The Shape of What Was There

Daily Prompt

The Shape of What Was There

Published by

Bob Lynn

14/08/2026

| Reading time:

1–2 minutes

If you had a time machine and could send just one message to your past self, what would it say?

Algiers, 1943. Beneath a military hospital, in a cellar thick with heated wax, a young woman builds faces for soldiers who can no longer bear to look in a mirror. An elderly painter descends the stairs with a bundle of linen, a sharp eye, and hands that will no longer hold a brush. She reads faces from a distance. The sculptor leans in close enough to breathe on the wax. Two women. One question. What would you say to your past self, if you could send just one word back? The answer will break your heart and quietly mend it.

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Tags: Art and Creativity, dailyprompt, dailyprompt-2853, Historical Fiction, Literary Drama, Short Play, World War II

3 responses to “The Shape of What Was There”

Steven S. Wallace

17/08/2026

The 60 year old painter and the 30 year old sculptor. How petty the older artist seems at the telling of the story about painting the child. Yet she is confessing. The sculptor, on the other hand, cries a tear on the mask of what she made for the patient.

I’m trying to decide if I like one or the other. That’s not the point of this play. But I don’t think that I like the older woman. Not in a disrespectful way. Rather, I just don’t like her. Am I supposed to formulate a judgment about some fictional person? I don’t know.

The younger woman seems like my daughter. She has grown to be a person who experiences these types of feelings. Emotional she is. But she run the risk of proceeding too much in empathy. Like someone I used to know.

SSW

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1. Bob Lynn
  
  17/08/2026
  
  Well, you’ve gone and made me reconsider the Painter in a way I hadn’t quite settled while writing her, so I’ll take that.
  
  “Petty” – I think you’re right, actually. Or at least, you’re right that she sounds petty in the telling. She was furious with an eight-year-old for behaving like an eight-year-old, and she knows it, and the knowing is what makes it a confession rather than just a complaint. She’s not asking for sympathy. She’s reporting the evidence against herself. I think that’s the key to her: she prosecutes herself more harshly than anyone else could. The flatness of “I was rather furious with her” is the sound of a woman who’s been sitting in the dock for forty years and has stopped expecting the verdict to go her way.
  
  But I don’t think you’re wrong not to like her. And I don’t think you need to feel you’re being disrespectful by saying so. You asked whether you’re supposed to formulate a judgment about a fictional person, and I’d say: you’ve just done it, and it’s the most natural response a reader can have. Fiction isn’t a museum where you admire the brushwork from behind a rope. You’re meant to have feelings about these people. Liking them isn’t the requirement. Responding to them is. And “I don’t like her, but I can see what she’s doing to herself” is a perfectly valid, perfectly human reading. Some of the best characters in literature are the ones you can’t stand and can’t look away from.
  
  The Sculptor as your daughter – that’s not a small thing to say, and I won’t skate past it. The fact that you recognised her in someone you love tells me she’s doing what she’s meant to be doing. And your worry about her, that she might proceed too far into empathy, that it might cost her something – I think that’s exactly the worry the scene is asking. The Sculptor’s own answer is that the feeling is what the hands run on. But you’re right to be cautious about that. Empathy without a floor beneath it can eat a person alive. The scene doesn’t resolve that tension. I don’t think it can. I think it just puts the question on the table and lets the two women sit on either side of it.
  
  And “someone I used to know” – you don’t owe me the rest of that sentence. But I’ll say this: the fact that a wax nose in a cellar in Algiers in 1943 managed to reach across and touch someone you knew, once, in another life – that’s about as much as I can ask a piece of writing to do.
  
  (She’s late sixties and mid-twenties, by the way. But sixty and thirty works perfectly well as a reading. The gap between them matters more than the numbers.)
  
  Bob
  
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  1. Steven S. Wallace
    
    17/08/2026
    
    Yeah. Is it possible that she can confess this 8 year old dislike but still somehow seems flat in doing so? Would it be a better confession if she was more distraught about it? I really don’t know. I see confessions all the time. Hers can’t be completely discounted. You’re right, she doesn’t have to bring it up. When I see someone confess, but then go on a diatribe of yeah but this and this and this and therefore I was justified…wrong but justified… that is a hollow confession. I think hers is not hollow.
    
    SSW
    
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