My awakening began with a single sentence that sliced through the daily fog of errands, daydreams, fragments of potential prose, anxiety, and lingering postpartum weariness that filled my mind in the early months of 1993. Who would even want to talk, I wondered, as the words landed with surprising sharpness.
Immediately, the laughing face of a dear friend—let me call him Ian—surfaced in my memory. He had died seven years earlier from AIDS.
I carried mementos of him: photographs of us at Studio 54, radiant parties, but nothing could resurrect him. He resisted becoming merely a memory; Ian had been the embodiment of presence, charm, and vitality. When he was with you, his whole being focused on you—his attention, his wit, undivided—so that whenever you and he slipped past velvet ropes into a nightclub, or settled on Sheep Meadow in Central Park, or wandered along shadowy downtown streets at dawn, you felt the universe tightening itself around you, and you found yourself at the center of it all.
The moment in In the Gloaming when Laird pretends to be a representative of IRS outreach and succeeds in making a whole crowd of New Yorkers laugh and chat was emblematic of Ian’s way of engaging with the world. I had a treasury of such bright recollections, yet I kept them at bay; they hurt too much. Earlier in life I learned that the only way I could endure such a profound loss was to shed the version of myself who loved the person or the place and to become someone else entirely. While Ian was ill, I stopped socializing and stayed awake late into the night; there was no pleasure in being out without him.
The words were inside of me, and I was being called to compose a story.
After his death I married, wrote a book, welcomed a child. He remained unaware of this newer version of me—the Al he had named—who smoked relentlessly, loved flamboyant outfits, and seized every chance to dance. That person no longer existed. In a sense, my former self died with him.
Then “He wanted to talk again, suddenly.” I perceived that sentence as arising from a separate awareness, a consciousness distinct from my own. I lived in a time of anxiety—concern for aging grandparents, a toddler who had spent the first days of life in a NICU incubator. My writing was stalled by a need for perfection; my pages looked more like redacted government documents than living stories. Beneath the surface, I grieved for Ian.
And then, he appeared. What did he wish to discuss? Was this a replay of an afterword of a failed argument, a moment when the truth of what I wished I had said finally crystallized? Had Ian learned what he wanted to say in life and returned to tell me now? To be precise, this wasn’t a specter or a voice from beyond the grave. The words were within me, and I felt urged to shape a story in the world, yet I could also sense Ian’s presence in a way I hadn’t in years, inviting me to discover why his return mattered.
Reason would have urged me to delay—perhaps to wait until I had mastered the craft of the short story. Even though I had published a book, a full method eluded me; each new tale felt like a perilous tightrope walk without a net of technique. I had begun as a poet in my twenties and entered the realm of prose when minimalist currents dominated, and I began by testing that mode of writing.
I had energy. I had words. Back to the little desk for me.
Minimalism, I soon learned, is difficult to execute well. For every Raymond Carver, there were countless writers like me, crafting pared-down sentences that longed to glow with significance but emerged thin and underdeveloped. I didn’t naturally gravitate toward that style anyway. It wasn’t the literature that had shaped my sense of fiction. Before long I redirected toward my own voice and cadence, yet I remained unclear about the formula that underpins a story: how character plus setting, plus plot, yields meaning. I was drawing from my head, my opinions, my experience, rather than from a place where good stories are said to originate.
Where does that place reside? I don’t claim to know with certainty, but over time I came to suspect that truly resonant narratives—stories that touch the universal, that break through the writer’s ego—float in the ether around us. They are unfinished; they need a living author to grant them life and form. Even in their preliminary, unformed state, they possess agency of their own and demand that the writer invest time and care to honor them. If a story is bullied by too much thinking rather than by careful conjuring, it recoils. Creating a story resembles forming a deep friendship or a marriage. You must understand its nature, that much of it exists outside of your own will.
You must attune yourself to what it wants and requires, to its timidity and its core longing. You face the page and begin a dialogue that can travel in many directions, yet always aims to approach and reveal meaning. I carry a mental image of an atmosphere thick with stories, and from time to time I or another writer will encounter one at the right moment, ready to become its partner.
Recently a reader told me she loved the story.
“Yes, it’s good,” I replied, though I might have tempered that by noting I did not mean I was the standard of goodness.
