This week, Futures welcomes Emily McCosh with her story Breathe the last bits of air. Emily is based in southern California, and you can keep up with her work at her website or by following her on Twitter. Here she talks bout her inspiration for her latest tale — as ever, it pays to read the story first.

Writing Breathe the last bits of air

I have a short attention span for plays, where everything is long-winded, and described through dialogue — irony, I know — but there has been one that I thoroughly enjoyed. My English professor assigned Samuel Beckett, and his play Endgame, a weird and dystopian piece of work that was so far from Shakespeare and Sophocles that I couldn’t help but be pulled in by the sheer difference. The play was absolutely absurd, following the rambling, snarky sentences of two of (what seemed to be) the last people on Earth.

The style of their speech was bizarre to say the least, so of course, the assignment after reading the play was to write a few sentences emulating the dialogue of Endgame’s main characters. I wrote a full version of this story instead, wondering what it would be like to experiment with a full plot. Months later, I realized it could be a true story worth reading, and with a few tweaks and details added, it became the piece it is now.

It’s certainly one of the strangest things I’ve written. But I hope readers find just as much beauty in the strangeness as I did when reading Endgame.