I was interviewed by Kristine Johnson recently for Voices in the Wilderness / The Sparrow’s Call (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEKanUz8D3djpUknXyIEhrw). One of the questions she asked was how I think story relates to culture. Having grown up in England, many stories I heard as a child centered on the Second World War. Even in the 60s and 70s, cities were still adorned with demolished blocks and massive holes in the ground. So even now, whenever I see such a hole, my first thought is “bomb damage.” Not so here in America, of course; here, there’s more likely a new building going up. So what difference does my “story” make? I suspect it makes me more of a pessimist — a building site reminds me of the destruction human beings can cause, while my American neighbor delights in what great things we create.
In England, church and state were intertwined, so my children learned their Bible stories from the same teacher who read fairytales to them. Faith became part of childhood’s fairytale culture to them, and ten-year-olds would happily announce they’d grown too old for church. But, in the States, my friends bemoan their separation of church and state that bans Bible stories from elementary school — my “story,” my experience, supports the separation; my friends’ opposes it.
Part of why I write Bible stories is in answer to my son’s schoolfriend who asked, “How can you still believe in fairytales?” I add science, history, archeology, and anything else I can think of to my Bible tales, hoping to make them read like adventures of real people in a real historical world (with a real God), because that’s what I think they are. If you’re thinking of the story of Easter this Easter season, maybe you’d like to read it in non-traditional, non-fairytale, wholly Biblical and hopefully historical form in my book Jerusalem Journey.
Meanwhile, what about your stories? My English background is filled with tales of Saxons invading the Celts, Vikings invading the Saxons, Normans invading the Vikings and more. If only the stories of refugees and immigrants from tyranny around the world could be added to that mix — how might that stem the rising tide of intolerance? And here in the States, if stories of slaves and tales of the Long Walk of the Navajo could be added to the “stories” our children accept and own, could that change things too?
I think the stories we grow up just might define, create, or destroy the cultures we grow up in. So I’ll try to be an optimist and believe our youth have more (and more honest) stories and more hope.
Did you make any New Year resolutions? I saw my doctor last week (on Zoom) and she suggested a good objective for me would be to stay out of hospital for the rest of the year–one thing I surely hope to succeed in!
So far 2021 has offered two floods in the basement (one much worse than the other), two unrelated hospital stays (one much longer than the other), and a small tree falling toward our house. There’s not much writing getting done around here; not much editing either. But I’m working on getting back to normal.
Of course, after 2020, it’s not entirely clear what normal should look like: Sickness, violence, the normalization of lies? Or kindness, generosity, strangers helping strangers, and neighbors checking up to make sure the elderly are safe. (Okay, I wasn’t intending to include myself among the elderly quite yet…) Perhaps it’s just a question of point of view.
The hospital visits revealed problems I didn’t know I had, that can now be dealt with before they come serious. The big basement flood waited until we’d brought all the books and ornaments upstairs after the small one. And the tree had just been trimmed so it didn’t cause any damage. Which means we’re seriously lucky. Meanwhile, in the small amount of writing I’ve done, my pre-teen boy protagonist has revealed a much more positive point of view than his older sister’s, pondering whether his teacher is having a bad day when she can’t pronounce his name, whereas big sister, in the same situation, was more likely to consider turning someone into a frog.
The Hemlock stories are one thing I’m working on. Another is my cat stories, ’cause my mum loves cats and wants to see them in a book. And a third is a middle-grade storybook version of Revelation. Who knows which I will finish first? But if you’re looking for something to change your point of view on sickness, violence, and the normalization of lies, you might try my most recent release: Questioning Faith. The world has a long history of trials and tribulations, and a long perspective can help.
It means three days – the Easter Triduum – from Maundy Thursday evening, through Good Friday’s afternoon, to glory at midnight on Saturday. This year we rang in Easter with the Hallelujah Chorus on bells. I’m sure I messed up. But I’m also sure it sounded good, and it was strangely wondrous to be part of it.
Bread and Wine
Bread and bitter herbs and oil
Sponge was dipped in gall
Wine with water smoothly blends
While blood and water pour
One of you betrays me, we
All ask Not I? while each
Betrays him when the end is near
And each forgiven cries He’s risen; where am I to go from here?
