“You won’t get fat telling stories like that one.” Miriam pointed a comfortably fleshed finger at Anyatta and waggled it judgmentally. “I keep telling you, people want stories they can relate to, real tales that reflect their everyday lives, but with added hope, not made up, childish fairy stories.”

 

As if to prove her point another five people presented themselves at the narrow entrance to Miriam’s story weaving tent. Miriam rapidly walked the few steps across the square, pulled back the multi-coloured entrance flap and swiftly ushered them in before they could change their minds. “See,” she hissed across at Anyatta, then lowered the flap and disappeared into the muggy, internal gloom of the tent.

 

Outside, Anyatta pulled her worn woolen shawl tighter around her and walked the six steps back to her habitual story weaving spot on the town’s memorial steps. No one was waiting for her.

 

She was hungry, she admitted to herself. She hadn’t eaten properly for days. Miriam was right, she’d never grow fat on her current income levels.

 

More out of habit than hope, she started another story, “Listen hard, listen well, listen to the tale I tell. This is a story of our past and our present and, if you believe, our future, but you must believe. This is the story of how the Others came in from the wildness to be.”

 

Two scruffy street children scuttled out from the shadows behind the municipal bins to sit on the steps below her feet. At least she had an attentive audience. Though, judging from the state of them, they weren’t in a position to pay for her words.

 

By the time she had concluded her story, Anyatta had six urchins seated at her feet. Miriam’s tent had already disgorged the ten or so reasonably affluent citizens who had formed her most recent audience. Anyatta expected they had paid generously for their entertainment. Her six young listeners, as soon as they heard the traditional closing words of her story, scattered into the alleyways and shadows around the rundown market square without comment, let alone payment.

 

What now? Anyatta gloomily scanned the stalls, or what passed for stalls these days, in the square. The market was almost empty. There were no potential audience members for anything, let alone any misguided types who might actually want to listen to one of her “childish fairy stories”. That comment of Miriam’s had stung, but she knew Miriam was right: people didn’t want to think about stories and myths anymore. They wanted to be entertained, rapidly and painlessly and with versions of a world they knew and understood without having to think about it, albeit versions where everything turned out right in the end. The stupid thing was, her “fairy stories” were also about life lived and the realness of things. Although, you had to think sidewise to grasp the metaphors and, in the case of the Others, you had to step sidewise and stand beside yourself in order to see the reality of the world: a place you thought you knew but actually no longer did, at least, not entirely. New things had crept into the holes humanity had left in its polluted wake. Ironically, they were things that might help humankind, if humankind were a just a little more open and a little less blinkered. They had answers, if people only thought and asked the right questions and were prepared to believe, but they didn’t and they weren’t. The problem was, people liked stepping sidewise to themselves less than they liked thinking at a slant, and they didn’t like doing that at all.

 

Anyatta glanced the short distance across the market square. Somehow Miriam had managed to drum up some further well-dressed trade. Anyatta watched as another five people exited Miriam’s tent, smiling and chatting happily to one another. Anyatta scowled. They were pig shit stupid. None of them realised that all Miriam was doing was peddling tawdry, short-term emotional gratification. Anyatta’s stories were different. If you saw into them, they saw into you and then they stayed inside you for keeps. They would open your eyes, if you let them, and bring the wildness in, but you had to let them and these days nobody did.

 

Anyatta retreated further into her drab, thin shawl and scowled all the more. Her frown etched itself even deeper into her weathered features as Miriam plodded over to her and said, “Enough stories. That’s me done for the day. Do you fancy some hot soup? I’ve got some on the go and you’re welcome.” She smiled hesitantly. Anyatta just continued to scowl.

 

“Enough stories! As if there could ever be enough, and fresh soup, eh? What have I got to do for that? Listen while you prattle another of your flimsy, made-up, kitchen sink melodramas? Or are you simply looking for an opportunity to demonstrate your pity towards the less fortunate. Am I meant to be grateful for your unasked-for charity?”

 

Miriam took a step back, looking both startled and dismayed. “I have some vegetable soup to spare, is all. I thought you might like some. The weather’s cold. You could come into the tent and we could chat together while we eat.” Miriam studied Anyatta and slowly shook her head. “Or not, as you please. I could bring you a mug out here and then you wouldn’t have to talk or listen to me prattle.”

 

“So, it’s your pity I’m supposed to be grateful for?” Anyatta snapped.

 

“No.” Miriam was feeling hurt and ill-prepared for Anyatta’s ingratitude. “It’s just an offer of hot soup. Take it or leave it. I was probably foolish to think story weavers should stick together in hard times. If you like, you can think of the soup as payment for all the times I so obviously forced you to listen to my domestic drivel, despite your thoughts being on higher things.”

 

Miriam turned her back on Anyatta and stomped off towards her patched, fading, rainbow coloured tent. Five minutes later, and without further words, a plain tin mug of steaming vegetable soup was placed on the cold stone step beside Anyatta.

 

Anyatta didn’t notice Miriam come or go. She drank the soup in silence and placed the empty mug down beside her. Somewhen during the next half hour the mug disappeared, but Anyatta didn’t notice that either. She was too busy weaving fresh stories in her head. That, or watching one of the auburn furred Others sneaking in and out of the now empty stalls in the market. It smiled at her, exposing pointy, sharp teeth. There was a story there, somewhere, if she could just coax it out from where it was hiding.

