Sentence I by Lydia Ship

Each member of my family was born as a page in a book. All of the words had to form a relevant artistic whole, so we spent the minutes of our days examining each word against others in the book. Then we discovered that the book already existed, and so we examined our pages against the pages of the existing book to make a perfect copy. We had to live as those existing pages, and so we tried to eat our breakfasts, talk, work, and play or not play as the book would have us do. We would find ourselves unable to squeeze into the tiniest footnotes at times. Within justified margins, words spread out to fit the pages, we found an easier time settling into the most spacious sentences, except for occasional excursions elsewhere. Each of us eventually became a single sentence entirely. My sentence was, “In the beginning, there was darkness.”