The Birth of a Story

A short flash that is a gift to those who visit this blog.

KEIRA’S STORIES

She sits in a room that is not part of the house. It is a shed but she does not call it a shed. There’s carpet on the floor, a Persian rug in reds and russets and blues. And there’s a low bed in one corner and in another a desk where she works and flowers in a vase on that desk and everywhere pages and pages of stories she has written. Keira calls them her children, those stories, her only children.

They are sad stories, all of them, stories of women losing themselves, slowly disappearing, cell by cell; or one of a woman trying not to lose herself, collecting every spilled hair and rolling each wisp into an unbroken thread that she winds up as one might wind up a ball of grey twine.

Keira does not always know what she writes. ‘That’s not important,’ she says. ‘It’s a sort of letting go and I am not responsible for what they are in the end’. She says these things with a light laugh, as though she means what she says.

The stories don’t always make sense. She knows that and shrugs and says that’s all fine.

She begins with a word or a picture and then she lets go, lets the story unfold just as the girl in the fabric shop unfurled the cloth Keira used for the curtains hanging at the window in her shed. She remembers that cloth and the wonder of seeing the pattern repeated over a greater and greater piece, so much that it covers the bed, too. Her stories the same, unfolding and unfolding onto so many pages and the pattern repeated.

The word becomes a feeling, the word or the picture. That’s how she explains it, and it is the same feeling over and over, and Keira says it is like giving birth what she does and every thing she writes is pulled out of her, and the pain is unbearable, she says. So it feels like they might be her children, it does, and every story so precious in its own way. Only today she has lost one, the page carried out on the sole of a shoe or pulled away on a draft when the door was open, and Keira cries and pinches the skin on her arms and punches her thighs till they bruise.