No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
These were people’s memories that I saw. Some were pleasant. Others not so much. People carried a lot in them, stories you’d never even imagine were real or possible. My father used to sometimes tell stories back in the village. He’d always say a good storyteller renews the story with each telling, weaving in memories and personal experiences to subtly change it and make it a new story.
In her old life, her eyes would have been anxiously scanning the room, searching for flaws. Was there enough food? Were the flowers fresh enough? Were the guests having a good time?
Marissa leans a little closer, uses her confidential voice, though she’s pretty sure even his good ear doesn’t work so well these days. And he probably isn’t paying attention. Around them people are eating dinner. Chairs are being slid in and out at tables. Low voices like pillows buffer an occasional impatient “what?” and the frustrated response, “I. SAID. THIS. IS….”
It begins with a splintering intersection of time and reality. The world shatters, seeks to cobweb, to consume the glass coffin that encases and confines. I inhale and hold and pray, but forget what I’m praying for? The sensation stalls like a pinched vein unable to release the life-giving blood within. But it hasn’t stopped. Not really.
It was her customers who had started the whole acting thing. Almost every night at Chiro’s when she took their orders she was asked if she was an actor or dancer or grad student. Was it her fault that patrons, especially tourists, expected that a young server working (only temporarily!) in a Chelsea trattoria, would be headed for a big career?
Clare was twenty-three, living in central Oklahoma. It was a long way from home. She wanted to write a novel and get it published, but it felt late to accomplish that. Sometimes she thought she’d give anything to sit for an hour on that worn couch with the dented cushions in her tenth-grade classroom. Clare could still remember the smell of her English teacher’s hair, a mixture of peppermint and permanent marker.