Where does a story come from? Or a poem, a novel, or a play? No writer can answer this question. In fact, it remains a mystery to the write...
Where does a story come from? Or a poem, a novel, or a play? No writer can answer this question. In fact, it remains a mystery to the writer herself and there are times when she asks herself: Did I write this?
There is however one story of mine of which I can trace, if not very clearly, a trail that could, perhaps, lead to its source. A story written at a very bleak time in my life. When grief had made me numb and writing had deserted me. A time when my age seemed a burden impossible for me to bear. I had thought, if and when I thought of it at all, that I would live up to seventy. Seventy-five, perhaps. But there I was, eighty and still living.
I wrote this story in fits and starts, happy that I could write it at all. It was, unusually for me, a story set in a dystopian future. A time when the world was overcrowded, not because more babies were born, but because the old would not die. This problem had reached a critical stage, with so little space that people could not live without jostling one another, and resources were...
