All the stories come from the sea. They follow the rivers upstream, up brooks and burns until they reach the hilltops where the shepherds and the eagles carry them away to spread across the land. All the stories come from the sea.
Stories
Stories
I have become the stories that my parents told each other, nervous, excited, looking at the sky.
I am the stories that friends have woven and imagined, each new beginning another tale.
One day, one day, I will be the stories that my children more or less remember or in their own ages tell their own.
I was, will be, and am those stories.
Telling stories to not tell the truth
Joe’s family were great story tellers. And when they weren’t telling true stories, true but polished and embellished through the years and the retellings, they were making up stories to prick and provoke, cause brother to turn on cousin, son-in-law on another. The greatest compliment you could hear was that you could have two breastbones fighting.
And the talking and the drinking and the telling went on, night by night, and year by year, even the youngsters being drawn away from their games, their chat with friends, their posting and defacing of photos. The arguments were clever and sly, the language a cutlass wrapped in the sweetest roses, the pauses for breath always in the middle of a phrase. Holding the table was holding your own, if you didn’t talk over you went under and were held there.
But the talking and the telling hid the missing, hid the gaping, hid the empty. There were stories but no feelings, flat stones skipping on the surface of the sea. Feelings were beyond the bounds of the storyteller or the story hearer, too deep and dangerous to sparkle and enchant. Black art.
So Joe told stories and was good at it and made a life of it, a good life of it it seemed, and came to the end, like all of us, eventually. And when he wondered at the end if his story had been a good one, he realised he did not know.
The day the stories were forgotten
The day the stories were forgotten dawned brightly. The wind blew cold from the west and the sun sank again, back to the east from a hands breadth above the horizon. Night came again and stayed for an hour. When the sun rose again, cold and bright again, all the stories had been forgotten.
So many stories
“Hello.”
“You’re three minutes late.”
The story started with the words
The man sat down and thought of all the stories he could tell. Then he thought again and crossed out the words ‘the man’. That was not right.
He. He’d put ‘he’ instead. He sat down (again) and thought of all the stories he could tell. But but but. But if he wrote ‘he’, people would think it was about him. About the man. How about ‘she’?
She sat down and thought of all the stories she could tell. She was a normal person, unremarkable; perhaps for this she had never been described. Her stories though were many; too many.
She sat down (again) and thought of just one story, one she knew well, one she knew forever. To tell it though would be difficult, she (and he) both thought.
They sat down together and had no need for stories. They were their own story, the beginning clear and cloudy and the future curving softly grey before them.
simonsalento 