Clam

She'd been battened down for as long as she could remember.

She didn't mind. It was safe. No-one could reach her. And inside, it was just exactly how she wanted it to be: private, quiet, and writing on every surface. On the walls and ceilings and floors, the looped hand of ideas and thoughts and dreams. On the seats of chairs and the underside of tables, around the handle of the teapot, on the shells of eggs and the skins of bananas. In steam on the shower screen, condensation on the windows, in lipstick on the mirrors and in biro on the back of her hands, all the way up her arms to the elbows. Words and words and words.

After a long, long time she thought she wanted to be reached.  She came out, naked from the shell, and said "Here I am, world, this is me". And to her surprise, the world answered back, extended its hand, and she discovered that being reached was good.  She blossomed and bloomed in this unfamiliar sunshine, from tight green knot to white and yellow daisy. And all the words inside tumbled out, and all the ideas and thoughts and dreams flowed down her outstretched arms and into her pen and onto the page in perfect order, and she laughed out chapters of her novel, and breathed out a poem with every smile.

Then the world said the thing she'd always feared it would. "I'm sorry, there has been a mistake. All this wasn't for you  -  you can't have that. What were you thinking? Go back".  And she wasn't even surprised, and bowed her head and opened the hatch and went back inside her submarine. Ran her fingers over the familiar surfaces, worn to mother-of-pearl gloss under her touch. And she did not cry, because that is the way of the world, and no-one sheds tears over the setting of the sun or the fall of leaves in autumn or the melting of the snow.

She had thought that the words would still flow out of her fingertips, to be freed out from the airlock like underwater butterflies. But they were limp and dead, all the colour and flight leached out from them in the dark salty teardrops of the sea.  And she tried and tried, but the words were clogged to a standstill; leaves that fell in a red and bronze swoop of beauty but turned to dark sludge in the gutters.

And she realised that she had nothing to say, and no-one to listen to the whispers in the dark.