How They May Be: After the Fall

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I am no viper, yet I feed

On mother's flesh which did me breed.

I sought a husband, in which labour

I found that kindness in a father:

He's father, son, and husband mild;

I mother, wife, and yet his child.

How they may be, and yet in two,

As you will live, resolve it you.

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Afterword & post-mortem:

(The following is eminently skippable; merely a collection of some of my thoughts about writing this story and its predecessor. Given how long it took me, I amassed a fair number.)

I did not originally intend for there to be any sort of sequel to 'How They May Be;' I had seen their story as essentially complete. The events which would follow were left as vague hints and suggestions, unworthy of being explicitly covered. I moved on to writing something unrelated. But as I began having trouble making progress with this other work, bits and pieces of what would eventually become 'After the Fall' started to come to me. I decided that it might be a story worth telling after all - though I was surprised, wrapping it up, to find that it ended up somewhat longer than its predecessor.

Ultimately, the two accounts comprise the story of Mark's acceptance of his feelings - beginning with what I might call the instinctual, proceeding through the emotional, and ending up with the intellectual. Instinctual acceptance occurs essentially at the very beginning of the first story, as he experiences a bodily attraction to Emily. The progression towards emotional acceptance is the basic conflict in that story; it has largely occurred by the time he makes his reflection that 'something has changed,' that it is not a mere lust he feels but fully-fledged romantic love. 'After the Fall,' then, is primarily about the (unwilling) achievement of intellectual acceptance.

I set out, at the very beginning, to write a realistic account of a relationship of this kind. Perhaps not of a typical real example, which would undoubtedly be a great deal uglier, but a story involving people who, hopefully, ring true. Emotions that a person in that situation would actually have. Dialogue that human beings might actually say...these were, I found, lacking in the majority of the stories of this genre I have read. Understandably so, of course; most such writers have different goals in mind. Nevertheless, it was what I hoped to achieve. You may decide for yourself whether or not I have done so.

The fundamental question in all works of this kind is, of course, "how does such a relationship come to be?" Fathers do not generally pursue their daughters. I tried to come up with a reasonable answer for this, though it is not explicitly addressed in the literal text of the stories. I did, however, sneak in something of a reference to it. The main character's name, Mark Robert West - given in full at only one point, in the first story. It might be abbreviated as Mark R. West, which, reversed, gives West R. Mark, a reference to the Westermarck effect. This is the psychological mechanism evolved in humans to help prevent incest; sexual attraction tends to be mutually suppressed if two people live in close proximity while one of them passes through early childhood (before/around age six). Mark's sporadic home presence prior to this point, the idea goes, avoided this effect, and 'primed' the two of them for attraction, something which was then largely accomplished by his return at a particularly vulnerable point in Emily's life. If anything, the unrealistic element was Mark's failure to notice or realize this attraction until she had reached the age of majority...but I needed that conceit, if nothing else, in order to abide by the strictures of submission to this site. I already fell afoul of them once, writing too descriptively of Emily's thoughts of her father during childhood. I don't think, in any case, that it quite breaks believability.

Another little reference; the title of the first story comes from a play also alluded to while the two are on the beach in Hawaii; Shakespeare's "Pericles, Prince of Tyre." The title character, in the first act, attempts to answer a riddle in order to win the hand of the daughter of the king of Antioch; if he fails, he is to be killed. The riddle is reproduced at the end of this story, and suggests that the king is in fact in an incestuous relationship with his daughter. Those who answered correctly, thus, were also killed for slander against the king. It's rather a nasty situation to set up, honestly.

And a curiosity. The bible passage referenced as forbidding incest is, of course, accurate, but the part quoted is not the whole of it. After that generalized prohibition, there is a seemingly exhaustive listing of precisely the relations that are forbidden. A man is not, it indicates, to have sex with: his mother, his stepmother, his sister, his half-sister, his grand-daughter (by his son or his daughter), his step-sister (if born after his step-mother marries his father, as I read it), his aunt (on his mother's or his father's side), the wife of his uncle, his daughter-in-law, his brother's wife, both a woman and her daughter, a woman and her grand-daughter, his wife's sister if his wife is still alive...and then we get out of the relationship-based ones and into "no sex during a woman's period" and "no gays." The point is, there's a rather glaring omission from this list, considering its otherwise thorough nature. I am not entirely certain whether 'daughter' was left off because the author thought it so obvious as to not need mentioning, or because he didn't actually think it was wrong.

'After the Fall' actually ended up being more solely focused on the two main characters than I intended, and really than I like. I had originally had in mind to bring back the Laeners and Katheryn. The former would be visiting with Emily and Mark, and Mark would reveal their relationship - demonstrating acceptance, even in the face of society's judgment. The problem there is that the judgment really would be too harsh; I couldn't think of a viable way to create that scene which wouldn't, realistically, result in terrible consequences, so I had to scrap it. Katheryn, I thought, would do some snooping, realize just who Emily was, and attempt to blackmail Mark - only to be convinced by Emily that she should not. I liked this plotline, but I couldn't find a place to put it; the context essentially required that it go after Mark's acceptance, after the hiking scene, but this is where things are already winding down. It would not be proper storytelling to start up another big threat there. So I had to ditch that as well.

Little things. I think I did a passable job at creating differing 'voices' for Mark and Emily, the former more formal. In the first story I just kept a few rules of thumb - Mark pauses with 'Ah,' Emily with 'Um.' Mark says 'yes,' Emily 'yeah.' Emily prepends many of her statements with "I mean." The difference turned out stronger in this one, I believe, though I more or less maintained these rules.

In any case, their story is now quite complete; I will be writing no more of it. It is in fact vaguely frustrating writing something which I do not feel remotely comfortable sharing with anyone I know, and likewise upsetting that this has, despite that, been the longest work I have produced in quite a while. I will be attempting to produce something more presentable, next, which will not be shared on here. But depressingly, I do have a handful of notions for works which would have no other outlet. If I stall again, I may have little choice but to turn to those.

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Comments and criticism on 'After the Fall' are, of course, very much welcomed.