“Almost Astronauts”: Short Stories Page: 16
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grand metaphor provides unity and cohesion to the raw, desperate emotion the
characters experience.
The importance of the story's setting was revealed to me one night as my
friend (a Denton native) and I sat on her porch and watched lightning zipper
through the sky. We were discussing the trauma and excitement of the constant
influx and evacuation of people in Denton. The university, and the town by
extension, recycled minds, hosted a thousand births and deaths with every
admission and graduation season. She explained that among her local friends,
two attitudes prevailed. One type of person felt loyal to Denton, nostalgic, and
always returned. The other type felt trapped, a victim of circumstance who
resented every person who left for a better life.
At the same time my friend relayed this story, the heavens bloated and
buckled on our heads. I seized the image of the sudden flood, which lasted only
ten minutes or so, and used it as a metaphor for the urgency the characters feel
during every going-away party. I framed the story in water imagery, from the bog
of hesitation the narrator splashes through in the beginning to the light rain that
collects on the narrator's eyelashes in the final scene.
This ambivalence of attitudes within the town encouraged specificity in the
story's location and solidified the use of the first-person plural narrator. Though
the characters in the story each have a different insecurity, as revealed by the
photo booth, the anxiety springs from the same source: a deep-seated fear of
inadequacy. This fear extends beyond just these characters and reaches toward16
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Miller, Laura I. “Almost Astronauts”: Short Stories, thesis, May 2012; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc115120/m1/20/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .