Today begins September Story A Day. I've got my small spiral journal, ready to pen ten-sentence or less stories. I never know what will spark a short-short story: an incident, a sighting, a sound, a word or overheard conversation.
The Story Dancer appeared while watching a reality television program. I'm considering building a series based on what I witnessed – it was beauty in motion.
THE STORY DANCER
He entered stage right. No one could see the baggage he carried. If they could, they'd wonder how he was able to move so lightly across the floor.
There were moments when he landed hard and sunk into the rubber mat like a stone on hot asphalt but the music pulled him out every time. He danced and twirled before his mother's eyes while she still had her sight, lifted her from a bottle of pills and kicked away the dirty syringes.
He held her until the love moved the audience to tears.
It was a sad day when The Great Illuminator died.
Tears fell like miniscule flakes of gold leaf and scattered, caught on the breath of sighs and sobs.
Even Old Lady Quill turned out for the funeral. Her knotted fingers wrapped around an enormous lace-bordered hankie as her nurse pushed her wildly patterned and painted wheelchair through the crowd.
No one had seen her for years.
Rumor was she and The Great Illuminator, once admired and sought after as the most famous pair of story and memory recorders in the world, began to fade as society picked up pace and dropped the beauty of a hand-lettered page for a quicker, albeit mechanical looking, document.
Lady Quill and The Great Illuminator continued their adventures in private: he applying layer upon layer of the lives they'd touched in paint and gold leaf, she in broad-edged letters that married themselves into words and stories.
Those that remembered them would stop by their estate for a visit, always being received graciously, always leaving with the gift of a painted page.
Each person attending the funeral brought pages and tossed them onto the grave site until even Old Lady Quill could barely see the separation between The Great Illuminator and herself.
The rains that follow such large displays of grief and remembrance mingled with the gold-flecked tears of the crowd and turned the mountain of memorabilia into a solid mound of story.
Old Lady Quill's pen can still be heard, the skritch-scratch of nib on paper forever recording the memories of friends she'd never meet.
How many people these days are content with simply being in the presence of the moment? Decades of connecting, capturing "the moment" in film (now pixels), is ingrained in the people. It takes courage these days to trust ourselves to remember a moment, let alone hear a story.
I've never been much of a picture taker. Although I carry around a camera, I forget to take it out at "opportune" moments because I'm too caught up in the seeing.
I'm okay with that.
