The story I’ve chosen this month for What Makes This Story Exceptional? is “Brain Aneurysm Kills Boy in Beauty Salon” by Rob Reynolds. This story was recently nominated for The Pushcart Prize—a prestigious American literary award—along with five others: 

• “River-born” by Tunvey Mou
• “Progress” by Stefan Sofinski
• “Ex Cinere” by Christine Cohen
• “Reclaimed” by Leo Johnson (which you can read more about here)
• “Saturated Mud” by Evan Burkin (which you can read more about here.

There are two elements of Reynolds’s story I’d like to focus on in particular: the title and taking creative risks with your storytelling. 

Personally, I find titles tricky. Titles for novels are important, too, but for short fiction and poetry, titles are one of the most important elements. They need to be doing a lot of heavy-lifting. Ideally, they need to form part of the story; they need to be enticing; they need to be original. Let’s look at those three elements in turn. 

Further Reading: “12 Story Title Frameworks That Will Hook The Reader”

Originality

One of the things I often think when reading a story or editing one is that the author didn’t spend as much time thinking about the title as they could have. The most common titles are: The + noun, i.e., “The Dog” or “The Girl” or “The Book”. And apparently, the most common of all is: “The Gift”, so maybe avoid that one in the future. If your story is about a gift and that really is the best fitting title for your story, think about how you could change it up with adjectives—”The Unexpected Gift” or “The Smallest Gift”—or expand on it: “The Gift that Had to be Opened Twice”. 

Enticement

Magazines and competitions get a lot of submissions, more than they can publish or award prizes to. Even though every submission is read, what you’re doing with a more interesting title is (hopefully) changing how the reader or editor feels just before they start reading your story. When I read the title “Brain Aneurysm Kills Boy in Beauty Salon”, I was immediately intrigued and wondered how this story was going to unfold. 

Part of the Story

A title needs to be part of your story. On a basic level, it can’t be plucked out of thin air. Even if your title is interesting and original, if it doesn’t fit the story, it isn’t the right title. But if you like it, save it in a notebook or a file on your computer for another story. The title needs to reflect or summarise what happens in the story, or its themes; it can be the first sentence of the story (run-on title); or it can have a circle-back effect so that when you get to the end and reflect on the title, it allows you to understand the story better. 

A circle-back title is most definitely the case with “Brain Aneurysm Kills Boy in Beauty Salon”. 

Reynolds’s story takes place in a beauty salon. Julio, the boy and main character, is waiting for his mother while she gets her hair cut. We assume he is fairly young by this description: ‘dangling a toy astronaut by its leg’. He climbs onto a chair, puts his head into a hood dryer, and it starts to talk to him. From this point onwards, the story takes a turn into the surreal, and for the rest of the story, it’s not entirely clear what is happening. Did the hair dryer make the local news? Did the voices inside it want something? Was there music? And did they really want a boy? 

But we keep reading. We want to know what happens. Then there is this paragraph:

Silence, and more silence. The infinite silence of space. Various attempts at contact drew no response. Nothing worked. The experts shouted and ripped their clothes; the mother tore at her permanent hair. Sophisticated equipment was removed. Tubes and wires.

What stands out to me is the mother. We have a reference to the mother tearing at her hair, which brings us back to the real world and gives us a clue as to what is happening. 

This is the concluding paragraph:

On the afternoon of his last day on Earth, beneath a cloudless sky perfect for launch, a boy followed his mother into a hair salon, climbed onto a chair, and lifted his head into a dryer. He was on his way.

You’d be forgiven for getting to the end and not quite understanding what you’ve read. This is, I believe, one of those stories that you get more out of each time you read it. More on that in a moment. First of all, what did you read? You get to the end and… what? This is when you circle back to the title: “Brain Aneurysm Kills Boy in Beauty Salon”. And suddenly, everything becomes clear. All those references to voices and aliens and Jell-O are the imaginings of what it would be like to be inside a brain when it is failing. If you then return to the penultimate paragraph, it could be that ‘Various attempts at contact drew no response’ is a team of doctors trying to revive him. But ‘[n]othing worked.’ 

With his story “Brain Aneurysm Kills Boy in Beauty Salon”, Rob Reynolds takes huge creative risks. The story is surreal and tumbles further and further into that surreality. But what makes it absolutely clear what happened is the deft use of a specific title which we can circle back to. And once we know that this is the depiction of what it could be like to have a brain aneurysm, all the details of the story become even more compelling.