By Katie Worden, Editorial Assistant
Against the backdrop of Chicago, Leah Yacknin-Dawson unfolds a story of grief, pain, and love—probing the limits of each. “Interiors,” indeed, relishes the inner. It is defined by the introspective eye of its narrator, Anna, who renders her emotional landscape with as much detail and acuity as she does the outside world. The present moment of this story is short—an afternoon in the Museum of Contemporary Art—but, through Anna’s narration, becomes something expansive. Each memory or moment of introspection opens unto its own world, not unlike the artwork that Anna so carefully scrutinizes as she browses the MCA galleries. Through this deft manipulation of narrative structure, the present problem of the story—whether Anna and her sister should visit the deathbed of their mother’s abusive ex-partner—is weighted by memory made immediate. We are made witness to love and violence’s frightening overlap, to the confusion our characters find therein.
With striking prose, Dawson draws us into this uncertain world. We see this uncertainty in Anna’s tendency to define herself against and around her sister, and we see it in the story’s final image, rendered through dialogue: “‘You can’t see it, but the Sears Tower is just behind the clouds. . . . You can’t see it, but it’s there.’” The weight of things unseen, the promise of the horizon. “Interiors,” too, points toward something almost palpable, but just out of reach—an easy way out, an answer, a definition. I was reminded, here, of a line written by Elena Ferrante: “Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.” Dawson’s story is real life, or as close as it gets.
Leah Yacknin-Dawson’s “Interiors” appears in our new Spring 2024 Issue 115.
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Katie Worden is a fiction writer and second-year MFA student from New York. She is a recipient of the Fred Chappell Fellowship and the Jiménez-Porter Literary Prize. In addition to teaching undergraduate writing and composition, she currently serves as an editorial assistant for The Greensboro Review.