"Eventually the Gig Is Up" by Ellen Zaroff

 – We all rolled the dice that we could play this game for just a few months.

I had been living my best life, dancing in the moonlight, drinking homemade Grappa.

Ellen Zaroff lives in New York City and has recently published three books, "A Layered Tress," "A Tree's Tale," and "Once, Upon Reflection." She runs a small foundation and travels trying to help community projects while collecting stories and sharing stories from around the world.

Author’s Talk

Ellen Zaroff

Wisdom says to write what you know about and in a way, even fantastical stories, are what we are familiar with: things we have felt, something we saw which caused us to think about a tangential experience or a story we heard -- not our own -- but touched a cord, a memory, an emotion. Is not then, every story we tell, even from our imagination, something we know about? 

I have had the wonderful opportunity to travel to many parts of the world, live in places I may have never even thought to visit and meet people whose experiences, by overlapping with mine, have become a part of my story. 

I used to find it hard to write about actual experiences. I ask myself, am I being true to the memory and is the memory even correct after all this time or have I conflated it with other stories without intending to? Did I have those emotions when I was processing the experience, in the moment of living it or were they added in hindsight, the colors drawn in as must have been logical at that time? 

Then, I realized it doesn’t matter. Fiction is a collaboration of experience, mixed with memory, colored in with explanation, painted with detail and spit out as a story which amuses, entertains, provides a mirror for recognizing one’s own life and hopefully provokes thought. 

“The Gig Is Up,” is based on true experience of a time I spent on the island of La Magdelena, off the coast of Sardinia.  It was a charmed summer, begun with a misunderstanding at the cashier, stemming from my personal rule of saying “no” when you don’t understand the question. And so I slept on the deck, not in a room (“camera”, in Italian), of a ship which was bringing the cadet class of the Italian navy to their training camp, somewhere on the island. I have keen memories of the bees on the jam, the moon lighting the way back to my quarters, the callouses I had from running barefoot all summer.  But it could not all fit into this abbreviated recounting.  

I hope, as this story stands, it will give a taste of that summer and the quirky things that happened along the way.—Ellen Zaroff