A young girl crawled into a warm bed one cold night, and called to her father that it was story time
The father sat down beside his daughter’s bed and began “a long time ago, even before you were born, there was a young boy who lived with his mother. When the boy was first born, he was placed on his mother’s chest and she told him a story before they fell asleep together. Each night after that, the mother told her son a story before he fell asleep, each night a new story. One night she told her son a story about his father, another night about his sister. One night she told him a story about rabbits and how they hop, another night about chickens and the eggs they lay. One night she told him a story about bravery, another night about cowardice.
“Sometimes the mother and son traveled great distances to tell the story, and sometimes they went to a neighbour’s house. Sometimes they stayed in the son’s room, his mother telling a story from his bedside. For the story about rabbits and how they hop, the mother and son went to the woods behind their house. For the story about his father, they traveled to a far away place.
“One night, the young boy asked his mother to tell him a different story, one that was unlike anything she had ever told him, unlike anything he had ever heard. The mother smiled at her son’s request, almost sadly, like a wince or a grimace. She asked if he was sure, that he wanted to hear something very different. Her son nodded his head, and the mother smiled wider, knowingly.
“The mother inched closer to her son’s bed, and whispered in his ear. She whispered a story of evil people, in evil times, doing evil things to evil people. When the mother had finished her story, she leaned back in her chair and looked at her son. He was thinking about the story, running it through his mind. Finally he said ‘mother, I don’t really like that story. Can you take it back and tell me another one?’
“His mother kissed his forehead, and walked across the bedroom. ‘I’m sorry my dear,’ his mother said, pausing at the door, ‘I can’t take the story back. It’s your’s now. To forget or remember, to retell or to change. To find your place within it’”
The father asked his daughter if she liked the story. His daughter said she didn’t. He smiled and said he would tell her another story the next night.
—
I told this story to my partner, after having sketched the story in my head and the writing it down quickly, so I could at least have something to refer to if I forgot a whole part. I found it went really quickly quicker than I thought it would. I also kept wanting to stop and change things, to be able to pour over it and rework sentences.
I’ve gotten used to ‘showing, not telling’. But that was really difficult here. I had planned to go into detail about the chair the mother sits in beside the bed, but I found I couldn’t do that as easily and remember everything. I got to thinking that this might be easier with a kind of crowd-sourcing of the details, over time. If this story, or any story was told and retold over and over, people could add-in details, and some would stick and some wouldn’t. And as a teller got more comfortable telling it, they could add in a detail, that someone else would get comfortable with, and then add on to it.
I think a story that has a shell but relies on others to populate it lends itself to an oral tradition. You’ve got your structure, but then each person can add in details that make it meaningful to their lives. The earlier stories could be changed from rabbits and chickens to moose and wolves, and they could be expanded, if the teller wants to actually tell that story (another story within the story). I’m thinking of something like the famous joke that comedians tell among themselves (The Aristocrats – I won’t link to it, because it’s definitely ‘not safe for work/school’…and Bob Sagat’s version might not even be ‘safe for life’). But I think leaving out the details of the ‘evil story’ is a great idea, not least because it reminds me of this gem (particularly around 3:01).
Hey!
Even though you said that you felt yout story went by quite short, I found that it hit just the right spots.
In particular, when you said: “It’s your’s now. To forget or remember, to retell or to change. To find your place within it’”. Im absolutely in love with the idea that one can never really forget a ‘story’ that they’ve been told. Just like one can never really forget an experience that they had. In fact, if you think about it in those terms, listening to a story could bring you similar results compared to experiencing a story because both never leave your mind. You have to ‘find your place within it’, like you stated above.
My question to you is, has there ever been a story that you were told that made you want to forget it? If so, what did you do? Did you change the story and appropriate it somehow within your belief system, or did you just let it linger and be the way it was?
Thanks,
Anna.
Thanks for the response, @annabourak. Sorry it’s taken a little while to reply.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you compared listening to a story and experiencing a story. I think they are one and the same. Listening to a story, we experience that entire moment of its telling – everything from the cadence of the storyteller to the weather.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I can remember quite a few stories I wanted to forget, but I think I recognize that you can’t forget a story, at least not in the sense of giving the story away (to be sure, I might not recall the story at any given time, but the story is still there, having shaped my thinking and life experiences in some subtle or overt way). But stories that you don’t want, I think we all have a pretty good defense mechanism that will incorporate the story into our world view (our morals, spirituality, etc.) – meaning, “that terrible thing happened for these reasons” – a deity’s will, poor planning, random luck, etc.
HI Jamie -thank you for the story and the song; this is a gentle telling of the story of evil that manages to warn the listener/reading without letting the evil escape into the world. I can’t help but to wonder if the approaching arrival of your new baby helped to inspire the soft hopefulness of your story?
Glad you enjoyed the story, @erikapaterson
I actually didn’t think this was a gentle telling of the story. I found it a bit disturbing as it formulated in my head, because it suggests that evil comes into the world through each of us. So here’s this young child, whose entire world had previously been devoid of evil, and evil has just entered it (by way of their parent, no less!). You’re quite right, it was inspired by our expected arrival; there’s always balance – with elation and excitement come thoughts of how (and whether) to protect your child from the realities of life.