Telling stories

This photo of Joan Didion
and the quote was the "spark"
for my super-short story

The world is mad with delusions of power and horrifying invasions, but this past Sunday saw me step away from that roiling mess of humanity for a 2-hour break to focus on telling stories. It was so much fun.

I am co-leading a 4-week course called Spark Your Writing, with my creative collaborator, Deborah Schnitzer. Each week, we send out a ‘spark’ (a prompt) to the participants and they have the week to write something in response to it. On Sunday afternoon, we gather via Zoom to share what we’ve produced.

In a time of great destruction, it is both nurturing and necessary to connect with our creative capacity and put our energy into making art. Writing stories is one way of doing that.

I have spent years and years saying, 'I don’t write fiction'. But last week’s spark got me going and sent me down a road I don’t usually travel in my writing: I wrote a fictional short story. A super-short story — in fact, a piece of ‘flash fiction’, which is defined as no longer than 1,000 words. I wrote just over 400. And I think I told a story in those few words. See what you think, I’ve pasted it in below.

It’s not perfect, but the point of our course is not for the writing to be perfect. The point is for it to be — for it to be done, to exist. The creative urge is within each of us. May we use it for good and for sharing.

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GRASPING

Seize the moment. Ha! Hard enough to seize the day. Those 24 hours are slippery enough, but the moments within those hours? They’re murderous to capture. She no longer even tried.

Her feet felt leaden as she walked the narrow path between the high walls of routine that circumscribed her life. Eat. Sleep. Work. Repeat. Where was the fun? What was the point? Of all the moments in any given day, was there even one she actually wanted to seize? Wasn’t the point to just keep moving, in fact to NOT stop, to NOT focus on any one moment because, if she did, it would all come back to her, and then where would she be?

She had loved that young child so much it was, some days, hard to remember to breathe, so enthralled had she been just watching the girl do the most ordinary things — read a book, eat a meal, play with her toys.

She had not planned to be a mother. She had thought it would never happen and, when it did, she lived in fear it would end badly. And it did. So badly.

The day had started out ordinarily enough. Slam shut the alarm clock. Get up. Coffee. Shower. More coffee. Then, once her mood had shifted beyond gloom to a glimmer of hope, wake the child and fix her favourite meal: buttermilk pancakes — always fun to watch her eat those golden pillows of tangy softness.

She knew it was a stupid habit, a bad habit, but it served a purpose. It curbed her own appetite and, frankly, gave her something to do with her hands — better to hold the cigarette than to snatch a pancake from the hands of the child and stuff it into her own mouth.

Better? How could she ever have thought that? Because, if she hadn't, she would still be making pancakes and the child would still be eating them. Instead, the child would never eat again and she, herself, no longer felt like eating.

If only.

If only.

If only she had been a neater smoker. If only she hadn’t been so absorbed in her own loneliness for the intimacy of an adult partner that she had had that third drink and then passed out and then woken up to the mayhem of smoke and flames. And the loneliness of a loss so profound that, while the moments of every day moved slowly enough to seize them, her spirit was so heavy that her heart couldn’t make her do it.

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.