Floaters

Abstract

Floaters is a collection of three pieces: a short story “like this has more than one telling” bookended by the novellas “Floaters” and “Talking, #2007”. Set in contemporary Maryland, the collection explores the chronic labor of human connection and the ways the notion of self-hood is bound together by all the people outside oneself. These stories are each grounded in the perspectives of precociously stunted black characters: a ten year old with little body awareness runs away from home while trying to get caught; a college-aged man spirals after having his first orgasm brought on by sex; a young, selfishly focused filmmaker decides she’ll never watch a movie again after a bad mushroom trip. Walled into the protection of the analytical, the heady, the associative, these characters spend so much time pondering their seemingly unique lives that they don’t live them. Unwilling to share their fears and questions with the people co-living around them, they struggle to find self-affirming answers to questions like: why do we care about people? To whom do we owe our care? Why make art? What is black art? Who will remember us? Why even consider the lives that will follow our own? Why does invoking the past offend those who never lived it? Are ghosts real?