The Parts of a Sum

    She’d picked it up from her mother, talking with her hands like that. Her mother told stories at the dinner table when Elle was a little girl, and her eyes would trail the wide movements and flexing fingers, magnetized by their motion. Now Elle told the stories, and her onlookers mirrored her young self as they watched her own dancing hands.
    She couldn’t remember exactly when it started, all this learned behavior, but sometimes wondered if there wasn’t a person inside her at all, just composites of others that had been carbon copied and attached end to end to create a personality.
    When Elle was little, she stole her walk.
    There was a girl, a big kid in the fifth grade class that she watched on the blacktop at recess. The girl had a way of floating when she walked, with an elegance that should have been alien for her age. She seemed to just drift forward, like a nun--all motion and no movement.
    Elle practiced a lot. Mostly at home in her mother’s bedroom where a high mirror hid her feet, but revealed if her head was bobbing too much for the desired effect. Sometimes she would give up trying to float, and instead dig around in the closet to try on her mother’s high heels, pretending she was a famous singer.
    When she got to middle school, Elle was starting to “blossom”(as her mother put it). Elle just felt like a big awkward mess.
    There were girls, big girls in the eighth grade, that didn’t seem awkward at all with their newly acquired assets. Elle would watch the way one (Susie or Suzanne) would wear tight sweaters and skirts that kicked around a lot when she walked. She saw the way this girl handled the attentions of boys as well, and subliminal blueprints were being drawn inside of Elle.
    In high school, now armed with her own tight sweaters and even tighter skirts, Elle learned what “spit or swallow” meant, and what shame tasted like. She tried to keep up with the all accelerated learning: Catch phrases, inside jokes, body language, being prepared but seeming casual, which clothes received compliments and which drew glares, making friends, trading friends, falling in love, losing her virginity, getting dumped, feeling sad, and then feeling glad.
    By the time she reached college, it was hard to tell what was Elle and what was the influence of others. But she didn’t dwell on these kinds of thoughts for too long. Not after she realized, some years after her graduation, that there must also be parts of her in others. And if that was true, then those parts would spread out even further in an ever more finite impact on so many others. She took comfort in knowing that she was part of everyone, and they were all apart of her, and didn’t try to be original or wholly “herself”.  So she kept telling stories with her hands, and no longer worried about why.

Reviews

[DavidRyanM]

I dig it, man. The idea that was all just take from each other and morph what has been into something new, and, in turn, our original actions get interpreted in other ways and so on and so forth. Dig it a lot, buddy. Surprised it was this short. Figured you could have gone on about this for a while.