Just One Thing with Emily Costa

Emily Costa’s flash “Banana Split Deluxe” shows the not-so-sweet side of working in an ice cream shop. Here she shares just one thing about the piece:

“I started this story around 2011, and it was way long, and most of it was this body-horror stuff about a waffle-cone iron burning the narrator's hand in a very gruesome manner, and then a lot about self-injury as a kind of power. I don't know. It got kind of muddied, I couldn't get it straight, was probably trying to do too much. But I've never gotten over being an ex-ice cream scooper so I kept coming back to it. I couldn't let it go. At some point during early pandemic days I started hacking away at it and this is what was left.”