Small Change

You sit there in the audience waiting for the play to begin while a blanket of dust quilts your lungs. Still to the point of stone, you watch at least a hundred other people in the rows ahead fissle and fidget.  Even your wife beside you is restless.  You sigh.

She turns to you.  Her face is pale beneath daubs of blusher, as though two quick slaps have revived her from a faint.  Her eyes are tired dull pennies inside crepe lids, rimmed by a second stroke of pencil, carelessly applied. After ten years plus you are each tuned in, and with ten years plus practice you each know when it's best not to speak, or ask.

Hush. A last desperate minute of rushing, then silence. The curtain is lifting. You cough.

As soon as the actress on stage begins to speak, your lungs contract. The audience is captivated.  The words are well-written.  You did not write them.  You have had no hand in this gathering’s enchantment or joy.

The talent of this play depresses you. Months of practice converge to this moment, the commitment of actors, writers and directors who were living a truth, who never gave up. There's a rock in your chest, rough-hewn and callow, unconsumed. 

Your wife's face is lifted, her expression rapt.  She has entered a different place, behind a curtain where you are not ushered.  A hammer of sadness claps at the bell of your heart, chiselling pain to the bone.

Years ago when you first met, you'd been a budding writer.  She'd kept all your poems in her purse until they'd disintegrated and were discarded with some other old receipts.  She eventually replaced that purse with a much smaller one, tiny really, palm-sized, no bigger than a coin purse.

Nina Couser

I wrote this story after a night at the theatre.  One of my happiest moments, a moment where I was in a complete state of flow and joy, was as a child, taking part in the school play.  I'd been nervous before I got out in front of the audience, but once there I felt entirely fulfilled and happy.

I thought I wanted to pursue a career on the stage, but somehow that didn't happen. And for years, the writing didn't happen either.  The poems and stories dried up.  The words stopped coming.

As we sat there in the audience, I wondered what it might be like to be this character, a man who had tied his love - of his wife, of self, of life - to his creative output.  I liked the idea that his wife still kept a purse, albeit small now.  There is hope yet for haiku.