by Melanie Tem
There are so many stories to tell.
And all of the stories are true.
We wait for whatever happens next.
We stay available.
We name it to make it real.
It was hard for us to write this piece.
For one thing, we write differently. My stories tend more toward magical realism, Steve’s more toward surrealism. Realism, in both cases, but we argued over form: “This isn’t a story! It doesn’t have a plot!”
“What do you want from a plot? Important things happen, and it does move from A to B.”
In our fiction, Melanie’s monsters usually are ultimately either vanquished or accepted, while at the end of my stories you often find out that the darkness in one form or another lives on and on. There’s no escaping it, and I question whether you should try to escape it in the first place.
Since words can only approximate both the monsters and the vanquishment, we wrote each other worried notes in the margins of this story.
“I don’t know if we can really use the word ‘divine.’ ”
“If someone looked inside your dreams, would they really see only darkness?”
It was hard for us to write this piece.
“This upsets me,” Melanie would say.
Steve would nod. “Maybe we can’t do this.”
“Oh, we have to,” I’d insist. “We’ve gone too far to stop now. I want to see what happens.”
This piece is about writing and horror and fear and about love. We’re utterly separate from each other, of course, yet there’s a country we share, a rich and wonderful place, a divine place, and we create it by naming all of its parts, all of the angels and all of the demons who live there with us.
What happens next?
There are so many stories to tell.
We could tell
another story:
END