“A saw squeals in the half-built house across the street; a man shouts: Hey hey hey!; a car speeds by on the road out front; the neighbor thuds across the floor on the other side of the wall; a hammer strikes; men speak; a car door slams,” begins Kathryn Scanlan’s story “Study for American Interior (Monday),” published in the Summer 2026 issue of Granta. The story consists of a single dense paragraph, which itself is one long sentence punctuated by a litany of semicolons, creating a portrait of a neighborhood through its sounds. The mentions of “my chair creaks” and “the windows in my room” hint at the narrator perhaps being a writer at their desk. Write a short story composed entirely of a sequence of sounds from someone inside a building listening to the outside world. Even if nothing particularly extraordinary occurs, how can you curate the repetition of sounds to create a feeling?
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