Online stories: StoryNights on Zoom

Why has this story been haunting me for over

twenty years?

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It’s the locked door and the bloody chamber.

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Nothing has only one meaning in fairy tales. The chamber can exist inside a house, a person, a relationship, or the structures of a society. It's where what has been harmed, discarded, denied, or concealed is hidden.

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Once I read Fitcher's Bird, it wouldn't leave me alone. The story changed as I changed. Things I thought I understood opened into something larger. Questions I thought belonged only to the fairy tale showed up in the world around me—and in my own life.

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Hope cannot free herself by pretending the chamber isn’t there. She has to open the door. She has to see what has been destroyed. She has to listen to the dead and confront the systems that allowed their destruction.

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And eventually she has to recognize the chamber within herself—the parts of her own life that have been diminished, abandoned, or emptied out.

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Don't be fooled—that isn’t where the story ends.

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Now we have to ask: what do we do with the difficult events in our lives? Will we stay trapped inside the stories imposed on us? Will we stay trapped inside the stories we impose on ourselves? Will empathy become self-sacrifice? Will love survive without requiring us to disappear inside it? Will what has been hidden be seen, named, mourned, and brought back into relationship with the living?

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The chamber is horrific.

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It is also a place of truth.

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And truth, even when it's terrible, isn’t the end of the story.

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That’s why Fitcher's Bird still lives in me.