Her father had taught her silence. He was not a man comfortable with words, but he could steep in silence for hours, and when she collected her books and went to bed with a quick kiss on the cheek, she felt as if they'd said more than they ever had in any conversation.
She had learned to be quiet, to be watchful and wary, but also to lose herself in her novels. Though not, she remembered, all the time. She had been so absorbed in The Three Muskateers when she'd first read it, sitting in a tree, that when d'Artagnan dodged a sword, so had she, and promptly lost balance and fallen out of the tree. Her concussion had been so severe the doctor insisted she stay in her bed. Her father had relocated for several days to her room, with a new stack of books each day, and they'd sat in silence, in their own worlds, closer than ever.
Silence, she came to realize, was a breeding ground for stories, but not books. In silence she could make up entire aventures and epics, but without words they withered and died. Her father was a collector of stories, but he was not a wordsmith.
She found her fertilzer, her compost, her sunlight and water and root-growing soil for her stories in libraries, where she easily camouflaged herself with grey blouses and black skirts and listened to the conversations on the other side of the stacks. She'd never longed to have conversations like that with anyone.
Her father had filled shelves and shelves of books for her. One day she caught him glancing at the black smudges on her fingers. The next day, with a biography and an annotated version of Alice in Wonderland, a box of pencils and a silver sharpener appeared on the shelf.
She made notes of the stories she'd collected, and when they felt ready to grow, she planted herself in the silence she'd collected, and touched the tip of her pencil to the page. Words bled from its tip, and the silence consumed them.
Art by Ludovic Jacqz
Text by Lucie MacAulay
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