Making It Last

Excerpt

Marcia’s thing with Anders had started one beautiful afternoon in October. They’d been taking massage classes together for months without getting a beer, wasn’t that crazy? They’d had a beer on her porch, and they’d gone upstairs to her apartment for a second round. Marcia had come back to the living room with two more cans, and Anders had kissed her. He’d stepped back and begun to shed his clothes while nearly glaring at her. He was small, sturdy, and covered in dark hair, the kind of guy who used to get shot out of cannons. The fall light made him glow.

In the years preceding massage school, there had not been many nice things in Marcia’s life. A boyfriend from her grocery store job had turned out to be violent, and her mother’s vertigo had turned out to be a tumor. She had credit card debt, car debt, undergrad debt, and medical debt, all compounding. Life felt like gray gauze. Anders didn’t.

She had set down the cans of beer, and she had undressed, too. Marcia liked her body. No one else had seen it for a while, and she was happy to have Anders staring at her with his mouth open like a mailbox. Anders’ head came only to her clavicle. He had bent towards Marcia and taken one of her nipples in his mouth. It had been like punching through a paper screen; she had gotten the word taproot in her head.

Sam Dunnington

Sam Dunnington is a writer and teacher based in Seattle. His writing has also appeared in The Missouri Review, Harper’s, and Fiction. He is at work on a novel and a collection of stories. Find out more at www.samdunnington.com.

Patrick Ryan on “Making It Last”

When I asked Sam Dunnington, author of our new issue, “Making It Last,” what was the best piece of writing advice he’d ever received, he said a professor had once asked him, in a writing workshop, “What secrets is this story telling?” In other words, Sam answered my question with a question. And what an interesting question it is. It’s a reminder of what a great short story can do: reveal things about a character that were heretofore unknown—including things the character didn’t know.

“Making It Last” is, in a way, a study of someone coming back to herself. Marcia is deep in debt, involved with an immature married man, and struggling to hold foremost in her mind her primary goal: to complete her massage training and become a licensed, practicing massage therapist. Her supervisor at the clinic where she’s in training is as officious as he is disinterested. Anders, the married man she’s involved with, is also pursuing his massage license, but instead of seeing it as a means to an end, he seems just to want something to do that keeps him away from his wife and kids. (Far from being a supportive presence in her life, he asks Marcia things like, “What makes you think you’ll get yourself out of debt if you were silly enough to get yourself into it in the first place?”)

Marcia is stuck between a rock (her debt) and a hard place (Anders). But that’s just on the surface of things. This is a story about coming back to our passion when life has tugged us away, and it’s about the promises we make to ourselves, about ourselves, that we struggle to keep against all odds. One of the secrets “Making It Last” tells is that, for as rattled as Marcia feels, and for as much precarity as she sees in her life, she has within her the means to pull through and succeed. It’s a whispered secret—do you hear it? Step into the world of Sam Dunnington’s new story, and you will.