Behold!
Behold the wood—
And cloth of purple dyed is slipped aside—
Behold the cross on which he died.
Behold the wood.
And so I cry—
I did not ask that he should die for me—
And yet I weep
And yet this vigil keep.
Behold the wood.
I am not good.
I do not do the good I would
And what I should not, do,
Yet even with my woulds and shoulds and coulds
He says I’m good enough—
Behold the wood—
For him to pay my price.
So on that tree—
Behold the wood—
He died for me—
Behold the wood—
That I might be—
Behold the wood—
So much much more than me.
Behold the wood.
Behold—I will behold,
And I will try.
Behold, he dies.
And he will rise.
Holy Saturday’s Planting
Yellow in the green grass, suns
Are lit, and, passing, Easter’s Son
Has fit the crime to gift of
Bread and wine. The Son-shine lifts,
And yellow lions bend their heads to Him.
I touch the yellow lion, see
God’s Lion set me free.
Risen Indeed
What threatened us was promise
And what we feared was hope. In the grave we laid him Left him then he rose.
Do not fear he whispered. Tell the world he said Love to loveless given Risen from the dead.
Now he gives us promise
Hope instead of fear.
In the grave our trials
Were crushed. The future’s here!
I once read a book called “The Productive Writer” by Sage Cohen. (The link should take you to my review on Goodreads.) Sometimes I remember that’s surely what I aspire to; to be a writer, and to be productive. And sometimes life gets in the way.
If you produce an email a day, does that make you a productive writer? If you read a hundred emails a day, are you a productive reader? (What if you only reply to one in a hundred?) And does collaborating with your spouse on resume-writing make you a productive editor?
What about seeing a book re-released? Does that make you un-productive since it was first removed from publication, or productive because it’s back? Or is productive simply a state of mind. I will call myself productive. I will rejoice in what I’ve produced. And I will…
…BE A PRODUCTIVE WRITER!
This month has seen the re-release of my “last” two Five-Minute Bible-Story books (11th and 12th in the series), and I’m very proud of them, even if the color versions are awaiting release, and the next book in the series merely fills me with stories and no time to write . I will make my state of mind productive and I’ll claim that yes,
I’VE PRODUCED SOMETHING!
Plus I just updated my website to include links to the new books. That’s “productive” isn’t it, even if I have’t updated it yet to include just one book on a page… And…
I’ve almost finished printing out the paperwork for this weekend’s Writers’ Mill meeting. And… DRUMROLL! … I have actually written something/produced a whole piece of writing. It’s a story I hope my Writers’ Mill colleagues will critique for me, so I can submit it to the Northwest Independent Writers Association for their anthology.
PLEASE WISH ME LUCK.
It’s another Tale of Hemlock, and I really hope it works because, as the doubts creep in, as I wonder if I’m productive after all, and as that state of mind falls prey to states of reality…
I’d love to find homes for the Hemlock series (maybe rewriting it comes first).
I’d love to write more Five-Minute Bible-Stories.
I’d love to see A Nose for Adventure come out (it’s slowly climbing the list with Linkville Press).
I’d love to write more novels.
I’d love to have 48 hours in a day.
And I’d love to stay awake!
But am I productive? Are you? And what’s your state of mind?
Tomorrow I’m the not-quite-guest speaker at our local writers’ group (hard to be a guest when you’re always there). I’ll be talking about narrative voice – past/present, 1st/2nd/3rd person narration and all that good stuff – and our upcoming contest prompt is “dialog.” So, if you write in first person, is the narrative voice the same as the use in dialog?
Given that readers will spend 6-12 hours listening to that narrative voice in their heads, with no gaps to get a word in edgewise, perhaps I should hope I don’t write in my speaking voice, else I’d drive my readers crazy and they’d never come back.
Which kind of begs the question, if I’m the guest “speaker,” speaking for around an hour (yes, with gaps for questions), will I speak in my narrative voice, my dialog voice, or something else entirely?
Anyway, here’s a rough draft of what I’m planning to say:
Why does Voice matter?
