There are so many ways to tell a story with words.

First-person or third-person point of view, poetry or prose, short story or novel.

But words aren’t the only way to tell a story.

Natalie “Tally” Nourigat is a writer, cartoonist, and animator from Portland, Oregon. Her artwork named Monsters and Dames turned up in my Facebook feed with a single sentence fragment: “A girl and her sea monster.” That set the stage for this story told without words:

Four panels. No words. But they say so much about an entire lifetime.

One of my favorite parts about stories told with art is how open-ended they are. Even though so much story is told, there’s so much more story we can fill in with our imaginations.

• See the original at Nourigat’s DeviantArt page.