I could have explained that the story’s merit existed before I encountered it, that all I did was surrender to its existence and help it take earthly form. I didn’t resist, though; I do believe it is good, and I think the universal wisdom deserves some credit as well.
I began the tale with a vision of a young man named Laird sitting up in bed, his sister Anne—who I imagined as a lawyer—beside him in a chair. They were drawing up his will. He teased himself by adopting the persona of Queen for a Day from the old TV show. “Only I’m a queen who gives away her things,” he proclaimed. He could be capricious yet generous, sometimes leaving everything—including his apartment—to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, other times poring over photographs of his treasures and earmarking them for friends. Their mother, Janet, heard their laughter and wandered into the room—the downstairs den, where a hospital bed had been installed—and asked what was so amusing. Janet! There, present as Virginia Woolf described Mrs. Dalloway’s late-life gaze inward, this was meant to be her story. Laird longed to talk again, suddenly, to Janet, just as Ian longed to talk again to me. Janet would become the figure affected by the story, the one who would glimpse the moral order at work within the world.
Anne, unfortunately, received a smaller part in the narrative, but I have since expanded her role in a new novel, Wherever You Are. Once I anchored the mother–son bond at the story’s center, the words began to flow each afternoon as I sat on my toddler’s futon while he played nearby in the park with a babysitter. I wrote scene after scene, concentrating on the conversations between Janet and Laird that occurred during the evenings, in that liminal time when light fades into dusk.
One evening I read a passage aloud to my husband, describing Laird gifting Janet with a cluster of lilies of the valley. Is this overly sentimental? I asked. It felt delicate to me. I wasn’t accustomed to writing in the tender, vulnerable register this part of the story demanded, a tone quite different from the sly, wry stance in many of my other pieces. He replied that it was moving without veering toward cloying—keep going. From him I learned a valuable lesson I now share with my Rutgers-Newark MFA students: if you fear you are overdoing it, trust that the emotional upheaval is in your body, not merely in the words on the page.
It was March 1993. We lived in a rent-stabilized apartment on West 97th Street in Manhattan. The living room and bedrooms faced 96th, a busy east–west corridor where ambulances and police cars howled through the night. Below us lay an alley inhabited by stray cats that I fed by lowering or tossing cat food from the window. Others discarded french fries and chicken bones; the cats managed to survive. (I even managed to rescue two of them and welcome them into our lives.) Beyond the alley stood a gas station, and across the street, P.S. 75. In our bedroom I had a desk set up at right angles to the window. We had a computer by then, but I still typed on my old Olivetti manual machine, a two-finger typist. I had typed nearly the entire story, though an ending still eluded me. I tried a few pages, then ripped them from the platen as if I were a deadline-driven journalist in a screwball comedy. Instead of presenting them to an editor, I carried them to my husband and watched as he read.
I had reached a line with a weighty resonance, a dramatic, “dun-dun!” that seemed to signal a Law & Order episode. It felt right to me.
He shook his head. “Sorry. This isn’t right.”
How maddening: I thought I had it. Yet okay, I would begin again.
I had energy. I had words. Back to the little desk for me.
This pattern repeated for several days. I would write, he would read, he would reject, I would return to the drawing board. Did I start to resent him for it? Yes. Did I grow more and more frustrated? Yes. Was I tempted to pitch the typewriter out the window? Indeed, and I might have, if not for the cats. My limits—and my stubbornness—stood out in relief. I kept returning to the end of the last scene and reconfiguring Janet’s movements within the house, at different times of day, until at last she found herself in Laird’s old bedroom, still alone with her thoughts and the weight of a life without him.
A story moves toward an authentic reversal when, at the moment of critical choice, a character rises above their usual way of responding to stress and instead consciously chooses to do something for the sake of another person.
The writing was solid but not dramatic. What would push it toward drama? Then—Martin entered the room, climbed onto the other bed, and something began to stir. Janet, long restrained, suddenly erupted in a fury. It made me uneasy, but I stayed with her. Miraculously, so did Martin. Until that moment, he had been a marginal figure, mostly offstage and passive. The story, my partner in this enterprise, would not permit me to finish without giving him a meaningful presence. He was a walk-on, yet crucial—Laird’s father. Now what would he do? How would the ending unfold? I pressed forward, knowing the ending I had set was meant to fulfill its promise.
