“Sandía is Spanish for Watermelon”
I think of him this morning while I sit on my couch with the cool spectral air off the San Francisco Bay breathing softly on the back of my neck. And we are sitting on a hillside at the top of Mountain View Cemetery at sunset. His glowing face. A smile not for me or the camera, but for himself. What is funny. What does he think of.
I think of him on the funicular to the top of Sandia Peak. Sandia means watermelon in Spanish, he tells me, and not pink like some people assume. The mountain looks like a slice of watermelon in the sunset, thus the name Sandia. From the restaurant at the top, the prehistoric valley below us and the lights of the desert city flickering like electric candles and the sky its double.
It is true that people from the past will visit you at dawn if you leave your window open. And when they do you will have no choice but to let them in and look and when they do the past is present and time is a rubber band that snaps back and when they do you are both riding on the tramway down to the Heights and the desert city is flickering like thousands of flames and the sky is flickering like millions of flames and the way you are going down is like some metaphorical going down, like into the primate brain where love and fear live. They reach up from the dry valley like the pale hands of a ghost to take you down and make you stay.
RUNNR: What question, or image, is the engine of the story?
Joel Tomfohr: This is a great question, one that I think sits in my subconscious as I work. The story meditates on something that feels true to the narrator: memory sneaks in through the living room window and seduces him. Before he knows it, he’s completely submerged in an experience. The question, then, is: What feels true to the narrator in this moment? The engine of this piece, and maybe the answer to the question, is the descriptions of the desert landscape and the feeling(s) that they evoke in the narrator, which hopefully get transferred to the reader.
How is your piece shaped by the genre of flash?
I’m new to the form, so I’m still working a lot of things out about it. I love it though because of the constraints. You’re working with a very limited amount of real estate. I appreciate the kind of attention you have to pay to language. It’s different than in longer forms, though I’m not sure I could say how. I also like the way you can “jump cut” between paragraphs without having to do much explaining. I think the reader intuitively gets it. I’d say those three things informed my piece.
When did this story first start to take shape?
A few months ago, I was sitting on my couch as I do every morning, and I was imagining what it would be like to be a person who sees in their mind’s eye someone they once knew. I put myself back behind the camera so to speak. As I wrote from this perspective, I found myself having the same experience that the narrator is having. I think once those two things align for me, the story takes on a life of its own and becomes a solid structure.
Joel Tomfohr is a writer living in the Bay Area. He is the author of the chapbook, A Blue Hour (Bottlecap Press). His short stories can be found in Bright Flash, Short Beasts, Bending Genres, Joyland, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, X-R-A-Y, BULL, Hobart, and others. You can find him online at joeltomfohr.com and on Instagram at thesword1979.