Jason M. Jones

There are times when my imagination gets away from me. These are often uniquely times when my stress levels go up. When I’m so flustered and overwhelmed that anxiety spikes, takes over, takes me places I don’t want to go. Problems at work. Air Travel. Arguments with my wife. The prospect of having children. Any one of these factors, I can deal with alone. But combined, I start to fret. I get unsettled. I start to imagine things might not turn out okay, that the existence I’ve worked so hard to cultivate is imperiled. I always find a way to process the stimuli eventually. And usually, I’m able to exorcise my neuroses through writing. I channel the experience into a nonfiction narrative and am often able to recognize how ridiculously I’ve been reacting. This was the genesis of “River Full of Lost Sharks,” publish in Portland Review‘s Winter issue.

For a long time I could only compose nonfiction in the second person. I discovered this when trying to write a piece that eventually ended up in Blue Mesa Review (it appeared in their first online issue #25, which seems to have been lost or forgotten on their site) called Descent. In the first person, I was unable to distinguish the important details from the unimportant. I put everything into the pot because what was on the page was “I.” As soon as I changed “I” to “You,” I became a character, and it became clearer once I saw myself as a character where the story was. I rode this method through stories I published in The Normal School and The Southeast Review. In the essay I recently published in Barrelhouse, I straddled the line, shifting back and forth between first and second with what I believe was good reason (I even pointed out in that piece that another reason I use second-person is that many of us shift to talking about ourselves that way when we’re under pressure). But late last year, I started to shift to first person. For some reason, I started to feel comfortable using it again.

Unless I feel the need to return, “River Full of Lost Sharks” was the second to last of my second-person nonfiction pieces. Soon after my daughter was born, I began hearing strange noises in the house at night. Or maybe I just noticed noises that were previously there but that I was deaf to until I was up late. Sleep deprived, I saw things out of the corners of my eyes. Despite it going against all good sense, I wondered if there was someone else in the house besides us. I knew it was ridiculous. But in order to shake the feeling, I had to move through the house and examine all the hiding spots in each room to convince myself. Now I’m not normally this obsessive and these suspicions passed, but the responsibilities of taking care of a whole new person brought this out of me.

As a result, I wondered, could I create a nonfiction piece that read like a horror story? One in which nothing Manson-like occurred but was still infused with a sense of dread? Something that retains the truth and accuracy of my experience but comes off like “The Tell-Tale Heart?” Whether I’ve succeeded is, as always, up to the reader to decide, but I thought it worth publishing, and I’d like to thank Portland Review and nonfiction editor Catherine Johnson for accepting the piece and helping to work on improving it with their edits. If interested, you can stop by and purchase the issue here. And if you find yourself in Portland, OR Tuesday night, you should attend the released party. You can get the issue there, as well.

And to tempt you, hopefully, here’s a bit of the piece:

The question keeps coming to mind, popping up at odd moments. It’s unnerving, unsettling, yet you have to ask: “Is someone in the house?”

The question has plagued you for days and doesn’t seem ready to resolve itself anytime soon. Naturally, when you ask, you don’t mean your wife and daughter, the ones you expect to be here. Nor do you think it’s your mother or brother-in-law, both of whom have spare keys. No, what you’re thinking is an intruder, someone who’s not supposed to be here, someone who unbeknownst to you is living in the closets or crawlspaces, someone who creeps around whenever you’re away, whenever you’re not looking, whenever you’re tucked in bed at night.

You shake it off. Paranoia. There’s no reason to think it, but it persists.

Is someone here? Someone who’s not supposed to be?

You listen at night. The heater goes on. The hardwood floors heave. Expand. Contract. The sounds an old house makes. You listen between your wife’s respirations, her gentle sleeping breath.

Who’s there? What’s that?