Return, Full
Twenty-seven days, plus a few hours, and I return, full. Did you miss me?
What did I do in the interim?
Layer by layer, thin as rice paper, silver in my light, I laid down a tale.
It starts with nothing.
Slowly, it begins to form. A story made from fragments, figments, memories, dreams. The stirring of a sense woven from nonsense.
I lay down a story.
A woman falls in love.
A girl befriends a dog.
My light shines silver on secrets, shimmer,
revealing pain, revealing sorrow.
A grandfather’s life, in hollow and shadow, appears.
What do we know, and what can we never know?
What regions lay within, hidden even to my reflected light?
Some truths, layer by layer, like a sheet of rice paper, shine through.
And this is what I build while I return.
Once the tale is full, we pare it down,
remove what’s not needed, layer by layer,
like water on the rock, wearing it down
until only the shape of the crystal, more durable than water
remains.
We end at nothing.
Prompt for May 31: “Write a story about a creative person who has just completed, or is in the throes of completing a massive creative effort,” from StoryADay.org.
Cathy Tea's SimLit Anthology 