Eshtine

first stories

I wrote my first story before I could write.
It was called "The Magic Cat and Mouse Show." I suppose I named it "Show" because I thought I was writing for television. The plot, as I remember it, featured a talking cat and a talking mouse (this ability was what rendered them "magic") in a classic adversarial relationship. The mouse gets lost in a perilous forest and the cat sets out to find him. At some point, too, the mouse may have saved the cat's life. They are then friends happily ever after.
I drew the whole story when I was three or four, so the cat and mouse were both vague shapes only distinguished by comparing their sizes. The trees in the forest looked like massive lollipops. The action moved forward through dialogue indicated through hatchmarks, the way Woodstock's speech is rendered in Peanuts, since I couldn't write words. A part of each page looked like this:
lllllll llll lllllll lllllll llllllll
I would take the story round to my mom and dad, sisters and brothers, and translate the words fresh for them.
I told my first story before I could talk.
"Magic Cat and Mouse Show" I remember. This one I know only through what I've been told.
I was meeting a cousin for the first time. I would have been around one year old, she one and a half. We'd gotten ourselves a catalog of some sort (in other versions of the story it's a dictionary or encyclopedia), and we spent a mad afternoon flipping through it, pointing things out on each page to each other, "reading" aloud what we found, hysterically giggling. It was all gibberish. Neither one of us could talk.

May I always attempt what is beyond my abilities.