Fictional stories are those stories that give color to life. These are the stories that you wanted to happen, an episode of your life that you did not like, or something that you could have wished for on this planet or in another paradise. The expressed and mute song of your heart becomes real in fiction.
I wrote fiction. I have wanted to make a little world out of my own imagination (boring and exciting), cravings and loathing. Fictional stories create in me a goddess, of which I am not. Fiction creates in my life, from which I can raise the dead. Fictional stories, I believe, are a gift from God to human creations to fill the gaps of yesterday and today, of life now and heaven, a bond of time and space for immortality.
Let’s review five excerpts from fictional stories and their authors:
1. The Dead – James Joyce -(1882-1941)
Born in a suburb of Dublin during a turbulent era of political change in Ireland
“Oh, I’m thinking about that song, The Last of Aughrin.
So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her. It hardly hurt him now to think that he, aside from him, her husband, had played in her life…”
2. The Blue Jar – Isak Denisen
Pseudonym Isak, which means “he who laughs” in the spirit of saying that GOD loves jokes.
Isak is the name under which Baroness Karen Blixen of Denmark (1885-1962) published her writings.
“…Now I can die. And when I am dead, you will take out my heart and put it in a blue jar. Because then everything will be like then. Everything will be blue around me, and in the middle of the blue world of my heart will be innocent and free, and it will do so softly, like a wake that sings, like drops falling from a paddle.”
3. Hills like a white elephant (1898-1961)
Born in Oak Park, Illinois
“Anís del Toro. It’s a drink.”
“We can try?”
The man yelled “Listen” through the curtain. The woman left the bar.
“Four reals”.
“We want two Anis del Toro.”
4. The house on Mango Street – Sandra Cisneros
The Cisneros collections represent the writer’s attempt to achieve both the intensity of the short story and the discursive light of the novel in a single volume.
Unlike the chapters in most works, each story in the collection can stand on its own.
“Do you live there?” a nun from her school had called when she saw Esperanza playing in front of Loomis’s apartment. “There I had to look where she was pointing to the third floor, the painted scroll…the wooden bars that Dad had nailed to the windows so we wouldn’t fall. Do you live there?” The way she said it made me feel like nothing…
5. Scent of apples – Welcome Santos – (1911-1996)
“Their stories capture with warmth and deep humility the pain of exile and the cost of progress…” Washington Post
Filipino-American fictionalist. He lived in the United States for many years, where he is credited as a pioneering Asian-American writer. In 1946, he returned to the Philippines to become a university professor and administrator.
“Welcome Santos Creative Writing Center”, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines
6. The Execution – Charlson Ong
This story won several short fiction awards (Woman of Am-Kaw and Other Stories)
“It was raining the morning of the execution. I remember how briny and crimson the sky was. God has sliced the sun, spilling its entrails, carving out its heart…”
Rosa Flores-Martinez
I will write / I wrote fiction