Subverting the Expectation: Deborah

This is very basic stuff, here

So this one time in college, Deborah and I dropped acid…

So start too many of my best stories. I could write a collection in which every short story began with that line. But this particular time, we dosed on a Saturday and tripped, and she managed a couple hours’ sleep before she had to work on Sunday morning.

Her job? She was a server at IHOP, and parched from all the dancing we’d done. In those days she had to wear a uniform that included a flared skirt and frilly apron and she slung heavy plates of pancakes topped with whipped cream and strawberries, feeding big families who’d just left church services. Not long into her shift, she gulped down a tall glass of orange juice — not realizing that citric acid would reactivate the LSD still in her system.

We were both work/study students who worked on campus at the University of Oregon, and worked off-campus jobs, and Deborah couldn’t afford to get fired. Still, she’s tripping balls, with all the church grannies turned into cratered monsters, and all the kids becoming laughing goblins. The piled-up pancakes and fruit morph into living masses of pulsing mush, and the slow-motion glug-glug of the chocolate or maple syrup poured from sticky pitchers holds her spellbound. The Reddi-wip seemed to explode from the pressurized cans. She tried not to scream as gargoyles asked her for more coffee and strips of bacon seemed to crawl like inchworms across tabletops. She had to shut her eyes when a wizened troll broke the yolk of his runny eggs.

What’s worse, this one high schooler busboy kept eyeing her in the dining room. Just watching her, like he knew she was fried. On her break she sat hunched in the staff room. The busboy came in and asked, “Deborah, are you okay?”

She said she was.

He said, “You don’t look okay.”

She broke. She told him she was on acid.

At that, the busboy said, “Me, too!”

The sudden shift from horror to relief made them laugh, and they finished the shift by coaching each other through their hallucinations.

It’s called “Subverting an Expectation” and it’s a basic way to create instant relief or dread

Consider stories where everything is going swimmingly, but then things tank. Like when Scarlett O’Hara is visiting Rhett Butler in jail, and she’s fooled him with her velvet dress, and he’s charmed until he sees her hands are raw from picking cotton. That’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Fiction is full of such moments. Those fast reversals. First, be aware of them. Then create your own.