Because the reader makes a huge commitment to spend time – 12-24 hours aloud, 6-12 hours silently – in company of this voice
Becauser the author commits… lots more hours than that to writing in this voice, so you’d better enjoy it
Because there’s a reader/author contract – you will make it worth the reader’s time (they’re paying you in time and money)
Because of reader expectations –
If it’s a legal contract, should be written in legaleze, but equally…
A sweet old lady’s voice in sweet small-town America probably shouldn’t devolve into pages of swearing
A soldier’s voice as he runs rampage in city shouldn’t devolve into romantic pillow-talk
And what about memoir? Or when people say, “I’m so sorry this happened to you…” when perhaps it wasn’t memoir
How do we avoid being identified with first person narrator, vs.
how do we prove we have the right to tell the tale?
What are our Voice options?
Point of view
Tense
Assumptions or examples
Advantages
Disadvantages
getarounds
First person hero
Present
YA dystopia?
Immediate
Action experienced alongside character
SYMPATHY for hero
Can’t see at a distance.
Whiny, introspective, boring? Temptation to tell it how it happened – too much detail…
NOT NATURAL!
Make sure it’s a real narrative voice.
2nd pov character?
past
Memoir?
Noir
Jane Eyre
Huckleberry Finn
Less immediate
Double consciousness – future looking over past character’s shoulder
Assume the protagonist survived
People ask is it real?
Disclaimer?
Make protagonist obviously different from self
First Person multiple heroes
Get to see multiple points of view, maybe of same events
Get to be in multiple places at once
Need separate narrative voice for each (NOT SAME as dialog voice)
3rd person only requires one narrative voice
First person observer
Great Gatsby
Comment on events
Hear about events from other people so don’t have to be present
Can’t see inside protagonist’s head
Third person hero
Can spend more time describing internal (even subconscious) thoughts, but maybe can’t “say” them.
EMPATHY for hero
Not as immediate Can’t see at a distance
Put 1st person thoughts in italics?
More than one viewpoint?
Third person multiple heroes
J.R.R. Martin
Brian Doyle
Don’t need separate voices for separate viewpoints.
Can give all sides of epic events
POV character can’t keep secrets from the reader.
Be careful how you switch – one per chapter, one per scene, one per paragraph…
Don’t break the reader’s neck, don’t make readers dizzy or confuse them
Use hiatus to separate views
Third person observer
Mystery
Sees all, knows all the characters’ actions (but not their thoughts). Gets to keep secrets and make comments
Have to keep it interesting. Can’t get inside heads.
Good plot!
Third person omniscient
Dorothy Sayers
Sees all, knows all, does get inside their heads, so no secrets
“Little did he know…”
So… if there are no secrets…
Need a really good plot
Examples
Tense change
Princess Stella was walking in the forest. Her thoughts drifted back to the corridors and chambers of the castle. Her feet trod lightly on the loamy ground. Her breath drifted in front of her face in gentle puffs of air. Then a wolf leapt out at her.
She falls back in horror. As the wolf’s red eyes stare into hers, as drool drips from the ends of its fangs, her body trembles and she knows she’s going to die.
Why did the writer change to present tense – identifying with the character while writing an exciting scene. Fix it just by changing the tense. Maybe use italics…
She fell back in horror. I’m going to die. The wolf’s red eyes…
Person change
Princess Stella was walking in the forest. Her thoughts drifted back to the corridors and chambers of the castle. Her feet trod lightly on the loamy ground. Her breath drifted in front of her face in gentle puffs of air. Then a wolf leapt out at her.
I fall back, terrified. The wolf’s red eyes stare into mine, and drool drips on my face from the ends of its fangs. I’m going to die.
Again, identifying with the character. If we change it all to “I,” we might lose sympathy for the character whose head’s stuck in a castle while she walks in a forest, so have to decide what we’re aiming for.
Tense change 1st person
I was walking through the forest, not a trouble in my mind. Okay it wasn’t the castle of my youth, but it was beautiful. Then a wolf leapt out at me.
I fall back, till I land with a thump on the ground. The wolf’s red eyes stare into mine, and drool drips on my face from the ends of its fangs. I’m going to die.
Present tense is more immediate, and, just like switching to italicsfor internal thoughts, we’re allowed to switch tense sometimes. Just need to make sure it fits the voice.
