There is a story that is only told in spaces. In school hallways on weekends, and on foggy hills. In haunted houses amongst ghosts, and highways after 3 am. Its either half forgotten, or half remembered– opinions are split on which. It is the movie that plays on the bus to nowhere, it is the story first written in the house made of air, and the story forgotten finally in the untouched dawn of freshly fallen snow. 

 

There is a game played by children called broken telephone. One thing is said, and it is repeated and repeated and by the end of the game the original message is broken. The girl in this story is like that. 

 

Of course sometimes the children win, and the original message is never shattered, but those words never mean anything anyway. 

 

This is the story, or the jagged pieces of it:

 

There is this one girl. Isn’t that the core of almost every story? There is this one girl and in some versions she is torn apart by monsters. In another version she is torn apart by the people she loves, and trusts. In some versions these are the same. In yet another she tears herself apart. 

 

It doesn’t really matter how it happened. The ripping is inevitable, it is a forgone conclusion. 

 

Sometimes the people she loves eat the pieces of her consuming her heart and her lungs. Sometimes the monsters place the fought over trophies of her pieces in cases, and on rickety pedestals preserving what is left of her. 

 

The point is that nothing of her that remains is salvageable. 

 

So she builds again. She takes pieces from the monsters and the lovers, and the truth is she could never tell the difference between the two. She sorts bones and stitches together hearts. She takes the best pieces, and the worst that no one else would take otherwise. She takes the appendices and the bits without purpose just because she wants to. 

 

She calls it borrowing, but the tongue in her mouth is from a liar, so the words bend and twist from her without stumbling in a well practised routine. The word she means is theft though only six of the fingers she took are slippery. 

 

She forces the pieces together till they fit, and cuts new edges in the jigsaw when they don’t. When this doesn’t work she just changes the picture on the box. 

 

And she completes herself. Her own, and other people’s. The pieces are other people, she is in the space between the stitches. 

 

There is a story that is only told in spaces, of this one girl made in pieces.