The setting sun filled the sky with orange, but when she looked up from her room’s window, the sky appeared grey. It was a cold, winter evening and after 6 pm, a clock on her room’s wall had stopped ticking. Outside, a street dog yelled a frightening call. He must be feeling cold, she wondered.
She flung a thick pink shawl on her shoulders and reached for the attic to get an old sweater from the trunk. The wooden stairs were rickety and old. As she climbed, they creaked.
She hadn’t climbed this staircase in the past three months. The lights upstairs needed to be changed. Most of them had their glass broken by an aggressive storm that came a few months ago, in the monsoon. She had to carry a lamp as she climbed the stairs. As she put one foot after the other, the lamp dangling from her fingers oscillated from side to side like a pendulum. As it did, it spilled pools of glowing yellow light on the giant paintings that hung on the side walls. The gold trimmed edges of the paintings glittered in the lamplight. Some pools revealed expressionless faces of her family members that looked as if they were gazing right at her, not in a happy way.
She reached the attic and unbolted the door. Everything inside was dusty. The murmuring dust particles formed a disturbing halo around the lamp. She walked to the bronze trunk and tried to open it. It wouldn’t open. Its super-old antique handle seemed to be rusting with years of neglect. She placed the lamp on top of an empty shelf. To squeeze out maximum strength of her muscles, she stretched her right leg from the back and started pulling on the trunk’s stubborn handle vigorously.
It must have been close to five minutes when the handle appeared to surrender to her will. She pulled it from the knob, swung it upwards, and settled it against the wall. The inside of the trunk looked like another world in contrast to the suffocating desert of dust that surrounded the trunk.
Lounging within the dark blue velvet lining of the trunk, there were expensive and colorful fabrics, apothecary-style glass bottles of perfume, thick hardcover books, and boxes of mysterious trinkets that glittered in the lamplight. She bent down to dive into this vast ocean of luxury and pulled out a silk bag.
She pulled a string and unfastened the bag and pulled out an orange sweater. The sweater appeared to have been sewen for a toddler. Above one sleeve, near the left shoulder, there was a ripped strand of orange wool. For just as much time as the sound of a sparrow’s chirp lasted outside, she stared at the sweater, lost in thoughts.
Then, as if jolted back to the present moment, she flumped the trunk close, grabbed the lamp, and rushed down the stairs. The stairs creaked even more, the echoes of their groaning sounds screaming at her as she walked away towards the front door. She flanked the door open and stepped out on the street, where she thought, was the dog that was yelling the frightening calls due to cold.
The dog wasn’t there. She stood there for a long time. She looked here and there, on the sides and around the neighbours’ gardens. The dog had disappeared. Where did he go? Will he die in the winter? She looked at the orange sweater. If he would have waited just a little bit more, she could have saved him. With the saddening thought possessing her, she walked into the house and closed the door tight shut.
She walked to her room, turned off the lights, and slipped inside the blanket on her bed. Moon’s uncaring white light entered through the window and spilled itself here and there. The curvy crests and valleys of her blanket cast shadows on the ceiling. She was still sitting, not lying down for sleep.
She could not know whether it was her time to sleep yet, because the clock had stopped ticking. So she took out the orange sweater clenched under her elbow. Faint shadows of a tree leaves crept across the floor. She didn’t notice it. She was busy looking at the sweater, as if recalling something she thought she had forgotten.
Then it came to her, tumbling like a rush of chemicals inside her body. She couldn’t see in the dark but she knew that droplets of sweat were bubbling up on her forehead, inside her chest, and between her legs. She remembered it, scene by scene, sound by sound. As she did, she started crying, at first in faint sobs, then in full-blown screams.
The
frightening screams shook awake a street dog from his sleep. He thought someone
around was feeling cold. He shivered. In the sky, the moon hid behind a cluster
of clouds.
What emotion this short story triggered inside you? You’ll
probably say, grief. And although, there are bits of horror, mystery, and humor
in the story as well, the primary emotion that it evoked was grief. You may
like to call its emotional cousins like melancholy, depression, sadness, or
pain, but essentially it was grief.
For this story, grief is the primary pintuck that is holding together the entire fictional narrative. This illustrates what the celebrated writer Edgar Allan Poe called the “single effect theory,” also known by phrases like “unity of impression” and “unity of effect.”
According to Poe, the “single effect theory” is a brilliant way
to learn how to craft a short story. The theory states that a short story
should revolve around a single, intense emotion, such as dread, grief, anger,
fear, etc. You can refer to Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions for a full list
of emotions you can use as starting prompts for your story.
The idea of Poe’s Single Effect Theory is that every
sentence, every incident, every detail, or character should converge to provoke
one, singular, pre-conceived, desired emotion in the reader. It can also be a
single psychological or intellectual state, such as confusion or contemplation.
Nothing that is extraneous to this singular state should be added to the story.
It’s like, looking at the story as if it were a machine engineered
with various elements where each element worked together to serve a singular
purpose. You can also imagine it with the example of a song’s guitar notes. The
notes might have different leads, multiple chords, but there is always a dominant
chord that guides the rest of the melody.
Poe believed that writing isn’t a random craft born out of spontaneous bursts of inspiration. Rather, it’s quite alike solving a mathematical problem. A story doesn’t come out from a random burst of inspiration, but is constructed piece by piece with words, sounds, images, and other elements. He, himself, applied this technique in his work, where he explored the darkest recesses of his mind, the madnesses, the obsessions, the psychological terrors.
His poem, The Raven, is centered around the emotion of
deep melancholy. Many of his works express the emotion of poetic beauty often
linked to sadness and loss.
His “Single Effect Theory” is a fascinating lesson that also
teaches us a way of exploring our own inner psyche, where we can magnify each
emotion and lay it out bare and naked on the paper for our mind to see and
reflect. It’s a focused meditation into the self carried out on the vehicle of
words, via writing. It’s both a prompt and the way, whichever way you like to
see it, and use it.
