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I love the idea of things hidden below the surface.  Of mysterious buried treasures, and ways to implant certain words or innuendos that have either a dual meaning or are indicative of an even larger mystery lurking beneath the surface action of the story.

I was interested in how each of you uses the concept of subtext in your personal writing, or if you have a brief example of how subtext was used from one of your favorite authors.

Last night, while scrolling through social media, I happened upon a comical quip made by one of my favorite authors, responding to the question:

Q: What’s the hardest part of a book to write?
A: Deciding whether to start with the word “The” or something more dramatic, like “Boom!”

That passing joke started the gears in my head to turning, then churning, then spinning.  So I wrote the following, lines beginning with my preferred word choice:

BOOM!
Carl rose startled. The clock shrugged and seemed to say, “well, it wasn’t me?” with its green digital “3:04 AM” glow hiding its smirking face.
The sleeping pill lingered, leaving an acidic taste. His face felt tight and stretched as if some sadistic bastard had hooked his eyelids to the mattress with fish hooks and a 10lb test line. “…where am I?” he asked no one, trying to clear his head of the soporific cobwebs.
His stomach churned.
A word lifted out of the fog. Clarified for a moment then sank under the surfeiting waves. “Chicago.”
BOOM! BOOM!
Carl then remembered. The red-eye flight. Trying to find a cab from O’Hare at 1:00 AM in the morning. The half-asleep hotel clerk. reading a flesh mag, when he’d trundled up to the Check-in counter. Two bags: one unwieldy shoulder bag, the other wheeled and clacking way too loud over the tile floor, annoying the sole occupant at the counter.
“Welcome to Chicago,” the clerk said, yawning. “Checking in?”
“No. I just thought I’d hang out in the lobby,” Carl had muttered.
The look he received back, could’ve drawn blood.
“Yeah. Just one night.”
…coming back to the rude present, Carl sank back onto the pillow-topped sheet-covered brick bag.
“Chicago,” he sighed. Turned over, and tried once again to find the whereabouts of the elusive “sandman.”

So here’s the thing:

This was all there was. Sometimes an odd scene will come to me and I just capture it, like a fleeting reflection on the window of a moving car.

Not sure where it’s going, but if it generates questions, that is a good indication that it needs to be “chased” a little bit. 😉

That’s often how inspiration goes with me.

It brushes by me and if there is a question hook that catches me by surprise, it’ll reel me in after it.  If I get ahead of it, then I get lost, so I have to always be in “the pursuit position” rather than the lead position.  That is, at least, how it works with me as a writer.

So, I’ve just learned to call this sort of thing “flash fiction.”  There may be another definition of the appropriated term here, but that’s how I define it. (Thank you, Burger King! 😉 What?! Too young to remember that commercial?  Well, all I can do is shrug 🤔 and say, “It’s in the subtext.”)

I did throw in an obscure word that might look like a typo, but it actually wasn’t.
The reference to “soporific” cobwebs…

A soporific is something that is sleep-inducing. Certain medicines, but also extreme coziness, can have a soporific effect.

There is an underlying creepiness to these being paired together.
Anything wrapped in cobwebs & said to be “sleeping”, is most likely dying.  The presence of cobwebs, both real and metaphorical, indicates that somewhere there is a spider nearby.  (BACK off! Shelob!!! …annoying spider…😣)
If one is “cozy” in the cobwebs, they must not be in their right mind, OR something else is influencing them to not be aware of their own peril. To sleep while the enemy eventually comes for them.  But there is something else mentioned prior that can be the culprit…namely, the lingering effects of the “sleeping pill”, he took that has the lingering acidic taste in his mouth upon waking suddenly due to the outside “BOOM”.
Since this setting is Chicago, however, the gun violence in that city has become so commonplace lately, that it has become more of a characteristic of the city itself, rather than a feature that causes the expected alarm in someone not from there.
But this is also something my subconscious reaches to point out.  The irony.  There are BOOMING signs all around us in our world that we have come to ignore and think of more as a characteristic of the place in which we live, rather than something that should wake us up and cause us to investigate the noises outside.
Instead, our world just rolls over, lets the drug we have taken to “shut out” the noise, lure us back into “sleeping.”  The momentary reflection of memory does little to unsettle us.  Instead, we’d rather “pursue the sandman”.

These are the deeper undercurrents of the slightly rippling surface water of this snapshot story.  Not sure many will get that, but I know you do appreciate the subtext.
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