I smiled all the way through—from first flicker of those many hands in the dark, right to that last nudge about ounces of doubt. You caught something here that speaks well beyond the playful tale. How often have we longed to trade a piece of ourselves for some imagined clarity, or for the promise of enoughness? You voiced it through Sam so deftly—and in doing so, mirrored a threshold many of us have stood before, bottle in hand, unsure whether to pay the fare.
And this—"It smelt of silence."—what a perfect distillation. Not an emptiness, not a void, rather a space where the swarming words might be met anew. You reminded me here that silence is no blank space; it is a lens, one we can hold to the light. I carry that with me now, like Sam with her small glass bottle—knowing the voices will return, yet no longer fearing their flutter.
Such a wonderful adaptation of this prompt and its questions. You brought the magic in, and let it leave room for the reader to breathe.
Thank you! I love the shopkeeper. He will be appearing again. The “hello I am mysterious and powerful and SO DONE WITH WORKING RETAIL just tell me what you want” attitude utterly delights me.
For this prompt I sat with the difference between “silence” and “silenceD” for a while. Going back and forth. I decided to go with silence as the deliberate pause, the pregnant void, the act of holding your breath to concentrate. Introspection is a complex process which requires many skills, and in western culture it’s rarely taught - instead we’re handed a script (or if we’re lucky a handful of scripts to choose from) and told “Here, just follow this and it’ll work out”.
And for some people it does. But for most people, to varying degrees, it doesn’t. We’d all be much better off if we were taught to figure ourselves out. Sitting with silence and seeing what shapes it makes can be part of that.
Leeron—
I smiled all the way through—from first flicker of those many hands in the dark, right to that last nudge about ounces of doubt. You caught something here that speaks well beyond the playful tale. How often have we longed to trade a piece of ourselves for some imagined clarity, or for the promise of enoughness? You voiced it through Sam so deftly—and in doing so, mirrored a threshold many of us have stood before, bottle in hand, unsure whether to pay the fare.
And this—"It smelt of silence."—what a perfect distillation. Not an emptiness, not a void, rather a space where the swarming words might be met anew. You reminded me here that silence is no blank space; it is a lens, one we can hold to the light. I carry that with me now, like Sam with her small glass bottle—knowing the voices will return, yet no longer fearing their flutter.
Such a wonderful adaptation of this prompt and its questions. You brought the magic in, and let it leave room for the reader to breathe.
Thank you! I love the shopkeeper. He will be appearing again. The “hello I am mysterious and powerful and SO DONE WITH WORKING RETAIL just tell me what you want” attitude utterly delights me.
For this prompt I sat with the difference between “silence” and “silenceD” for a while. Going back and forth. I decided to go with silence as the deliberate pause, the pregnant void, the act of holding your breath to concentrate. Introspection is a complex process which requires many skills, and in western culture it’s rarely taught - instead we’re handed a script (or if we’re lucky a handful of scripts to choose from) and told “Here, just follow this and it’ll work out”.
And for some people it does. But for most people, to varying degrees, it doesn’t. We’d all be much better off if we were taught to figure ourselves out. Sitting with silence and seeing what shapes it makes can be part of that.
He is absolutely great, a wonderful figure you created there. And who wouldn’t be in need of a store selling a bit of Magic?!
If only! I would be buying cognition tablets on repeat subscription and paying with pints of imagination. 😂