Short Story - The Drawing Pin

An attack of metaphysics for you all this month - a stream of consciousness piece of writing created for the Creative Prose module of my Masters in Literary Studies and Creative Writing. However, given it was shortly after writing this that I wrote the story that evolved into my novels, see if you can spot at least one theme from there that was on my mind!

The Drawing Pin

By Katherine Vick

   A glint; light catches. In a seconds pause, my eye is drawn to flash of hurried bronze, a whisper of brightness that touched, just for an instant, on the shining dome of a drawing pin pushed deep into the brown jigsaw of cork that sheathes the nearby wall. My gaze lifts – I stare for a moment at smooth convex surface, mostly dull but for a golden twinkle along one rim, a sunny wink in my direction, reflecting the dim glow of a cloud sheathed sun beyond the windowpane.

   It’s misty today, a dull pall that lingers like an off-white shroud over a forest of chimney tops and TV aerials stretching to a featureless, blank horizon not all that far away. On a good day, I can see the hills from here, dark lumps that undulate in oh so familiar patterns, distinctive and engraved upon the mind; I’ve walked those hills. Stood on their heights and stared out in new directions, towards new hills unclimbed, horizons untouched but yearning.

   What if I were to climb on those distant hills beyond hills, feel the crumble of soil beneath my boots, sit upon damp grasses or cool stones and stare, breeze singing through my hair as I gazed across silhouettes of places far away, trees against the sky line, a tumble of green fields and dancing birds that swoop and flap and sing for joy at the first sweet hints of spring, chasing, dancing in the sky from branch to branch, from cloud to cloud to pass across a hilltop where a single figure gazes back at the distant horizon she knows and realises that were she to stand upon those familiar hills, she could stare across a low expanse of hedges, insects, tiny creatures, past houses and the unseen lives of people never met to the ridge on which she lives and sits and writes and stares at the little glimmer of light against a drawing pin.

   I cannot see those hills today. The haze is bright, a circle of cloud that encloses me within a dome of golden-white, its upper reaches stained with hints of blue that shimmer through the shifting white like spilled water. There is a glow in the sky – it is getting lighter, brighter, the sun is fighting back and setting the mist aglow.

  It glints again, the drawing pin. Bronze against gold but more, a hint of colour, of reflected space, a little microcosm of the world beyond, distorted against its gentle curving surface, falling away. It is an indistinct image, no more than a blur, a tiny flashing hint of what lies without. Hardly a true mirror. But that was what they used once, wasn’t it? Polished bronze in distant past was the best kind of mirror a lady could have, a prized possession, the truest sight of ones own self that they could find. It is strange to think of a world without good mirrors, where the clearest idea of your image, of yourself, was a hazy image in gleaming bronze or a shifting, swirling reflection cast in undulating water. What must it be like, not to see yourself? Not to know yourself as the rest of the world sees you, to have no image of your appearance to fall back on. So much in our lives these days is down to appearance, a blessing and a curse – a person is judged in an instant by how they appear. But is that fair? People see themselves but rarely – they live in their thoughts, in their mind, the way they look is a covering they do not see, cannot see with their own true eyes. Surely it should be what lies within that counts, the person not the covering. But still, we look and we judge by looking. It should not be but it is so. Only one person can ever know the secrets that lie within the world of their own mind; however much you know someone, you can never, will never know it all. We cannot read thoughts but we can read faces and so then image becomes the world.

  Image is a strange thing. Does it matter to a blind man what he looks like? And someone blind all their lives – they could have no concept of sight. It would be alien to them, incomprehensible; the world in their heads would be constructed of touch, smell, hearing, taste alone. Not to see – not to perceive the world through sight is almost unfathomable but that must be the way it is, for how can you know sight if you have never seen? How can you describe colour without using colour, seeing colour, light without dark? To them, my drawing pin would be no shining mirror of bronze that catches and distributes light – it would be a smooth, slippery surface, a taper, a sharp point to prick the finger.

   A world without sight. What would that be for me, right now? The hum of my computer ringing in my ears, the twitter of starlings fighting in the garden. The smell of burning dust – I need to wipe my monitor. The feel of my canvas chair against my back, the hard wood of its arms against my elbows, soft material of clothes against my skin. The residual taste of chocolate biscuit. The drawing pin, too far to touch or taste, silent and odourless, would mean nothing from here if it could not catch my eye. What if there was no sight – for one, art as we know it would be meaningless. Would we have paintings of smell, sculpture of touch and taste if sight were not so dominant? Would music become a rich tapestry to paint the world, the reflection of sounds from all around you becoming a picture of a place or person, a portrait by voice? Could the drawing pin that holds the work of art in place become the work of art itself?

  Strange thoughts to have. Different worlds that we can never know in our world made for seeing. Are there other ways that we could see the world, other senses beyond our comprehension? In some sixth or seventh sense would the world be a place of even greater beauty? How would a sixth or seventh sense allow me to perceive a drawing pin, stuck in a corkboard, pinning a piece of paper in new and unexpected ways?

  What is that, anyway, that piece of paper my pin holds? Oh yes, a list of things to do from weeks and weeks ago, a reminder of tasks long forgotten and never taken down, a memory pinned in place. Is that the role of the drawing pin in life – to pin memories up where you can see them? Lists of things to do, some done, some waiting in the future, telephone numbers half forgotten, calendars that scroll tomorrow into yesterday and paintings of places that may or may not have ever crossed the eyes and pictures and photographs of friends and family grinning at you from the backdrop of holidays, weddings, birthday parties, the passing of years, of time, of memory itself, all pinned in place and staring down at you. Is that the lot of the drawing pin – to hold up the past whilst gleaming in distorted bronze a curving splash of colour from the present, a fleeting glint of light there and then gone, never to be seen again? A moment in time, a past, a present, a future, all can be found if you look hard enough.

  It glints; light catches. The haze has thickened, the gleam of hidden sunshine dulled, hints of blue chased away before the wave crests of gathering cloud, the dome set firm with weakened, chastened glow. So much for the sun.

   Light catches and then fades away across my drawing pin. But it will glint again.