She had the wind in her laugh, the tide in her thighs. She was hills and folds and flashes of floods: boundless. Always too much. Quicksilver thoughts. Balloon heart passions. Ruby had the bit in her teeth and we lunged to catch hold of her coattails. 'Spirited,' our teachers said and she giggled like water in a gluggle jug.
The tripwire teens sent Ruby spinning. Tribes and lipgloss and side-eye smirks. Boys on the grass, girls on the benches and her in the middle, nearly, almost, not quite either. I tried to show her the rules, truly. I hissed at her to shrink, to lessen, but Ruby still believed in rainbows.
When her mum asked if anyone would like more, her eyes slid past her daughter because big girls didn't need big appetites, and the Lord knew her child would thank her one day. And when Ruby spoke up in class, we shuffled away in case her boom-clever voice swallowed us up and coated us with its ugly sunshine knowledge and then we'd have to wear it like she did, blazing beacons of difference.
There were so many ways Ruby stood out. It must have hurt, stubbing herself daily on her own wrongness. So she unstitched herself, cut into her cloth. Painfully, precisely, she whittled her thoughts. Un-ate her flesh. She made paper boats of her dreams, and set them sailing without her. Then she resewed her salty seams. And for a while we pinged with satisfaction to see her diminishment. To see her smaller. More like ourselves.
'Good girl,' the teachers said, because everyone knew easy was good.
We looked at her, this new-pattern girl, and pennies of disappointment fizzed on our tongues.
Abigail Williams is a writer of flash, short stories and longer form fiction. She has won the Flash 500, placed third in both the Oxford Flash Fiction and Bath Flash Fiction prizes, and won the Exeter Writers short story competition. She seems to have developed a taste for family-based stories and tofu hot dogs, not always at the same time.
'The Diminishment of Ruby Brooke' was first published online by Reflex Press in their Winter 2022 competition.
No comments:
Post a Comment