Much later I realized that in the concluding pages I had stumbled onto a device used in many classic endings: a sacrifice performed for the sake of another person or for society at large. Throughout the narrative, the protagonist pursues a goal or a resolution, yet a core trait of their crafted personality keeps them stuck in a repetitive pattern, preventing fulfillment. The pressure builds, and near the end the protagonist must make one final, decisive effort to achieve their aim. In this case, Janet breaks free from restraint and speaks her truth—sharing the feelings she has long desired to express.
But would that alone deliver satisfaction?
Janet would reach her goal, yet she would not have learned or transformed in a way that aligns with what I conceive as a just, tranquil, loving, and abundant world—an imagined realm where kindness, equality, and self-actualization flourish.
Stories can connect us to that better world by showing how a person can bridge the gap between ideal and daily life. When a character abandons self-interest and chooses for the sake of another, the narrative awakens noble sentiments. I wish there were more words for this act than “sacrifice,” since that term often suggests deprivation. I’m talking about choosing to forgo a self-centered option in favor of recognizing another’s reality with full-hearted acknowledgment of their equal value. It is a universal understanding we all know, even if we forget it in the rush of ordinary days.
Yet we go about our days quietly setting this aside, skirting around others instead of standing beside them, seeing the world through their eyes. A story reaches a true reversal when, at the moment of choice, a character rises above their habitual response to stress and consciously acts for someone else’s benefit. I think of it as peering through a mirror past the reflected self to glimpse a world that shines with greater clarity.
Janet’s generosity toward Laird did not require a self-sacrifice in the strict sense. He was her beloved child, and she wished to be with him and care for him.
Her test comes when she is alone with Martin in the bedroom. Martin has remained a peripheral figure, slipping into the study’s maw and rarely earning much of her attention. Now he is suddenly present. It would have been natural for her to resent his intrusion; after all, he hadn’t been of much help. Yet when he tentatively offers a plan—suggesting bagpipes for the funeral music—she quiets, hearing his pain as real as her own, and grants him the space to participate fully in the moment. This is, finally, what she has longed for: genuine connection.
As I said, I did not know what I was doing when I wrote this ending.
With Janet making a climactic choice on behalf of another rather than pursuing her own clearly stated aim, a reversal unfolds. This is the magic of sacrifice. The world of the tangible loosens its grip, and hidden spiritual and moral realities emerge with unmistakable force. The one who sacrifices for another often attains a life that survives death, remembered with love and admiration.
You could say that Laird’s death allowed new life to blossom for his parents, and you would not be wrong.
Janet’s willingness to accept Martin’s contribution frees him to reveal his own pain and loss—an offering that exposes depth: “Please, Janet, tell me—what else did my boy like?”
We trust that Janet is prepared to answer.
I carried this ending into the living room. Mr. Dark gave it his approval.
It’s worth noting that a story concluding at a peak of grace does not imply that every thread is tied. People often ask whether Janet and Martin maintain their closeness after the final scene, and my answer is: not really. What endures is the sense of having touched a larger generosity. That feeling—being bighearted and open—becomes a lasting new understanding for both of them, a subtle but real transformation.
When we do something good, we learn what it feels like. That does not automatically make us virtuous, yet it may nudge us toward calmer seas for our uneasy vessels.
As I mentioned, I did not know what I was doing as I wrote this ending. Understanding the mechanism I’ve described came later, the result of deliberate thinking and hard work. At the time, the only way I could reach the mechanism was to enact it; I had to relinquish my urge to be right, to finish, to appear brilliant, and to craft a killer kicker, all for the sake of truly moving my husband. The ending mirrors what was happening in my own place: I had to push past the logic of the story and surrender to the mystery of the moral universe—for him, for the story, for Ian—which required setting aside myself and my ideas.
As for what Ian hoped to convey when he reappeared and touched my shoulder with the opening words of the tale, I believe he came back to two truths: that the truth is found within a relationship rather than in solitary rumination, and that the dead are always at our side, accessible only when we rise above our own smallness.
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From In the Gloaming. Used with the permission of the publisher, Scribner. Copyright © 2026 by Alice Elliott Dark
