...but first a story

She still enjoys a good story, anytime, anyplace. She loses herself in the sounds of consonants colliding in rhythm to form reticulating stories that dissolve at the edges, the place where imagery and imagination meld with reality.

And so it was bedtime once again, as it so often is when the sun lays down below the horizon. The fire crackled and the settling figures desired a tale to carry the mind away and beyond the present. This story began as every story does, with the inhalation of breathe and the vibration of vocal chords sending sounds through space. There was an image in her mind of a girl, her main character Olivia Jane, the girl with wild curly hair that housed a nesting hummingbird. She wove sentences together with pauses and space, giving her just enough time to place a perfunctory punctuation before beginning anew. The story was being constructed, creating itself even as she paused, unsure of the next sound to escape her lips.

A silent film, of the story she was weaving, played in her mind as she attempted to match up her words with the pictures behind her eyes. Her mind kept skipping ahead of itself, asking the consistent droning question, the question in mind at the onset of any story, "... how does it end?" The question hung in the air, like the suspended flight of a fly stunned into immobility by the spider's web. And in that moment, just as the web finished trembling, she understood something.

The role of our dear storyteller became clear to her, just as the role of Olivia Jane became clear with every passing breath. She was a character in her own story, writing in the captions on the slide show of her life. The soft sounds of snoring and the crackling of the fire reinforced her new found purpose. She thought, the bedtime story is not the newscaster's story, or the excited blurtings of a youth. Nor does it carry the same driving force as the lover's whispering sonnet, meant to stir up frenzy with it's wildly exaggerated hush. The bedtime story is about tone and meter. It is a song sung lowly and consistently that caters to the tired mind, providing a gentle humming, such as nature employs in her chorus of summertime crickets.

And so, as she finished her story and stepped outside into the night air, she opened her mouth once more.

This time the words that escaped were full of air, sung into existence by a storyteller who understood that singing and speaking are the same thing.