The Character Who Says Nothing

I recently attended a Zoom workshop that was part of the 2021 Winter Wheat Mid-American Review Festival of Writing (https://casit.bgsu.edu/winterwheat/ ). My workshop was led by award-winning journalist and fiction writer Terena Elizabeth Bell (http://terenabell.com/ ), who challenged attendees to create two characters. One character tells everything about her/him/them-self—the other character says nothing. The goal was to determine if it is possible to know more about the silent character.

Here’s what I wrote...

She slid open the train compartment door and flung herself inside and onto the open seat. Flushed face. Hair tangled. Mud creeping up the sides of her boots.

“Made it,” she said. “Just.”

She tossed her pack onto the empty seat beside her.

“Slept through my alarm and couldn’t find a parking spot.”

The train began to pull away from the station.

The other woman said nothing. She barely glanced up from her book, but her eyebrows pinched together, and pink color stained her cheeks.

The first woman sighed as she unbuttoned her jacket and shrugged it away. She rocked her head from side to side and rubbed at the back of her neck. She sighed again, looking at the second woman.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

The second woman slid a bookmark into the book, closed it, and looked out of the window. A field of sunflowers slid past. She remained silent.