By Beth Konkoski
She never told anyone the maxi pad on the soccer field fell out of her sweats, how disgusted everyone was and the coach putting on gloves to remove it before the game could go on—she never told anyone she scored a 99 on the Algebra Regents or that her teacher, Mr. Rakoce, called the house to tell her dad—she never told anyone how the 10th grade volleyball girls held her down against the dirty tile of the locker room and covered her head with sweaty t-shirts they found in abandoned lockers, although the six of them might have spread the story around—she learned not to tell anyone how much the books she checked out from the library meant to her, how the voices of Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Stephen King whispered her to sleep and lodged like flecks of silver in her brain, the shine she knew the world contained—she never told anyone how impossible Physics felt when she stared at the textbook in the study lounge of her dorm or how the girl who lived down the hall and aced the Biology test seemed like her but clearly wasn’t, how lonely it felt to feel stupid for the first time in her life, lonely in a way she didn’t understand because these books that were supposed to help her be a grown up version of herself didn’t whisper or sing or guide her—it took a long time to tell her parents she would not be a doctor but an English major, and how quickly her mother told her she had always known this would happen but never told her so she could figure it out for herself—she never told anyone how the notebook pages filled up, how words felt like paddles she could use to reach a different shore, how gently the hours passed when she moved along with her pen—
Although she never told her students how much or how often she wrote, never shared what she built, they could tell when she waved her hands around and begged them to read and read and read that words mattered to her—she never told people she was a writer, couldn’t find a way to work it in at parties when such questions came up, knew they would ask where to find her books and then look suspiciously at her when she had no answer—she told herself that teaching was enough, who she was, and telling about the other mattered less and less as the years went on and the poems and stories found homes outside her journals— and one day, without knowing it would happen, just before she turned forty, she told herself, in the mirror, I am a writer and the words told themselves and the words told the others, and the words made it true.
Beth Konkoski is a writer and high school English teacher living in Virginia. She spends as much time as possible listening to the sounds of a pen moving along the page and water flowing over rocks. Her work has been published in journals such as Bending Genres, Story, The Baltimore Review and Sky Island Journal. A collection of her short and flash fiction, A Drawn & Papered Heart, won the 2023 Acacia Prize for Short Fiction and was published in June 2024 by Kallisto Gaia Press.
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