My father is the story teller of my life. Often, when I am fixed on a task or in the midst of a day dream, I hear a narrative voice, detailing the things I'm doing.
* * * "A young girl, with curly hair like her father's, sits down and takes pen and paper. It is a bold move for a prisoner of her sort. And indeed, the guards had been appalled when she inquired for the materials, leaving their brown eyes as wide as catfish, murky and open in disbelief. No one of her class from the Confederacy has ever asked for such things. When the guards had asked her for what she intended to write, and to whom she would write since she had no relatives still living, she simply shook her head back and forth over her petite shoulders. For a moment the guards turned into two solitary pillars in a bay area that once held up a pier. At the top, in their cracked and war-worn faces, she saw ingrained crevices carved and dried out by the relentless sun. She fancied that those faces often looked upward, as her husband must have, and prayed that the sun would cease to return the next day. At the bottom, the two men that stood like piers, stood in a pool of blood rather than salty water. Their hands, their legs, their feet seemed to be drenched in a quest for blood and water so that they constantly sought after both in a natural rhythm, so that when one ran out they searched for the other: a circular motion between blood and water.
She narrowed her eyes slightly at the guards who stood in her pool of thoughts, and refused to cower before them. She thought that if she was to begin a story, she might as well start with the truth, the heart. And so at the guards request she replied, "A story. That's what I intend to write." * * *
.. and the moment continues - the start of a chapter of a novel. Perhaps it will turn into something... who knows? But the thing is that I constantly hear this voice. A voice that refuses to be silent at times.
Most of the time, I ignore it. I've allowed my critic to squash the muse... and the story I must tell is one of barely missing death. The "guts" of my stories are dying to be told, losing air with the minutes that pass by. This time around, however, I will make sure they have breath.