I was walking through the forest, not a care on my mind, when suddenly this bloomin’ great wolf leaps out at me!
Point of view change
Princess Stella walked hand in hand with Prince Jim, dreaming of the future they might share. Then a wolf leapt out at them.
As Jim released her hand, Stella fell, and the wolf seemed set to pounce. She turned around, sure Jim would rescue her, already imagining how she would fall into his arms afterward. But when she caught sight of him, he was already halfway across the clearing, fleeing in terror and wondering where on earth the wolf had come from.
Maybe “fleeing as if in terror, or as if he were trying to guess where the wolf had come from.”
A friend asked if I hadn’t “got it out of my system” yet. And yes, there’s an underlying theme of abuse, forgiveness and recovery in my three novels. And yes, I’ve sort of got it out of my system, but, like a tendency toward migraines, “it” comes back whenever circumstances, politics, current events etc trigger it. My fourth novel will be different though; it’s a mystery, for a start. But it’s still about wounded characters, and abuse of any type will cause those wounds. For me, reading and writing are about seeing through different eyes and realizing life’s not as black and white as I’d imagined; about asking how and why others might be different from me; and about recognizing this is a broken world where none of us are perfect; where difference teaches; and otherness helps us better see ourselves. We none of us have the right to claim another’s imperfections more “wrong” than our own in this world. After all, I can’t eat wheat, though the Bible tells me it’s good…
Which leads to my other books. I’m delightedly seeing my Bible stories republished – same covers, same stories, same “inspired by faith and science” theme (the publisher’s imprint is even called “Inspired by Faith & Science,” an imprint of “Ink-Filled Stories” who have published the novels), and lots more illustrations. There are even “Collectors’ Color Editions” coming out. Getting it all linked up on Amazon will take time. I’m guessing getting the books into real bookstores might take even longer. But it’s exciting (to me at least), and it fits my theme of a broken world, where brokenness needs to be forgiven.
So here’s an excerpt from “Bethlehem’s Baby,” coming soon to print:
In the beginning, God created the universe. He made stars and planets. He made the sun, moon and earth. He made mountains and seas, flowers and trees, birds and bees, and animals and people. And everything was good.
God made the world like a painter creating a beautiful picture. He mixed its colors together, designed its patterns, and added light and dark in all the right places. When God finished painting, the earth was good enough to hang on the wall of heaven.
God made the world like an author writing a book. He worked out the details, solved all the mysteries, and linked all the pieces together. When God finished writing, he gave us his words in the Bible so we could read them. Meanwhile angels rejoiced to know what he’d done.
God made the world like a programmer designing a computer game. He set up all the scenes, made voices for the characters, and planned how all the rules would make everything work. But computer games often have bugs in them. Our world was so good when God finished making it, there wasn’t a single mistake in it anywhere.
But God didn’t hang the world on a wall when he’d finished. He didn’t leave the Bible on a bookshelf to look nice. And he didn’t sell his program to people who wanted to play humans on their computer. Instead, God made the world like a gardener who works in a park. When he’d finished planning and planting everything, God stepped right into the park to help the people look after it. God’s park was a beautiful place called the Garden of Eden.
God worked in his Garden of Eden every day, feeding animals, helping bees, watering flowers, cleaning the rivers, and pouring sweetness into beautiful berries hanging from the trees. God walked and talked with the people in Eden, loving them like a father loves his children. He taught them to play and he kept them perfectly safe. No one was ever hungry in the Garden of Eden. No one was tired or sick. Nobody ever had to work too much and no one was ever bored. Even plants and animals were perfectly safe in Eden, everything beautifully in balance, living and dying in due season with no sickness, no loneliness, no sorrow and no pain.
