Minal Shaman is a student at Columbia University with a passion for the speculative and satire. [Editor’s note: However, this story is neither speculative nor satire.] This story represents the author’s first short fiction sale.
Eleanor
by Minal Shaman
I keep Eleanor on a yellow legal pad because white paper feels too clean for her. She’s penciled in there with a prudent hand: born in a small suburb, worked a sensible job, married once, divorced once, liked amphibians. Amphibians. What do you do with amphibians?
This will not do.
I add a tremor to her hand, one I can attribute to caffeine overconsumption, or perhaps existential unease. She ignores it. I give her a husband and she files for divorce before I can finish the paragraph. I give her a dog. The dog lives twelve years of contentment and contributes nothing narratively. Eleanor has a talent for nullifying plot.
Once again I am left with nothing but amphibians. The word amphibians, though, is not too far from amphetamines, and for a brief, shameful moment I consider pharmacological intervention. Medicating storylines is reserved for tabloids and optimists, of which I am neither.
My boss, Michael, wants “texture.” Truth with a hook. “Find the angle,” he told me yesterday. “People skim. Make them stop.”
So, I go hunting for angles.
I take Eleanor to the docks because docks always have angles. Salty wind, creaking ropes, sturdy men. I sit on a crate and imagine her next to me, nineteen years old, sporting a neat blouse and bright smile. I write that she once loved a sailor. This seems dishonest. I try a pirate instead. Eleanor erases him with a wave of her sensible hand. The water slaps the pilings like it’s laughing at me.
I put her in a church next. I light a candle for effect but it burns without commentary. Seated in a pew, I give Eleanor a crisis, something tasteful and sufficiently theological. Eleanor doesn’t pray. She thinks about her deceased dog and the superiority of rye bread to white. I wince at her unremarkable palette while God remains uninvolved.
I try the street where the wealthiest of the town reside. The lawns are well behaved and every window reflects the clouds. I give Eleanor envy, then ambition, then a sharp, ironic longing. She settles for curiosity. She wonders who dusts all these surfaces and how long it takes. A woman jogs past with a stroller that costs more than my car. Some of the trees look synthetic. This neighborhood offers possibilities in bulk, but Eleanor is already calculating the bus ride home.
My break consists of a few minutes spent comparing the symptoms of creative stagnation and mild hysteria. I put Eleanor in a hospital waiting room, then an operating table, then briefly inside a metaphor, which she politely exits, wiping her shoes. My yellow page fills with arrows, question marks, and a small drawing of a salamander I don’t remember making.
Eleanor soon develops opinions. She hates hyperbole, run-on sentences, and in particular, when I lie. “There was nothing symbolic about the weather,” she insists. “It rains all the time.” She tells me her favorite color is green. Not a forest green, neon green, or green of any memorability. Just green.
I begin to bargain. If she gives me one secret, just one, I promise not to embellish it. She hands me a grocery list from 1993. Milk. Rye bread. Oatmeal. Soap, brand unspecified. She doesn’t even have a preference. When I beg she looks at me—she can do that now, look at me—and I feel pitifully childish.
I try a diner at three in the morning. A stranger sits at our table and tells us his whole life in one breath. Eleanor listens, as patient and static as always. I read it back and it’s as flat as the tabletop. Suddenly the stranger is a cardboard cutout and Eleanor becomes a chair.
We return to my office where she begins to knit a trivet. I sigh at its mundanity. I pick up my pen and give her a letter from a secret admirer, slipped into her purse. She retrieves it and it morphs into a receipt. I decide I need some air and leave her at my desk. As I step out the door I nearly trample a toad. It freezes, offended but intact, its small body hunched into a posture of unreasonable confidence. I apologize out loud. The toad does not accept, but moves so I can pass. I shake my head and walk back inside.
Eleanor has finished her trivet. It will protect a table from heat and nothing else. I sit down across from her and she looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to give her something. I don’t.
“What do you like, Eleanor?” I ask.
She thinks for a moment. She says she likes her hometown. She likes her sensible job. She likes her ex-husband, but only sometimes, and she loves amphibians. She likes knowing where her keys are. She likes memorizing the bus schedule. She dislikes rushing and being misquoted.
I finish and look at my small collection of short sentences. I sigh again.
Michael appears in the doorway. He coughs instead of knocking, and gestures for me to give him the yellow pad. I hand Eleanor over, and he takes a look.
“This is… spare,” Michael says. He sits on the edge of my desk. His eyes shift to the bottom of the page, brow furrowed. “You cut the pirate.”
I nod.
He looks at me. “You okay?”
“I couldn’t make her interesting,” I say. “I tried everything.”
“Well,” He taps the pad and coughs again. “You’re not supposed to. It’s not a pitch deck.”
I blink.
“It’s an obituary,” he says. “That’s all.”
He doesn’t hand back the pad, but I see Eleanor poke her head around the side. She gives me a smile and a wave. I notice I never crossed out my drawing of the salamander.
Michael stands. “You’ve got half an hour till the deadline,” he says. “But this will do.”
Copyright 2026 by Minal Shaman