Can’t Write This
Some stories just can’t be told
It dawned on me slowly and then all at once. Velocity of a runaway train is how I hit the brick wall. I can’t write fiction to save my life. Don’t know how. I can write a wicked essay. Make you laugh. Make you cry.
Tell you about the time the lady in the flowered dress came back, mama shaking as her car pulled up because she come to take Shawnie away.
Little foster boy stayed long enough we thought he was our brother for real and true. Took his mother five years to want her boy. By then he thought my mama was his too. Called her mommy. Cried when the lady took him.
Car pulling away, face in the window, mouth open, tears running down his little cheeks. Reaching out, calling Mommy. Can’t forget that little face, small hand on the window. How mama fell on the floor sobbing.
That I can write. Flows like lava. Cream from a cracked pitcher. Blood from a gaping wound maybe. But fiction, that’s a different beast. Seems to me it should be easier. Less blood. Turns out no, it’s not that simple.
Like Vonnegut said. So it goes.
Here’s the thing eats me. How do you live inside books for half a century and not know how to cobble a story together?
