A Very Typical Family

by Sierra Godfrey

she realized she was sniffing out the tang of the sea. It wasn’t for everyone. The scent held notes of rotten sea kelp with a bouquet of salt, but to Natalie it was overwhelmingly home.

There was disorientation as her brain tried to reconcile the memory with the reality—a reality that had ticked on by without her for fifteen years.

She drove up the steep driveway and onto the pea gravel on the side of the house, the familiar crunch of her tires almost Pavlovian. The sound of home.

Hope was the color of midnight blue with a thousand new stars standing out in relief,

It was funny how the smells of childhood cut through adulthood to remind you of how things used to be.

The urge to get out her sketch pad hit her, even while she gave an inward shiver of horror at being so close to the thing. Ideally, the building would have to be burned down, but first she would draw the spider.

Also his car smelled really good—like a combination of sandalwood and citrus, whatever personal products he used, creating a beautiful alchemy with his body chemistry. She found herself inhaling the intoxicating scent. What the hell was wrong with her?

Not enough people talk about the taipan. I like this.” “Right? It gets no love at all, and it’s the most venomous snake out there.” “We should start a taipan appreciation society.” “Well.” Natalie stirred a hunk of wasabi into her soy sauce dish. “I don’t appreciate them, so I can’t be in the club.” “That is fair. We will start the club, and then we will run away from it.”

“You know how you know it’s meant to be?” Buck asked. “Because when you see them, all your organs do little jumps from the adrenaline. It’s not only the way they look. It’s the way they move and the sound of their voice. And then they speak, and you nearly lose your mind. That’s how it works for me. You love every aspect of them. You want to get inside their head and know everything about them. And the thought of losing them tears you up, right here.” He pointed to his rib cage. “Like, you really get shredded, you know? Destroyed, I guess—that’s not too strong a word, because that’s how I felt. If it’s happened to you, then you know how it feels, but anyone who hasn’t been through a loss can’t quite understand. It’s just…” He looked at his hands. “A lot of grief. You tell yourself to move on, but you know you never really can.”

it was hard to have perspective when you were in the middle of something your gut knew wasn’t right—and it was hard to accept that things weren’t going to turn out the way you wanted.

Natalie felt full, hopeful. She leaned against him, sighing. Floating. Disbelieving. Wait until Teensy heard. Wait until Michelle heard. Wait until Lynn and Jake heard. Wait until the whole world heard that Natalie Walker was home and whole again.

Tension is so much fun! Tension makes the payoff of a conflict that much more exquisite. Everyone lives off tension, in good and bad ways. It frustrates me when I’m reading a story that gives me the resolution too soon. I want to see characters yearning for what it is they want, even if they make poor choices along the way. If we all got what we wanted right away, it wouldn’t be as fun. Tension is universal in stories too. It can make a horror story incredibly scary by drawing out the dread, and it can make romantic elements sing when characters yearn for each other without getting the payoff of each other for a while. A good writer, I think, pulls that string of tension taut or loose depending on the scene, playing the reader like a musician. My advice to writers struggling with tension is to throw as many obstacles in the way of their characters as possible. Never let them get what they want; don’t let them be safe, don’t let them be loved, and don’t let them have the final say. Until they do, of course.