"The Yellow House" by Nathan Oates is in the most recent issue of Hot Metal Bridge. It begins:
I didn’t pass the yellow house every day as I didn’t ride that train every day, but, obviously, any time I did ride the train I passed that house and what seems strange to me and the reason I mention it is that what I really mean by passed is that I noticed it. Every single time we rattled by that yellow house with the six foot security fence that clearly did very little if anything at all or nothing to block out the noise from the tracks, I noticed that yellow, three story house with a wooden fort and a trampoline in the backyard. Amongst all the dozens, hundreds of homes between where I boarded the train in the city – where there are no such houses, at least no houses like the one I’m describing – and where I got off the train, I began to take particular note of that yellow house.
What I most like about this beginning is that I think Nathan Oates has done a great job in getting me, the reader, as interested in that yellow house as the protagonist of his story is. With just a touch of detail, and constant mentioning of the word yellow, he's drawn my curiosity.
From there the story stays in this type of language - semi-distant - in describing things he notices about the house from the train over time. It continues this way until about the 80% mark when he notices something pretty shocking, both to him (the protagonist) and to the reader. It makes for an extremely effective story as the semi-distant language still has enough reason for the reader to want to stick around and continue on reading. Without that, we'd miss the ending that kicks the story up a few notches.
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