SHORT FICTION - “THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR OF HER LIFE”
This is a sample of part of a larger work in progress. Copyright 2022 Shannon Muir. All rights reserved. Originally posted September 10, 2022.
She’d tried to rewrite her life. A few key omissions here and there would not hurt anyone. Everyone believed her to be shy and mousy and never having had a relationship in her life. Everyone around her tried to match her up with someone they thought was perfect. He indeed had been perfect. Everything she could have hoped for, so she kept up appearances and never told him the truth. She did not tell him her intimate experiences; she wanted a fresh start from all that.
But the forces that drove her made her impatient. She began to hunger for physical contact, craved it like a drug. Worse, she wanted her body to feel full again, heavy and stretching with life kicking inside her. No one that knew her now outside of her own family would believe she first conceived fooling around at Prom. Probably less so that she had a married lover in the past now raising their offspring. All they saw was the mousy girl hiding behind her romantic suspense reads, not the intimacy addict behind the mask.
Finally, she couldn’t bear it anymore. An opportunity arose for one night with someone she found alluring from a distance. While that night fulfilled her needs, it did not live up to her fantasies. With a body now full of life, the mousy girl told those around her she had a great opportunity that would call her away for a year. With everything else that transpired, it made the fabrication easy for all to believe. After all, all of their own lives had been upended.
So, for a while, she went to a remote area far away. Life came into the world, and as every time before, she arranged for it to be someone else’s responsibility, just as her own birth mother did. She still remembered the devastation of learning inadvertently as a teen that she’d been a product of her father’s past affair the birth mother arranged to dump her on the family and disappear, a fact they went to great lengths to hide from the world, just as she needed to try and continue to do.
Yet clearly she was her mother’s child.
She returned home not quite a year later, saying her opportunity ended early unexpectedly. While the position in fact had involved a lot of remote work she could have done here, she felt it necessary to be removed from distractions. All that was true, insofar as the details she chose to tell. She was in fact
hired for a remote job that did not, in fact, care about her health status.
One day soon after returning home, she found a note at her door, printed out with nothing unique about it, save its text.
“Everyone’s entitled to secrets… until someone decides that they aren’t.”
She crumpled up the note and threw it away in the wastebasket. No one else would narrate her life but her.