But then the people in God’s garden, the people God had chosen to be his very own children, broke God’s rules. They didn’t care that the rules were there to keep them safe, or else they didn’t remember. They just wanted to do as they pleased and have fun and pretend they were in charge. So they ate the fruit of a special tree that wasn’t theirs to eat…
Noise filled the forest that morning, growing louder as the day went on. It was almost like a party. Crowds, of young and old alike, thronged the paths, marched through trees, and gathered around the duck pond, the bench on the hill, and the parking lot. There was scarcely space for anyone to hide. But he knew his place. He’d watched them setting up sound systems, with amplifiers and speakers, wires like vines tangling with branches and leaves. He’d heard them testing, “One, two three,” and he’d almost smiled as birds and squirrels raucously answered the sound. But he hadn’t known what they were doing it for. He’d pretended not to care. He’d pretended not to hear those fate-filled words, Memorial for Amelia, so long after death and burial had rendered them meaningless.
A paper bag containing two whole burgers waited in the trashcan—food cast away by the murderer’s daughter-in-law who didn’t seem hungry, though she kept on buying more meals. The victim’s mother didn’t eat of course, and was quietly fading away. She stood near her nemesis now, each with that cone of silence hanging over her head, each separately alive though they seemed like they’d rather be dead. Poised by the makeshift stage, they waited ahead of the crowds while priests and pastors, imam and rabbi, passed by in robes of pomp and intensity.
Meanwhile the stranger stayed hidden under trees. The white cat twined around his feet. “Garnet,” he whispered, remembering its name from long ago.
“I lost my daughter,” Evie said into an ice-cream microphone, candy pink and much too cheerful for her frozen face. Her thin voice snatched at the air, while electronics caught the sound, amplifying silence to crackling booms. Confidence faded backward into the trees then reflected again. Is she looking at me? “I lost my daughter right over there.” She pointed. He was glad he’d hidden himself this side of the pond instead. People stared. “A dog found her and dug her up. She was buried like a bone. So then we put her in a coffin. Were you there? Did you see? She was so beautiful.”
He, the Prowler, had seen the coffin, but he hadn’t seen the child, grown old and still. He thought she must have been beautiful; she must have looked like her mother though she’d had her father’s eyes. He shuffled his feet, wondering where the dog had buried that particular, earth-shattering, beautiful feast.
The microphone fell from Evie’s hands. He almost wanted to run and comfort her. But the other woman, the evil Lydia, picked it up and handed it back. She held her arms around the broken mother, for a while, then let her speak again.
“You know what I prayed sometimes?” Evie asked.
What? Evie prayed? The Prowler thought she’d given up prayer long ago, when God stopped answering, and the child’s diagnosis remained unforgivably unchanged.
“For my Amelia? You know what I prayed? You know what she was like.”
He had no right; he couldn’t know, because he’d left her behind.
“I prayed that God would protect my little girl, because I wouldn’t always be here for her, because a mother’s meant to die before her children isn’t she? I never expected I’d have to bury her.”
A father shouldn’t have to bury his children either.
Evie sobbed again. “I thought, you know, the same things you all thought—about how she’d never learn to cope on her own.”
He’d thought it too. He’d known. He had to leave before his daughter’s future ceased to exist, before the blame became too great for any of them to bear. But Evie always insisted on believing there’d be hope; sweet Evie, ever betrayed by his denial and her broken child. So she stood, talking now about prayer.
“I asked God to help. So I guess God must’ve decided she wouldn’t have to cope. I guess God took her away instead of taking me. I don’t like how it happened. I’m sure she didn’t like it. But God took her, and now my Amelia’s okay.”
Evie sobbed, the sound hard and fierce, as loudspeakers turned it to shouting over the crowd. “Now she’s never going to suffer anymore, and I don’t need to be scared for her.” It might have been a cry of triumph, but Evie’s voice faded, strangling the final words. She wrung her hands and held the microphone low against her waist, a leaden weight that needed to fall to the ground.
Meanwhile the Prowler crouched over the cat, burying his face in fur. He tried not to cry, tried to make no sound, and prayed he wouldn’t be heard or seen at all.
“I guess it’s me who has to cope now on my own,” Evie continued, “not Amelia. And I just want to ask you all to help, ’cause it’s so very, very hard.”
He couldn’t help. His heart was stone, and he couldn’t put those shattered pieces together, never again. He really was a shiftless, worthless soul.
