Character Sketch: Sloan Gustafson

Each year, my fiction class invents a city and we populate it with characters by each creating a sketch. The following is my contribution to this year's city:


Sloan Gustafson had never liked her name, inspired as it was by all her mother’s upper class aspirations. Sloan was a miner’s child just as her mother was a miner’s child and her mother’s mother was a miner’s child. A hopeful name didn’t change that, and her mother, of all people, should have understood. Instead, she married a mining man just like all the generations of women before her and spent her days paging through home magazines, looking at pictures of dark-stained furniture and rich silk pillows.

Sloan’s childhood was one of white dresses and frilly socks that she tore off again and again to play stickball, barefooted, with the boys. Her mother would gasp over her feet, made hard and brown with imbedded dirt that no amount of soaking would clean.

Now, years later, Sloan was a miner herself—one of the few women who worked underground. She loved her job, spent in the company of the same boys with whom she’d once played, telling dirty jokes to brighten the darkness. There were rumors, she knew, that she was a lesbian, but she let people talk. Better they believe what they want, she decided. They would leave her alone that way. They wouldn’t notice if she looked a little too long at Hank, her old playmate, who had never seen her as anything but a pal, who had married their friend Gretel. Gretel, who in high school, had always kept her dresses pressed and who now subscribed to magazines full of dark-stained furniture and rich silk pillows.