CITY ISLAND LINES
The little girl pushed the front door shut behind her and made her way to the chair. The leather was worn to a velvety soft state, and she happily clambered up into its comforting cushiony expanse. Sitting cross-legged, with her giant colouring book open on her lap, she looked tiny, like a leprechaun, dwarfed by the high back and overstuffed armrests.
‘How was school?’ her mother trilled from the kitchen, and without waiting for a response, she continued, ‘I’m just reheating that meatloaf and gravy for your supper. I hope that’s okay.’ Involuntarily, the little girl scowled, turning her slight smile into a fierce frown. It had already been a pretty trying day. Once again, she had scored 100% on her math quiz. That wasn’t the trying part. That she had expected. What was tiresome and troublesome was that the teacher had announced this fact to the whole class and, once again, had used the word ‘gifted’, when making this unwelcome announcement. The inescapable consequence was that she was accosted at lunch break. The package of M&M’s in her lunchbox was instantly snatched as was her peanut butter and jelly sandwich—the latter was then smeared up and down her white T-shirt. All in all, she felt she’d gotten off pretty lightly this time, but it did mean that she hadn’t much lunch left. So, by this time, she was hungry, and the prospect of chewy two-day old meatloaf and glutinous grey gravy was not a welcome one. She lowered her head and took out a brown pencil, with which she started to sketch energetically. After a few seconds, she heard a racket emanating from the kitchen followed by her mother’s sanitized version of profanity. ‘Drat and double darn! The meatloaf has just fallen on the floor. Now how did that happen?’ The little girl looked up from her colouring book momentarily. Just a rhetorical question she concluded and dropped back to her task again. This time, she chose a pinkish pencil and began to draw intently. ‘Well, I guess I could make you a hot dog. I know you like that. At least you can still enjoy the gravy with some of last night’s green beans with it.’ Once again, the little girl stopped drawing and cocked her head briefly. She chose a red pencil and began working frantically. Another crashing sound exploded in the kitchen. ‘Oh my goodness! What is wrong in here today?! The gravy dish has just broken and spilled gravy all over the floor. And how did these green beans get moldy overnight?’ The little girl did not stop this time. She simply chose a yellow pencil and returned to her task. ‘Well, it looks like all I have for veg are some frozen French fries. I guess we could also consider ketchup a vegetable of sorts….’ The little girl’s face developed an impish grin. Contentedly, she calmly completed her drawing, while her mother finished preparing supper. When the meal was ready, her mother beckoned her to come and eat at the kitchen table. Hungry and satisfied, she took one last look at the page in her lap. On it, she had rendered a plump pink hotdog snuggled up in a fluffy brown bun and surrounded by golden French fries drenched in ketchup. ‘So, how was school today, ‘ her mother asked again. “Oh, it was okay,’ the little girl replied. ‘My teacher called me “gifted” again.’ 17 Oct 2017
0 Comments
The trouble started with my chest, ugly and a bit uncomfortable. Then it began to migrate down my arms, tentative at first but gaining momentum with time, until it had run roughshod over much of my body. In the space of a month, I found myself speckled with a firmament of splotches, scabs, blisters and bruises. Some were painful, others merely pruritic, all of them unsightly. It got to the point where I was embarrassed to roll my sleeves up at work. This was problematic, because our office had an ancient heating system that responded unpredictably and disproportionately to the winter weather we were experiencing. So, sometimes, while it snowed outside, we would be at our screens, sweating with only T-shirts on.
Perhaps we weren’t sweating solely because of the heating. Part of a large and successful firm with a ‘global presence’, our department felt increasingly denigrated and marginalised. Without knowing how, we had become or made ourselves irrelevant. We were like spokes in a wheel with a flat tyre. We worked doubly hard, but our efforts were neither effective nor appreciated. So, small wonder that we sweated away, even in the cold, with the ever-present threat of redundancy looming. After wandering the multiple and often contradictory byways of the worldwide web, I concluded that my curious skin condition was likely stress-related. Certainly stress teased and tormented the rest of my body – I had headaches and backaches, my stomach churned, and my heart raced. Why shouldn’t stress eventually spread its tentacles to my skin? With my Google diagnosis in hand, I made an appointment with an in-network Dermatologist. For my first appointment, I made sure to wear a relatively new bra and some pretty knickers- both fresh out of the wash. I sprayed a subtle eau de toilette into some of my nooks and crannies. I tried to stand tall and marshall the extra rolls of flesh at my midriff into some semblance of decorum. The doctor was probably not impressed by any of these efforts, but he was intrigued by my ‘unusual lesions’. Eagerly and with reverent whispers, he poked, photographed, froze, and scraped various bits of my skin. |
Proudly powered by Weebly