When the Prowler looked up, the other woman had taken Evie’s position on the makeshift stage. “I don’t know what I lost,” Lydia said, evil Lydia, unwitting daughter-in-law of a murderer. She faced the crowd’s accusation with a gaze that trembled and wavered even more than her hands. She held the shivering microphone close to her nose, and clutched her stomach as if in pain. “I lost my father-in-law I suppose. And then it was like he’d never really been there for me to lose, like I’d never really known him. I feel like everything’s sliding away, like it’s all an illusion. Nothing’s certain anymore.”
Curled low to the ground, crouched like a dog beside the cat, the stranger knew what Lydia meant. Nothing was certain, and life slips away like water in the stream. He remembered where he’d heard her name, Lydia Markham, from that distant part of his life. The cat wasn’t hers; it was her neighbor’s, and she was married to the son from Markham’s garage, just along the road. He needed to hate her, because the man from that garage was the man in the woods, the Paradise Predator turned Murderer, the man who killed the child.
Fair-haired Lydia looked around the crowd, seeing so many faces, but not the man’s. She confronted their knowledge of her father-in-law and called it their mistake too. “Did you take your cars to him? Some of you did, I know. If you talked to him in the garage, if you met him on the street, aren’t you wondering the same things as I am? How could we not have known? How could we all not have known?”
But no one had known that the man who mended cars would break the child.
—If the stranger had stayed, if he’d still been there in her life, could he have kept her from the predator in the woods? Could he have made her safe? Would he have known?
“I lost my memories of my children’s grandfather, and my husband’s father.”
—He’d lost his child, the life he’d thrown away when he left that day.
“All the things I thought he was, the things he could have been…”
—But Amelia could never be more, would never have been anything at all. She didn’t deserve what had happened to her.
“And then my little boy comes up to me and says, ‘I still love him.’”
—Does Evie love me still? Did Amelia?
People in the crowd turned toward each other, anger perhaps on their faces, disgust or something else. “My son still loves him,” Lydia announced firmly, sudden confidence infusing her voice. “His memories, my son’s memories, he’s holding onto them. They were real, those things he remembers; they’re part of my son, part of who he is. And I’m thinking maybe that’s alright, because I’m not sure how to tell him it’s all wrong.”
The Prowler sobbed out loud, knowing everything was wrong, everything since the day he left, since he’d thrown his own memories away. Afraid of little Amelia at three, he’d never known her at seven, at eleven, thirteen. He’d lost that right.
“Everything that’s happened, all these awful things, they don’t change the past.”
—They don’t change the fact that he wasn’t there when he was needed.
“The only thing that’s changing is the future.”
—He had none.
Hearing nothing now but a roaring pain in his ears, the Prowler crouched to the ground. A child’s high trill broke through, impossibly, but he wouldn’t listen. “Daddy, it’s okay. Daddy? Daddy?” The cat clawed his knees and he was still hiding under trees.
“I wonder,” evil Lydia asked, still standing in front of the crowd, still speaking into the microphone. “Is it possible for someone to be two people at once?”
—Could that be him? Could he be lover and betrayer, father and stranger both? Was that why he felt so torn apart?
He crouched in the shadows, waiting for the crowds to depart from the park again. He was well hidden. But then the stranger, husband, prowler, devourer, or father, felt a hand on his shoulder. He heard a once-loved, once-familiar voice whisper his name.
“Hello Andrew.”
“Evie?”
Sylvia had to forgive herself for not speaking earlier. The community needed to forgive itself (and forgive Lydia) for not knowing. And Andrew has to forgive himself for not being there. In the end, they all have to forgive the world for being a place where bad things happen to good people… forgive God for allowing such a place, though it’s we who broke his perfect creation… In the end Andrew has to learn there’s still good in the world. And for all our shouting, all our demonstrations and complaints, all our desperation, there is still good in the world. For that I thank God.
“Why did you do that?” Sharon asked. Sylvia just shrugged as they walked the tree-lined path in silence. “You always do it, don’t you?”
“Not always,” Sylvia mumbled.
“Oh come on!” Sharon stopped short. “Come on. Tell me one time you didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
They walked on. Dried leaves from long-gone fall crunched underfoot. The air smelled heavy and sickly sweet, pine needles dripping on the outer branches of trees. Light shone brighter as they came to the end of the path. Running water, shouts of children playing and adults calling names drifted nearby. Sunlight slanted through bark dust floating on air.
