Referred Pain: Stories by Schwartz Lynne Sharon

Author:Schwartz, Lynne Sharon [Schwartz, Lynne Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781453288139
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-11-20T05:00:00+00:00

The Word

I’VE FORGOTTEN THE WORD, the word that was so crucial I promised myself I’d jot it down as soon as I got a chance—I was on the street at the time, walking from the bank, where I’d made a deposit, to the drugstore, or maybe it was from the drugstore to the dry cleaner’s or the copy shop—anyway, the word was a reminder of the idea for a story that came to me in the bank or drugstore and I vowed to write it down as soon as I got to the library, after I’d picked up my necklace at the jeweler’s; it did occur to me to stop right there on the street and get out a pencil and paper—how I wish I had, but I was so sure I’d do it later. There happened to be a scrap of paper in my pocket with a few words on it for another story I was planning, about a writer going blind who hires an assistant to help with his correspondence and then begins to suspect the assistant is lying about what’s in his mail, making up fan letters to cheer him up or possibly for some more sinister motive ... (The words for that story were “writer going blind.”) That would have been an appropriate scrap of paper for the new word, the two notations forming a little list of ideas for when I got to my desk after my errands, but no, I thought I couldn’t possibly forget once I got to the library since the word was so perfect, summing up or representing or by some idiosyncratic connection clear only to me bearing the germ of that excellent, memorable (ha!) idea for a story, maybe even a novel—I can’t remember now how far I thought the idea could take me—a word that would suffice to make the idea flower in my mind, or rather re-flower since it had already flowered in the drugstore or wherever, generated by I can’t remember what. Certain words can do that, can bear that weight, at least they’ve done so in the past if I write them down fast enough—but once in the library I did forget, distracted by whatever insignificance took place at the dry cleaner’s or the jeweler’s or by something I saw on the street or some new thoughts intervening on the way; I don’t think it was any kind of self-sabotage since I’m not usually so inclined, and besides, I wholeheartedly liked the idea as well as its word and was eager to take it and run with it.

But now that the word is gone there’s no use trying to recall it since, as we all know, that only drives lost words farther away. I’ve tried to remember what led up to the idea (if anything at all—sometimes ideas appear out of the blue, in which case such efforts are even more fruitless), tried to reconstruct my train of thought in that painstaking, frustrating way one does;

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