“Hear then: Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not.”

Instead of writing an introduction, I should really have just presented this story. In gorgeous, circuitous detail, it teaches us (the quiet readers of a story narrated aloud by a woman who cannot read) how to produce the most perfect kind of silence. It portrays creativity is inherently female – not, I don’t think, because it’s talking specifically about female creativity, but because it wants to use the particular muffled and obscure experience of being a woman at that time (or any time?) as a metaphor for the awful liberation offered by the symbol created by a work of art. That final image! I find it genuinely revelatory.

Published in Last Tales, Random House, 1957