It’s National Tell-A-Story month, and we’re excited to hear yours! 

The prompt stared insistently at Jenna, her cracked screen unblinking. 

There is no specific genre for your story. So go ahead and get to writing.

Get to writing.

Come on, Jenna, she kicked herself. It’s not that hard. You’ve done it before—many times. Telling stories is what you do. Weave something magical out of lines on a page, and capture an audience with little ink blots. Make judges fall before you with letters laced together as words stitched together as sentences. 

Make art. Get to writing.

Tell a story.

“Jenna!” Her mother’s voice called from below, but her usual heavy footsteps told Jenna that she was coming up. 

Quickly, Jenna switched the tab on her laptop to Spotify, slid off her patchwork covers, and grabbed a heap of clothes from the stained carpet, preparing to make it seem like she was stuffing them into one of the cardboard boxes her mother had commanded her to fill. 

Her mother appeared in the doorway, her flowered apron splashed with tomato sauce. “Hey, honey. I see you’re starting to pack.”

“Yup,” Jenna said, smiling.

Tell a story. 

“I was just wondering if maybe we could go out later and get some paint. I think my new bedroom will be a touch too pink for me.”

Her mother nodded, “Sure.”

Jenna could not care less about the wall color of the new bedroom she was supposed to be moving into.

It was more the fact that she was moving into a new room at all.

Her older sister had gotten a job a few weeks ago and moved out, and her parents were demanding Jenna moved into her old room, thus granting them a guest bedroom. 

She was not upset by the whole ordeal per se, just uncomfortable with it. 

That room was not hers. Jenna doubted it could ever truly be hers. 

“Anyways,” Her mother rolled a strand of deep brown around her finger. “I need you to come downstairs in a few minutes and help set the table. You’re dad’s gonna be home on time tonight, so I want to have a nice family dinner.”

Nice family dinners felt awfully empty without Jenna’s sister around to make them well, bearable. 

Jenna placed the cardboard box on her bed as if she had spent all evening filling it. “Alright. Cool. Good to know.”

“Come down soon,” Her mother demanded as she swept out of the room, leaving Jenna with a million reminders of the things she had been avoiding all day. 

Jenna looked around at her childhood room, slowly fading at the edges. The pictures on the walls were all hanging on by the last tape piece, the daisy wallpaper peeling at the corners, and the yellow carpet had seen one too many grape juice spills. Her whole life could be summed up in these walls, in the memories tucked under the bed and beneath the window. 

She considered opening up her laptop once more and returning to that daunting task she so wanted to rise to the occasion of.

Tell a story. 

The judges would want something depressing, riddled with flowery writing, and an emotional ending, likely with the protagonist in front of a cracked mirror with tears trickling down their face.  

But clearly, no story was coming to her now. 

Jenna grabbed the only cardboard box she had actually filled and left her room, heading up the twisting stairs to her family’s looming attic. 

The door opened with several loud creaks, but in the end, she was left to drink in the majesty of what used to be her sister’s room. 

The walls were indeed an obnoxious shade of pink.

But the furniture matched each other, the pictures were all decorated with her sister’s ever-changing color fairy lights, and the hardwood floor was freshly scrubbed. 

Memories littered this room as well.

Here was a place with stories. 

Stories of her sister sneaking in boyfriends from the roof, stories of her sister giving Jenna her first drink, stories of her sister guiding her through the beginning of high school. 

The bed was made the same as always. When Jenna was a little girl she would crawl into that bed on Christmas with her sister and gaze out the skylight, waiting for Santa to come down the chimney. 

The arrangement of her sister’s intricately-designed collectible tea cups all sat shivering on the same shelf above her dresser. Every once in a while when her sister was out, Jenna used to sneak up to her room in an old costume of hers and play princesses with those elaborately painted cups. 

All her sister’s unfinished paintings and drawings still decorated her chipped desk. In the summertime Jenna would creep up the snaking stairs and just watch her sister create during the day, captivated by her ability to tell a story without saying anything.

If only Jenna had that superpower now. 

