I type “The dog died today and the woman buried him with a shovel in the backyard” because I am writing a story and the first sentence of a story must be provocative enough to engage the reader. But the sentence is not very good. I stare at the cursor for a long while and it blinks back. Eventually, I decide to save it. I close the document and then I close my laptop. The next day, I give birth to my son.

One must show and not tell when writing a story. The irony being everyone tells you to do this instead of actually showing you how to. I pull up the draft from where I last left off and write, “The scruffy dog died after he ate a flip flop he found on the beach. The woman brought out an old shovel to throw dirt over his small corpse.” Somehow this has made the sentence much worse. My son doesn’t care how badly I write. He is just over a year old. He wants to sit on the counter next to the toaster oven so he can twist the knobs until they fall off. He moans, pointing a finger at his beloved toaster, longing to be close to its heat. I sigh, close my laptop, and spend the next two years keeping him from cooking his own hands.

Every good story is really two stories. A famous author said this but did not specify whether both of the stories had to be good to make the story on the whole good, or if two mediocre stories could add up to a decent one. So my draft becomes a story of a scruffy dog who lives a long life of many adventures only to meet a grisly end because he is unable to digest a mass produced sandal. It also becomes a story about a woman who goes to great lengths to avoid attachment, yet maintains a lasting fondness for the one constant in her life—her steadfast shovel. I am about to stitch them together when my son rolls up to our driveway in his razor scooter wearing a helmet with neon green spikes. I ask him how his day was and he says he needs help with his geometry homework. We move my two unfused stories off the kitchen table to make room for his protractor, his graphing calculator, his enormous collection of erasers and pencils, which he lines up meticulously across the length of the table.

To write a compelling story one must imbue the prose with depth and a common way to do so is with metaphor. I type into the search bar “what is a metaphor example.” I make some edits to my story so the dog has a heart of gold and the woman is a work horse. They live together in a pigsty and have opposing views about whether all the world’s a stage. Just when I feel like I may be getting somewhere, my phone rings. It’s my son calling from his dorm room to ask how I make that pink pasta sauce he likes. The recipe is slipping my mind and I can tell it annoys him when I backtrack on my estimates and stumble over the names of ingredients. After we say good bye, I spend the evening trying to recreate it, recalling, as I often do when I’m fussing over intricate meals for him, the simpler times when I could just nurse him to sleep. When the bond connecting us was a tiger in a cage: fierce, primal, and unable to wander off.

Backstory is a way to show the past has consequences for the present. I give the dog a life of profound luck, a comfy bed, drumsticks from rotisserie chickens, which makes his violent demise more tragic. I give the woman a childhood in poverty—the middle child of six—offering to dig holes for her neighbors in order to make money. This makes her fixation on the shovel and bond with the dog more resounding. My son visits often now even though we live far apart. Sometimes he brings his partner, who is very handsome and always fetches my son a glass of water if he gets up to pour one for himself. They live in a very busy city with very important people. I have moved to a rather slow town where nobody amounts to much. The grocery store has enough variety to create delineation from one day to the next. Time has moved at an idle pace since the doctor told me the prognosis was not great. I ask if he thinks it’s enough time for me to finish my story. The IV bag responds drip, drip, drip.

Endings are of course an important, if not the most important, part of a story. How does it relate to the opening? Does it land with emotional resonance? My son has set up my things in the room just right. He knows the way I like them arranged near the head of the bed. A picture of his father in a worsted wool suit. An afghan my mother crocheted for me before I was born. Tomorrow he will be here early to make sure he catches the doctors when they do their rounds. The woman has hung up her shovel on a nail off the side of the shed. She rubs the dirt off her knees and uses a bristle brush to get the stubborn bits from under her nails. The house is a mess, but she will tend to it another time. She puts on a pot of tea, peels off her clothes, and lets her body collapse into bed. The dog, too, has begun to settle down in his shallow grave.