 

The next three days were a repeat of the first, except it turned steadily colder and Miriam no longer bothered to talk to Anyatta before delivering the evening mug of soup. Anyatta spun fewer and fewer stories and became more and more diverted by whatever games the Others were currently playing. She felt they were trying to tell her something. Neither story weaver was attracting much trade, but at least Miriam was earning enough to make more soup than she, herself, needed.

 

On the fourth day, Miriam decided, for old times’ sake, to reach out once more to Anyatta. Miriam had just finished entertaining a group of four warmly dressed, but frustratingly tight fisted, business people. Anyatta had been spinning one of her fantastic tales to an even smaller group of people who looked as if they didn’t have enough between them to buy a weak cup of brew from a rundown café stall.

 

“So, how’s it going?” Miriam enquired hesitantly. “Saw you had some listeners. That’s good.”

 

Anyatta did not respond well, “So you’re spying on me now? Looking for a chance to rub it in that my audiences are always smaller than yours?”

 

Miriam visibly retreated. “I wasn’t. I was just…pleased for you.”

 

“I didn’t ask you to be pleased.”

 

Miriam shook her head sadly, “Why do you have to make everything so negative?”

 

Anyatta was about to bite back, but something in Miriam’s voice finally got through to her. “Because nearly everything is negative. Only the stories make things bearable, and the Others, but they are the stories, so it’s all one and the same. No one wants to hear about them anymore, though. No one wants to believe. You told me that, remember? And if you hadn’t, my dwindling audiences would have. I don’t know why I bother. I wouldn’t if it wasn’t for the stories wanting to be told. I carry on for them. Only for them and because I believe.”

 

Anyatta knew she was being hostile and negative. Miriam was only trying to be neighbourly, but hostile and negative was how Anyatta felt and she didn’t see why she shouldn’t be true to her feelings. Truth was all she had left. The world, its husband and its starving, snotty nosed kids were rejecting her dearly held view of life and with it all fragile hope. She was damned if she was going to acknowledge their already defeated reality.

 

Miriam just stood there looking thoughtful and sad, but mostly sad. Finally she spoke, “I don’t really understand, Anyatta. Your stories, the mythical creatures you call the Others, it’s all just fantasy, isn’t it? All people want is to see a little fun in their reality. Why do you refuse to give it to them? You used to be so good with the crowds—the most popular story weaver around. You’d still be an outstanding story weaver if you were prepared to weave stories that people wanted to hear, rather than telling stories they don’t.”

 

Anyatta heard four painful words in the middle of Miriam’s speech and saw red, the bright, raw red of the Others’ head fur at dawn. “It’s not all just fantasy. It’s real. I tell you and I tell true. It’s the stupid bean munching crowd and false word peddlers like yourself who deny people the truth, the stories they should be listening to to help them heal. I know how it is. I’ve lived it. The Others offer hope to a world deprived of it, a chance to start mending the world and repair our damage, but no one believes. No one has faith. So we carry on perpetrating our own destruction. And you ask me why I’m negative!”

 

“But…” Miriam stalled before she had started. She had no idea what to say. Anyatta’s stance was beyond ridiculous, but she wasn’t going to change her mind. Her stubbornness, her stupidity, her delusions, were killing her. She wouldn’t take advice and she wouldn’t see reason. Probably couldn’t, if truth be told. She’d slowly starve, or freeze to death one cold, winter night, but what could Miriam do? She shook her head yet again and slowly walked back to her colourfully patched tent.

 

Miriam kept the daily mug of hot soup coming, but gave up trying to engage Anyatta in conversation. They didn’t even acknowledge one another across the increasingly empty market square.

 

The weeks passed, the seasons changed. It grew colder still and even Miriam struggled to earn enough to feed herself, growing thin and more wrinkled in the process. However much they needed optimism in dark times, people were loath to come out of their homes to hear a story when raw sewage was freezing in the gutters.

 

On the night Miriam didn’t have enough money to make soup even for just herself, the temperature plummeted lower than ever before. Miriam tried to talk some sense, yet again, to Anyatta, but Anyatta was having none of it. She just ignored Miriam and, instead, conducted a playful, but apparently nonsensical discussion with an invisible and inaudible Other.

 

Eventually Miriam was forced to give up and, when the night began to freeze diamond hard, leave the familiar, if increasingly worn surroundings of her tent to take desperate shelter with her estranged daughter. It was not a happy reunion.

 

Miriam left her daughter’s as early as possible the next morning, picking her way slowly and carefully through the run-down streets and then over the uneven, ice slicked slabs of the market square. At her age she couldn’t afford a fall and who was there to treat her if she did fall? As she approached the memorial steps, she could see no sign of Anyatta or the rag draped lump of frozen human meat she had braced herself to see. Miriam breathed a sigh of relief. Anyatta had finally had the sense to take shelter. May the Allabsent divinity be praised.

 

Miriam joyously pulled back her iced tent flap only to find Anyatta huddled on the thin rugs covering the market square stone that formed the floor of the tent. Anyatta was as cold, hard and lifeless as the ground.

 

Miriam sat sadly beside the dead story weaver, wishing she could do something, knowing she could do nothing and wondering what she should do with Anyatta’s frozen corpse. She was so wrapped up in her practical thoughts that she failed to notice the repeated rising and falling of the bottom of the tent flap as a multitude of Others slowly and invisibly crept in from the wildness, filling the tent behind her to mourn, with silent howls, the death of the last, great story weaver and the demise of human belief.

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