“Let’s stop here,” said Sharon when they came to a bench, so they sat. Sylvia gazed down at her hands, firmly, primly clasped over her knees, skirt pulled down, legs together. Beside her, Sharon threw herself into a sprawl, arms and legs akimbo on wooden slats. Then she stood again, stepping forward and back.
“No,” Sharon said as Sylvia started to move. “No. You stay there. Let’s talk.” She faced her friend. “You listen, Sylvia. You just sit there and listen to me for a change.” She turned back to the tree-hidden sky, gathering thoughts from the air. “Okay. So we’re at the party and it’s snowing outside.” Arms thrown out dramatically. “Everyone’s happy. Right? Great music. Great food. Nothing bad going on. Nothing our mothers wouldn’t approve of, right?”
Sylvia nodded and groaned.
“And then my brother, my dear sweet Simon that you’ve been going all gooey-eyed over forever, my brother that’s only there ’cause I told him I wanted him to meet you—’cause you told me you wanted to meet him… Yeah?”
Sylvia nodded again.
“My brother asks you to dance, and you stand there like a brick. Then he tells you you’re pretty—I know, I was listening—he tells you you’re pretty and you run away like he’s threatened to murder you or something.”
Sylvia’s head angled down. Tears splashed on the backs of hands tightly clasped in her lap.
“Why?” Sharon asked, reaching to comfort her friend. “Why, Sylvia?”
But Sylvia didn’t answer. Her sobs were quiet, though they drowned out the birds and the water, children and parents too. The rest of the park belonged to a different world as Sylvia wept in her secret circle of shame.
“Why, Sylvia?”
A mother walked by, holding a small girl by the hand. “Amelia, this way.” The child hummed tunelessly, trailing a red-dressed doll and stuffed rabbit behind her.
“Why?”
A bunch of schoolchildren, youngsters with bright happy shouts and flashing feet, burst from sunlight into the trees. They raced past the bench with parents following. Sounds of tears and laughter stayed behind, waiting for seasons and time.
“Will you tell me sometime, Sylvia?”
“Maybe. But I don’t think we should stay in the woods on our own. We should warn those kids.”
But how do we warn our children, and how can they know when their safe world’s suddenly strange?
I went out for coffee with Lydia then thought, how stupid—I couldn’t say anything in a store. We carried our drinks down to the park where I thought, how stupid—how could I talk with the forest still watching. Then we wandered the quiet streets back to Lydia’s house. I imagined I’d wait until we were inside, but instead my words just tumbled out.
“In the park. When I was a kid. This guy kept touching me.”
“Why didn’t you just say no,” said my sister, her voice as brittle as saccharine poured into coffee. “It’s what I did.” And I wondered what she meant…
I told my brother and he hugged me and said, “Poor you. Did you know our Lydia got abused too?” So I wondered if you can measure depth with the number of times it occurs, and define who’s more hurt…
Mom didn’t want to believe me at first. I sat beside her on the sofa and we stared at the TV’s empty eye. She said she would have known. She would have noticed it. She said I couldn’t have got home late from school so many times. She said someone would have told her. My school work would have suffered and the teachers would have said. I was never any good with secrets so it couldn’t be true.
Mom said they talk about recovered memories and so many times they’re false. Auto-suggestion, she said, and it’s all the psychiatrist’s fault. So what had my therapist said to me?
I said I never forgot, so I didn’t need to remember, and it had to be true.
She said I’d forgotten his face.
I said I never knew it…
Daddy cried…
I could tell when Lydia told Troy because of the way he looked at me, as if he was trying to imagine [those] hands on me, or else his own. I was glad I didn’t live in Paradise now. I was glad to get in my car and drive away, back to Donald and the children, back to the safety and secrecy of my home…
The therapist asks me, “What about when you told Donald? What did he say?”
Donald said men have needs and he was glad our children were all boys.
“What did he mean?”
I didn’t ask. I think he meant he loved me and it wasn’t my fault.
If you’ve ever wondered why we don’t tell, ask yourself how you would respond when someone you love tells you.
Sheila Deeth: author, editor and book reviewer 