We recently published Matt Kendrick’s illuminating “Nothing Certain.”

Here, we ask him two questions about his story:

1) I love the certainty that Mr. White begins the story with and the way he becomes unmoored as he stops to really think and not just accept things at face value. We see what he thinks of his wife (and how biased his perspective is). What do you think she thinks of him?
This is such a great question. It can be so easy in a scene that revolves around two characters to only focus on the POV character, but here, for me, it’s Mrs White who’s the more interesting individual. When the idea for this piece was first waltzing through my mind, I was thinking about the novellas “Mrs. Bridge” and “Mr. Bridge.” With both those (the dual perspectives of her POV then his POV), I find Mrs. Bridge much more fascinating as a character, and I hope there’s a little of that in my piece as well (and I would love to one day write this scene from the opposite perspective). Mrs White is trapped in this marriage in the same way her husband is trapped in his denial. On the surface, she stays calm, but underneath I like to think she’s full of rage, both at his condescending treatment of her and at his refusal to accept the truth of his own feelings. I think she has a complex mix of sadness, sympathy, weariness, confusion, love and disgust swirling about as well. And there’s a horrid irony to how she has to contain all of this because of the ways she’s been trapped. Although I haven’t necessarily stated it on the page, this is set in the 1960s, so Mrs White is trapped in this seemingly loveless marriage both by the unbending (i.e. certain) expectations of the time period and by the fact that her husband represents her own last certainty, her last anchor to her dead son.

2) The “dependable earth.” Oh, god, the “dependable earth”! That reveal tells us so much and in such a casual, beautiful way. Does Mr. White look at the sun and the earth and all of these inhuman things as dependable because life isn’t?
All of my short fiction at the moment stems from a saying (here it was “nothing is certain but death and taxes”) and I like to start by giving that saying a bit of a prod. While they contain a lot of wisdom, a lot of these sayings feel like they veer very much into absolutism. Are death and taxes both completely certain? And aren’t there other things like gravity, illness, embarrassment, discovery, and loss that are equally certain? For me, as writer, Mr White is a medium for these contemplations. I’ve purposefully chosen someone who I’d place in the category of MAMCASAW* man (*Middle-Aged, Middle-Class, Able-bodied, Straight, and White). He clings to what he’s always been told because he thinks that’s the “correct” way to behave. By extension, he believes in keeping a “stiff upper lip.” He also believes the husband “should rule the wife.” This is all he knows. He isn’t emotionally developed enough to approach his shared grief in any other way. These “inhuman” certainties are thus a bit like a shield. But that shield is wearing thin. His certainties are crumbling, and through that shift from certainty to doubt, I wanted to present a buried truth. Not that “nothing is certain but death and taxes.” But a new truth. That nothing can be taken for granted and that burying our heads in a false “certainty” (as Mr White is determined to do) leads nowhere good. In that way, I hope Mr White is multi-layered. I hope he comes across as a unique individual. I hope he comes across as a type who echoes outwards into universality. And I hope he comes across as a medium for philosophical contemplation. I’m not sure I accomplished all of that, but that’s what I had in my mind when I set out to write.