For Storytellers

Mimi Silverstein

A good story is like a childhood summer. You remember the feel of worn pages like you remember the smooth wet grass, flattened from endless cartwheels. Green stains gather on the lines of your palms like ink.  The best stories stick between your toes like sand to wet feet.  

I once had a teacher who looked quite a bit like an overstuffed raccoon with square glasses and a ponytail, and he gave me some insight that’s stuck between my toes, not like sand after a day at the beach, but more like gum left on the sidewalk. “All writers are narcissists,” he said. “ We just want everyone to sit down and listen to what we have to say, and not only that, we want them to pay us for it.”  I think about this as I watch words spill through my hands the way sand does, imperfectly and never fast enough, leaving traces stuck on my love line, and my life line, and other places I’ll never reach. When I was eleven I learned I had Romanian ancestry, which I thought made me a gypsy like Esmeralda, and I went around reading palms with an air of confident mystery.

It was around this time that I first read the story of Scheherazade and her thousand tales.  When I think of her, ancient Persia rises from the sands, all orange and pink and gold, and a dark haired girl stares into the cruel eyes of her new husband. In the eyes of the king, she sees the faces of the women who have come before her, as it is was the custom of the king to take a new wife each night and behead her in the morning.  I am certain that it was then, as she trembled in her gown, as she was led to his chambers, that she resolved to live. Perhaps she had  planned it all along, perhaps she volunteered just to let some other girl live one more day. But it was as she sat on the edge of his bed, and as she pushed away his hands as they came scratching like a panther’s claws at her skin, that she knew she would beat this man. And it was as she lit a candle, and as the light embraced her, and as she said in a voice calmer than night, “Let me tell you a story,” that she knew how she would do it. Scheherazade told only half her tale, and though the king raged and begged, she told him she would say no more till the next night. And each night went this way, a story ended and a new one begun, till the king could not dream of murdering his story spinning queen.  

If you have ever been a child who wished to fly, who climbed trees to escape the company of people like a slinking cat, you know that stories can save you.  But it must have been a woman who told this story first, because we know what it’s like to feel a man’s hungry breath on our skin and to look into the deepest parts of ourselves for anything at all that will keep us alive till morning. Scheherazade found stories living in those deep parts, and maybe stories are there in the deepest parts of all of us, deep like childhood. Scoop a hand through your inner organs and come up with fights over toothpaste with your sister, the song your father always played on long car rides, and the first book you ever loved. 

So perhaps we are narcissists. Perhaps what we want more than anything is to clog other people’s veins with our words.  Or perhaps we are heroes, who only hope our stories will save the future wives of a murderous king, or the next generation of lonely teenagers. I think we are somewhere in between: we wish for both, the selfish and the selfless, and in the end, when we sit with Scheherazade on a blanket that smells like blood, we light the candle before us with all that we have.