THE STORY I TOLD MYSELF

By Dana Wall

PROMPT—The story I told myself ...

I told myself the silence was temporary.

That's the first lie. You tell it the way you tell yourself the anesthetic is working while the doctor is still cutting — because the alternative is feeling everything at once and the body isn't built for that. So you say: temporary. You say: they will come around. You say: family is family, which is the most useless sentence in the English language, a sentence that means nothing except I don't know how to finish this thought.

My mother is in a room I don't have the address for.

Say that again. My mother is in a room I don't have the address for. A private investigator found my sister's house — XX XX Drive, Brentwood, the house I have never been inside — but not my parents. They are somewhere in West Los Angeles, approximate. They are in a facility. They are locked in together, my father who still has words but not legs, my mother who has neither, and I am here in Manhattan Beach where the Pacific keeps showing up every morning like it has somewhere to be.

Plath knew about the bell jar. The way it comes down. The way it comes down not like a crash but like weather — slowly, the air changing first, then the light, then you realize you've been inside it for years and the glass has been so clean you mistook it for the world.

The world I was inside: I had a mother who smelled like Chanel No. 5 and made everything look deliberate. I had a father who whispered you are my special girl at my wedding while I wore her 1962 dress and felt the weight of every woman who had stood in white before me. I had a brother and a sister and the five of us were something, once. A system. A closed circuit. Then my brother told my sister I had accused her of stealing and she believed him because believing him was easier than the alternative and the alternative was that she had to look at what she had actually done and none of us, none of us, are built to do that.

I told myself the story where I was the difficult one.

Tried it on. Wore it for a while. It has a certain comfort, that story — the one where you are the problem, where the exile is earned, where if you could just be different, softer, less, the door would open. Sylvia tried that story too. Made herself smaller and smaller until the smallness was its own kind of violence. Ate herself from the inside. Wrote about it in red ink while her children slept in the other room.

I have children who are grown now. Amber in the West Village with her cat named Croissant and her three blocks from the Whitney and her grandmother's hunger for beauty she will never know she inherited. Jake who is going to be a doctor like the grandfather he never met, who has his hands, I think, though I can't be sure, I am going from photographs, I am going from the shape of a face across the geometry of genes.

My mother named me. Somewhere in West Los Angeles, approximate, she is in a room and she no longer knows what naming is. She no longer knows she did it. She no longer knows I exist, which is a different thing from not caring — I have had to learn this distinction, have had to hold it up to the light like a stone that might be something valuable, might just be a stone.

The story I told myself: that love is enough. That love crosses silence. That twenty-two years is long but not permanent. That one morning I would wake up and the phone would ring and it would be my sister's voice and she would say something true and we would begin.

The phone has not rung.

In one universe it rings. Plath knew about the universes too, though she didn't call them that — she called them the fig tree, all those figs rotting on the branches while she sat at the fork unable to choose, unable to move, unable to do anything but watch the choosing time expire. In one universe my mother teaches me to clean a fish. In one universe my father drives me to college and cries in the parking lot. In one universe my sister is the door that opens instead of the door that stays shut.

I am in this universe.

In this universe the floor. The books. The afternoon refusing to move.

In this universe I write poems about quantum mechanics and call it grief because grief is too small a word and physics at least admits that everything that could have happened still exists somewhere, that no version of this family is truly lost, that the mother who named me is still naming me in some configuration of spacetime I cannot access but cannot stop believing in.

The story I told myself: I am fine.

The revision: I am the cicada. Seventeen years underground. Drinking from roots. Waiting for a signal I could not name. And now I am at the surface and I have been split down the back by the force of it and what is coming out of me is not fine, has never been fine, is wet-winged and blinking in the light and making the only sound it knows how to make.

Which is this.

Which is all of this.

The story I told myself is over.

I am still here.

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Dana Wall is a fiction writer, poet and screenwriter whose work blends speculative, lyrical, and psychologically driven storytelling. Her fiction has appeared in Brevity, River Teeth, Tupelo Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, Strange Horizons, Columbia Journal (contest winner), Flash Fiction Magazine (first-place winner), The Maine Review, and elsewhere. Her poem, "Theory of Half Things" (The Shore Poetry) was nominated for Best of Net, 2025. Dana has also received two 2025 Pushcart Prize nominations and nominations for Best Micro-fiction and Best Small Fictions. "The Red Migration" was selected for Tangent Online's 2025 Recommended Reading List. Dana writes from Manhattan Beach, CA.