by A. M. Dellamonica
A. M. Dellamonica returns to Asimov’s with their short story “The Humming of Tamed Dragons”, an exploration of trauma, airplanes, and how much of an author lives in any given character. Read it in our [May/June issue, on sale now!].
When I was about six years old, I was out in my backyard with a friend and a small airplane crashed through our backyard.
The plane smashed the new roof of the garage next door to our house, ripped through my father’s potato garden, obliterated the fence at the end of our yard, and came to rest in the other next-door neighbor’s sandbox. It was a spot where a bunch of us kids routinely played, but that family was off camping or something… nobody had been home, on that fortunate day, to invite us over.
Nobody was seriously hurt in the incident, happily, and in the grand scheme it wasn’t a particularly big or even a surprising accident. We lived under the municipal airport… little cropdusters like this one were taking off over our house all the time.
Because ours was a small town, the owner of the plane was the father of one of the kids in my second grade class, and the pilot was the father of another of those kids. The tale became a bit of a nine days’ wonder when we all got back to school.
Another thing about that summer crash was that all of my grandparents were visiting at the time… and so one of the legacies of the event was three generations of my family simultaneously coming into a little bit of PTSD… and at a time when the disorder was barely being discovered and documented.
Afterwards, the airport returned to business as usual, with planes roaring overhead all day. The psychic fingerprints of that trauma left barely visible marks all over my family, like sticky food residue deposited by tiny fingers on clean kitchen walls.
I’ve had a lot of years to come past that day, and I fly all over the world now, almost calmly. Still, the noise of airplanes bothers me at times. I dream in plane crashes, and am primed, always, to notice things like articles about acoustic sustainability in aviation—the technological search to make aircraft quieter—and the development of electric planes.
All of which is a long wind-up to saying that quite recently I had one of the experiences Huan has in my new Asimov’s story, where she’s outdoors near a major airport, coping with the noise of planes landing and taking off. I was just in a line-up for a music concert, but in the story, Huan is trying to do something quite important despite the plane noise. The sheer presence of that sound makes everything harder.
And at that point real life and fiction diverge, because what Huan is doing at the airport is something entirely outside my experience. For her, the planes are background noise, and a different shadow from the past is front and center.
One of the ways we sometimes redeem the harder parts of growing up is by going into careers that let us try to do better for others than was done for our young selves. Huan, in addition to having issues with airplanes, is an adult survivor of childhood parental abduction. She has developed an algorithm that is supposed to identify parents who are gearing up to snatch their kids illegally.
Huan is working on proof of concept, on ensuring her technology can be adopted… while also dealing with the noise of planes overhead.
Writers do this: we put things into stories that are true pieces of the past, and we mix them up with pieces of the world that we’ve only read about or studied or imagined, elements that aren’t autobiography. I’ve never been abducted by a non-custodial parent. I just got interested, months ago, when I realized there are uncountable adults moving through the world, every day, who have survived custodial interference and perhaps left their kidnappers—their family—behind. Somehow that sparked a story.
The world holds terrors and we put them in fiction. The world holds wonders and those go into it too.
That movement from the factual to the fictional, is something I love about fiction. Blurring the boundary, choosing things from both the real and unreal… it’s a delight, a spark, a source of joy.
And the real furniture in your stories isn’t always the bad stuff! I set the story at Vancouver International Airport, the launch point of many of my real life’s great adventures. I took Huan to have a meltdown beside the spectacular Bill Reid sculpture, Spirit of Haida Gwai, which sits in that airport.
The world holds terrors and we put them in fiction. The world holds wonders and those go into it too.
Writing short stories takes a lot of craft. Every layer you add on a character adds complexity… and length! In “The Humming of Tamed Dragons,” Huan is driven by the memory of having been kidnapped and has this secondary trauma from having been involved in an airline incident.
Imbuing a story with a few clashing layers gives you a super-interesting character or situation to write about. Then you have to give everything enough attention and nuance to make the story interesting and believable. If you keep it simple… if you don’t layer in enough, the story might lack sparkle. For me, at least, this is always the balancing act: enough, but not too much.
I like to have lots of facets. My novels tend to run long as a result.
Facets: this story, which is quite short, has more than two kidnappings and airplanes and a piece of art I love. It has three other characters and takes place in kind of a fun, near future world. Huan’s partner has some cyborg parts, people don’t live with the threat of gun violence anymore, and Huan, in the end, meets an intriguing new person who more or less offers herself up as a distraction from the planes and the problem at hand.
I like to imagine living in a world where we can sometimes be a mess out in public and help comes from unexpected places. I like to imagine worlds where we can be be open to the idea of that help coming to us when needed… and being that help sometimes, for others in our turn.
For some time now we’ve been subjected to a lot of people who want to send or amplify the message that people are bad and dangerous. And indeed, there are bad people, but there are also kind people, and quirky ones. There is still humour and altruism and sexual attraction, beauty and welcome distractions in unsupportable moments. There is comfort and fellow-feeling to be found in community, and even in strangers.
All of this tumbles together at once, the planes falling and the beautiful sculptures at airports and moments of possible connection between us.
Sometimes we find chances to reach out to someone, or accept them reaching out to us. Those connections, I like to believe, vibrate through the social ecosystem, carried on the nerves of our shared humanity.
Even now, with roaring overhead and no silent jets within earshot, we have potential to make things better. I think, at core, a lot of my stories are probably about that.
From Earth to the Stars 