The girl smiled at the class as she presented her project, a poster carefully constructed to show the lifecycle of a butterfly. She had elegantly drawn each stage in detail, her almost lifelike representation had the class in awe. The sixteen year old girl, with her buttoned up blouse and neat jeans smiled at her audience and showed them her work, moving over to the whiteboard to further explain the mating habits of the butterfly. The class watched her, some unable to believe what she was saying, others trying desperately to remember her name. The teacher sat in the back of the class, glasses askew as he too tried to remember who she was.
Clara? Cassie? Rebecca?
She thanked the class and rolled up her poster, expertly slipping the rubber-band over the tube and walked back to her seat. Still the class remained silent, whispered blinking. The teacher thanked her, though still unable to recall her name.
The girl knew that. She knew no one knew her name, or who she was or where she came from. She answered her name on the roll call and sat with the same kids as she had for four years. Yet her name slipped away from most she had met.
Was she sad about it?
No, not really. She wasn’t bothered by the thought.
She was relieved.
She walked home that night, the street lamps anticipating the night, and crawled through the catflap and up the stairs to her room. She unbuttoned her pants and kicked them off to the other side of the room. She tore the band that held her mousy brown hair up in a ponytail. She looked around at her neat room, white walls leaning in to watch her. Blank walls. Her phone didn’t have room for music, or contacts as she thought about it. She sat on her bed with a cover of pastel blue and flicked through the photos she had. They were the drawings she had made, destroying the evidence of her gift. Her talent. Her identity. She looked over to her bag where the poster poked out.
She walked over to her cupboard, sliding the door aside to reveal her neatly packed clothing. Nothing that screamed personality, just clothing of different colours. Her mother didn’t believe in patterns and shapes. She didn’t like how unstructured it all was.
But.
The girl did.
She slipped her hands to the back of the clothes, her fingers brushing the back of the stacks.
And pushed.
She shoved her hands forwards, watching the clothes tumble free onto the pastel blue carpet. One shelf. Then two. Soon her carpet was littered with jeans and shirts and sweaters. She scratched against the wood of her cupboard for the box hidden behind the stacks.
She took the black box out, cradling it to her small chest. Peaking inside, she saw the plan she had conceived weeks ago. No more blank colours. No more order. No more.
Nestled inside like golden eggs lay cans of spray paint. She dropped them on her bed and changed into black pants and a turtle neck top, smiling at her reflection. She slipped out the window, scuttling outside to the front of her house. With the moon on her back she began to spray. What she painted was something I could never describe accurately. It was a woman’s face, her eyebrows arched, her smile bemused of being created. She held no race, no culture, no identity.
Yet she did.
The girl overlapped the woman’s face with small wrinkles, only when you were up close did you see the hag beneath the woman. The girl kept going, spraying over the front door, across the panels of her house. The woman’s face was happy from afar, yet the closer one got the more unsettling and manic her smile seemed to be. Red was introduced, overlapping in her hair, a halo from afar, a burning, searing inferno burning through the skin up close.
The girl with no name let her being unleash itself upon the house, the true spirit of the little thing transform the world to her, treating it to the same welcome as it had her.
It was grotesque when she was finished. When the cans had run out dry. With its swirling patterns and demanding colours, it was chaos and emotion. It was human corruption, it was time. It wasn’t “pretty” or “sweet” but a being of infinite hope within the fire of its’ rage.
The girl packed her cans back inside the box one by one, suppressing what she was back into its box. She did effect the world, she did love and hate it. She did leave her mark.
But she knew, just as it had happened before. It would be washed away. It would be taken from her.
What was she?
A tamed thing that was truly wild. A wild thing that couldn’t truly be tamed.
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