He sat pondering over the empty writing pad.
Self-isolation through the pandemic was surely his chance to do something he’d always wanted to have a go at. To write; to write something, anything, really. He knew there were stories rattling around inside his head, there had to be. He would let them come to the surface, then make a work of it. A piece of his own creation!
He sat listening to the silence in his head. A silence that began to stir. A rippling of thoughts began to wash back and forth, like bobbing waves coming in from a great ocean or the tiny ripples on a pond. One by one he felt the notions move; layers of things being revealed. Each being a step towards the telling of a tale. He’d love to write a story about a flight of steps that go nowhere… But, no, that wasn’t real He wanted to write about his memories. He couldn’t help feeling that he’d like to write about some magical person, able to bend light rays or change the colour of leaves back to green from brown or reduce humidity to improve the day or bring on rain or just gave life to dead things…
No. This was more of the same. He needed to let the ripple of memories return. Boyhood memories were best. Some of them were forbidding. Like the scary spare room at the back of his grandma’s cottage, and what it contained. It was kept locked. He never knew why. Then there was the time, lying in bed as a small boy, hearing a loud bloodcurdling scream coming from next door. Another mystery that was never solved. On that night he had considered going down to his parents to learn more, but he had fallen back to sleep.
There was the time when the family had gone to visit friends and found them all out in the surrounding streets, looking for their dog. A dog that they never found. There was the orange monkey, a toy he never liked or the time he dropped one of his mother’s best cups. It had made her cry. Then there was his father’s anger, the time he spilt orange juice on his newspaper. There were happier, spooky times, they’d sit around by candle light when they had power cuts. Lots of things to think about, but was he just treading water?
For a long time he sat remembering smells; the lavender that grew near their back fence; a friend who would visit and smoke cigars, filling the house with the pungent aroma, and how this would upset his mother who said nothing until he had left; the lemony fragrance that hung around one of his mother’s friends. There was always the batty old bird from further up the street who was always going on about aliens, and how they were regularly visiting us, and how people kept avoiding the fact that they existed, and how she would welcome being taken on board one of their saucers, so she could learn more about them. Of course, there was the day their neighbour’s barbeque had got out of hand and thick smoke wafted down the street.
Or he could write about his uncle and the morning he was in the local church repairing a pew when the organ started playing for a few seconds, then stopped abruptly, when he looked up to find that there was no one there. He remembered how one of his best friend’s at school was so proud of how good his pet hamster was at pretending to be dead. Then there was the time he was on the Ferris wheel at the fair when it broke down and he was stuck there for hours looking down at his parents, and how angry everybody was when they eventually got it going again and everyone got off. He could write about some of the things that his auntie was always talking about, mainly how there aren’t enough trees being left to keep the air fresh and how the sea was gradually filling with plastic…
He sighed and dropped his pen.
He could think of nothing.
