obviously, I’ve spent most of my time since then stoned on first Percocet and then Oxycodone, so it’s good that the accident itself has given me a topic for a post–namely verisimilitude versus what my partner-in-crime, Elizabeth Bear, calls second order cliches. (I would never use another person’s broken ankle as fuel for my creativity, but using my own broken ankle is not merely thrifty, it gives me something to think about, which has been essential at more than one point recently.)

The accident occurred as I was walking across a slight grassy slope with a couple of other people, toward a barn in which people and horses were warming up for a Training level dressage test. (Yes, the irony is mighty. I was at a horse show and my broken bone has nothing whatsoever to do with horses.) I slipped.

I can’t reconstruct exactly what happened. I think that my right foot must have skidded out from under me from right to left (also downhill), but honestly, I can’t say for sure. I don’t remember that part. I do remember hearing my ankle break and knowing immediately and absolutely what it was. It was a wet, tight snap. It did not sound like a gunshot or a snapping branch or any of the other second order cliches that people use in stories. It sounded like a bone breaking.

The people with me were convinced I must have hit my head. That’s what my ankle breaking sounded like to them, like my head hitting a rock.

One of the people watching the warm-up was a person who had training for dealing with this sort of situation (and believe me, I am grateful to him beyond the telling of it). He said he heard my ankle break from the barn, a good twenty or thirty feet away. He knew immediately what it was, too.

Second order cliches are pernicious; they’re ruts in our use of English. (I have a terrible time with them, as Bear can testify.) In this specific case, they’re also misdirection: they obscure the truth not merely with the sort of soft cloud of familiarity they draw between reader (and writer) and story, but also by comparisons that change the nature of the event they describe. I’ve been thinking about this all week, while stoned on painkillers, and it has turned itself into a sestina. Apparently, Percocet makes blank verse easy. Certainly, it does make one’s thoughts turn back on themselves in ways that make sestinas inevitable.

Percocet Sestina

Untrue, the story: when you break a bone,
The sound is like a twig or rifle shot.
But it isn’t. It’s a stingy sound
And mean. Unmistakable, inside
At least. I knew the bone was broken truth
Before I hit the ground. Before the pain.

It’s good, that story. It says that when the pain
Comes down, it will not be your real bone,
But a twig, a bullet, anything but the truth
That you yourself are not the bullet shot
But, quivering, the doe rabbit, torn inside
And rent, every breath a sobbing sound.

Not a story, not a twig (the sound
Clean and dry, free of strength or pain).
You are not a twig, not dead inside.
You are meat and blood and broken bone,
And if you could escape, like a shot,
You’d run to story, leave behind the truth.

Stories–twigs and rifles–hurt less than truth:
The suddenness, the slip, the fall, the sound,
Not crisp like twigs, not distant like a shot,
But wet and all too close and thick with pain.
It is no safe-soft story, but your bone;
It breaks within your private story, inside

The border lines policed and watched, inside
The place where stories spin and toil, where truth
Is made. In this place, it’s not just bone
That breaks. The sound–the snap–is more than sound;
It tells your helpless imperfection, the pain
To come. It would be easier to be shot,

To end the story by firing squad: the shot
Like punctuation, nothing left inside–
No embarrassment, no circling pain–
But that’s a story, not the needed truth.
We know truth by the sound it makes, the sound,
Wet and sharp and cruel, of breaking bone.

ENVOY
The breaking bone, the petty sound of truth,
No shot, no story–not inside. But pain.

Comments

[marycatelli]

Of course, to convince readers of that in a story, you'd have to go on for just about as long as you did here.