Kitty Flood

Work meant being on-line or being immersed in a game. Work meant these things now. It was not that she no longer worked, it was just that the nature of the work had changed. For what was she meant to be doing except creating characters? What was she meant to be doing other than telling stories and lies, fabricating a world based upon what she knew and what she imagined? She was, she had decided, a pure writer. Far purer than she could ever be with the nonsense of books and publishers and agents and shops and sales and readers. All that was paper. She was story. She was a writer who was writing herself into the days of the world, into the minds of people so completely that they didn’t know that it was happening to them. The story she told was immediate, direct, instant, intravenous. It rattled off her keyboard and straight into the soul of her audience, each of them – Caroline in Canada; little Sissy and her drunken mother in upstate New York; Ryan the gay boy, for whom she had uncovered the joyous despair of love; Tom Nelson, with his rooms filled with photographs; Maureen, very close, up the coast a little, with her terrible marriage and her search for a binary God. All of these people. And dozens more. Myles from Kenmare; Fabian from Paris; Josef in Rio; Dominic in San Francisco; Virgil in Nebraska; William in Cape Town, Maxwell in Sydney. She knew every one of them. She could, if she dared, count them. She did not dare. And then the countless others for whom it had been a brief, fleeting tale. Something flicked through, glimpsed. Unrecorded, not repeated. They were happy with a couple of minutes, an hour or two, parts of days - then gone. Her audience. Each of them catered to. Each of them responding to a different character. Identifying. Changing the story subtly, simply by hearing it.

What was it if it was not work? Great work. Literature.

From The Parts (c) Keith Ridgway 2003. Not to be copied or reproduced without permission. For rights information email info@keithridgway.com