The word

She said she wasn’t going to write another novel. That part of her life was over, page turned, book closed. Not that the ideas had dried up. They were still there, little larval things like glow worms, squirming in the dark at the back of the drawer where she had locked them. It was difficult to close her ears to their piping voices, to refuse the siren call that would start with a scene, an opening line, an image bursting from silence into a multitude of sounds.

But if she listened, that single line, bursting into life, would inevitably and irrevocably, become a story line. The squirming thing would sprout fins, a tail, scales that glinted, wings, feathers, galloping hooves, and there would be no stopping it until another story was finished, revised, edited and revised again, and then…

And then? It would be another story on the pile of stories that nobody wanted, that towered and tottered and threatened to submerge her. So she had said, no more. Enough disappointment is enough.

She tried to ignore the squeaking glow worms, but it’s hard to be on your guard every minute of the day, and in a moment of inattention, she heard the word flung at her by an insistent larva. She heard the word and immediately slammed the drawer closed and turned the key. Inside, in the dark, the little voices were chanting in triumph. It was just one word, but it was an important word. The most magical word of all. The word was a title. And if there is a title, there is inevitably a story.

She was there again, on the brink of another world. She held a word, like a star, and felt the star tug. She dug in her heels, but the brink fell away in a cascade of unstable rock fragments, and she was falling, soaring or drowning, in an ocean of sky. The star tugged imperiously, and she knew she was on the point of giving another year of her life to a dream. Would it matter if, once again, she was the only one to follow where the hazy path led? Probably not. She had a word, the first. A title. The rest would follow if she let it.

When there is silence,
the silence of the scratch
of gravel beneath a shoe,

a dog barking
in the blue distance,
too far away to be real,

the fluttering, rustling, the whoosh,
the pitter-pattering of the rain,
rushing towards us over the hills,

we hear then the voice
of what we were, what we are
and what we will be,

and the deep blue silence
is suddenly filled with the beating wings
of a thousand birds.