“BOOOO-ring!” Didi huffed dramatically.
“Hey,” I chided gently. “Don’t be mean. You know I don’t like that.”
Too proud to apologize outright, even at that age, she folded her hands and said in a pretend-imperious tone, “Try again.”
I sighed. When had she become so difficult? In the past, any story I told would get her to clap her hands in joy. And honestly, it was getting late. With no job, I didn’t actually have to get up before 9 a.m., but I didn’t want to lose the routine of rising early to look for work. And I hadn’t even had much of a chance to talk to Tanya.
As if she heard my thoughts, Tanya called out from the kitchen, “How you two doing in there?”
It wasn’t surprising that Tanya and I might share a thought; we’d been inseparable as kids and now in our 40s, we were much more like brother and sister than cousins. I called out to her that we were almost done, earning another skeptical look from Didi.
“OK,” I said to the kid. “How about a dolphin who became friends with a cat, but they could never see each other because they met when the cat’s family was on vacation in Florida and the cat lived most of the year in Ohio?”
“Why didn’t the dolphin just get a job with Sea World?” Didi asked.
“Good question. What about the cloud who wanted to learn how to swim? Or the vampire who kept biting his own lip? Or the hummingbird who dreamed of getting into the Olympic in the shot put event?”
“Silly, silly, silly,” Didi said.
I gave it some thought. Then I said, “Once, there was a story, and all it wanted was to be told.”
She looked doubtful and I tried not to laugh. But she didn’t object. She folded her arms and waited.
“This story was very sad, because a story’s whole job is for somebody to tell it, right? But nobody would. So the story went to a reporter and said, ‘Would you tell me?’ ‘What are you about?’ the reporter asked. ‘Everything,’ said the story. But the reporter frowned and said, ‘I only tell very specific stories.’ So the story went to a novelist, but the novelist was very busy not writing his own stories.”
“Wait!” Didi’s hand shot up like a very small traffic cop. “Did you say he was busy not writing his own stories?”
“Of course! Not writing a story is just about the busiest you can be. In fact, when you’re not writing a story, sometimes that’s all that you can do.”
“Even if you’re not doing that either?”
“Uh-huh. It’s all you can do, until you start writing your story. And then you have to do that.”
“Are you sure you’re not being silly?”
“Positive. May I continue?”
“Fine.”
“Thank you. So the story was very unhappy, and it roamed all around the world, asking everyone it could find to be told, but everyone was busy. The story even asked a Leprechaun, a tree, a hummingbird, a vampire and a cloud, but they weren’t interested. They had their own problems.“
’But I can tell you everything,’ the story protested. ‘We don’t need to know everything,’ the others said. ‘But I’m already here. I can tell you how I end,’ the story said. ‘Eh,’ the others said.‘No thanks.’ And so the story continued to wander until finally, it died.”
“It died?”
“Yup.”
“Like, dead?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But why?”
“Because no one cared how it ended.”
She knitted her brow, and I watched her laboring to work out just what she was missing.
Finally, she said, “So wait. How did it end?”
“Well look at that!” I said. “You just brought it back to life.”
• • •