Jenna sat the cardboard box down on her sister’s rosy coverlet, imagining how she would redesign such a room. It seemed like a sin to pack her sister’s life into boxes and stuff it beneath a bed. But then again, her sister had left her life behind. She clearly had no intention of coming back for anything Jenna thought made her, her. 

There was a story there, too.

Jenna’s sister was full of stories. She was made of magic, dreams, and love. She was a sorceress disguised as a normal girl. And then one day she shed her skin and transformed into something else completely.

“I’m going to be home for Christmas, it’s only in a month or so.” 

She had promised Jenna. 

“I’m moving out, not dying.”

Jenna didn’t care that her sister was growing up, everyone did that.

“I have to be brave enough to stand alone, Jen. I’m almost twenty-three.”

But I don’t want you to stand alone, Jenna had secretly yearned. I want you to stay with me.

Tell a story. 

In Jenna’s imagination, her sister had stayed.

Her room stayed the same, Jenna’s room stayed the same, and their lives stayed the same. 

They stayed up late and watched cringey movies and told stories together. 

But that was a lie, not a story. A wistful dream of impossibility. 

Jenna tred across the cold wood floor of the room, flicking the light switch as she did. In the back of her sister’s empty closet was an evanescent purple box that used to be full of all her most prized paintings.

Sitting down on the ground of the closet, she slid off the lid.

It was empty, just as Jenna had expected.

Empty all but a forgotten mustard post-it settled at the bottom. Jenna reached in a withdrew the note, surprised to find her sister’s loopy handwriting scattered across the paper.

Jen-

This is for you. Put all your best writing in here, so that when you doubt yourself, you can remember how incredible you are.

-R

Jenna was not incredible. She had never been incredible. Not like her sister. 

Tell a story.

Weave something magical out of empty promises and unfulfilled lives. Make judges fall before you with truths laced together as lies stitched together as dreams. 

It was Jenna’s sister who had first told her to begin submitting to writing contests. 

"You won’t get better until you fail and then succeed."

Jenna had submitted too enough to know she had completed the first half of that mission.

"Don’t write stories to win. Write for the exposure to the world of it all."

Jenna did not write to win. She never had. She wrote to do exactly what this contest was begging her to.

Tell a story.

And yet, she could not.

Her sister was magic. Her sister was an artist. Her sister was a story.

And now, she was gone. 

Jenna’s stories were contingent on her inspiration, on her ability to feel shocked and entranced by those around her. 

Jenna was not the story. Just the storyteller.

“Jenna!” Her mother’s voice interrupted her thought’s once more. “Come downstairs immediately!”

Begrudgingly, she rose from her place and padded down the two flights of croaking stairs to the kitchen, where her mother stood with her usual frown resting on her face. 

“What the hell were you doing? I asked you to come down half an hour ago,” Her mother’s hands sat on her hips firmly, reminding Jenna there was no right answer to this question.

Except perhaps, another question.

Jenna mustered up her courage and her most thoughtful expression before she asked, “Mom, do you miss her?”

Her mother rolled her eyes. “Who?”

“Riley,” Jenna filled in, her lips forming the familiar word for the first time in weeks. 

Her mother sighed, but she seemed to understand. “Why, of course, I do. But she’ll be home soon enough. You didn’t want her to live here forever, do you?”

Jenna’s silence told her mother everything she needed to know.

“Dear,” Her mother reached a comforting hand around Jenna’s shoulders. “I miss her too. All the time. When I was younger, I imagined having my two girls here with me as long as possible. But I guess now I don’t want that. Because as much as I love Riley, when she’s here, it’s so hard to see you. You are like her little shadow. Now the lights are on you. And that’s a good thing, I think.”

Jenna nodded, surprised.

Because for the first time, she was shocked and entranced with herself. 

Tell a story. 

Not about Riley or Riley’s adventures or Riley’s magic. 

About the storyteller.

The watcher, the girl who saw anything and composed something glorious out of it. The builder, the girl who took a strand of something real and built it into something entirely different. The girl in the shadows who brought others to the light. 

Tell a story.

Weave something magical out of a hopeful beginning and a fresh start. Make judges fall before you with prayers laced together as certainties stitched together as confidence. 

Tell a story.