She Could Actually Fly
She would travel the length and breadth of the entire whole wide world with a single finger. She would then randomly stop at an exotic sounding country and wonder why one couldn’t just pass through the map into the destination she had a finger on. Maybe, I have to press the finger harder she thought but the paper would create a dent that would come back to its initial position in a matter of three seconds. You could notice the dent only if you paid very close attention. An attention that can come only to a mind that is irreverently focused on things that implicitly bloom out of imagination.
She would then sigh out of sheer frustration but that had an ounce of hope. The hope she knew that she wouldn’t let go off trying to go to a different country. She only had to find a new technique. Her old time tested technique of having a pasta that floated on white sauce right after dinner while watching a wrestling match on TV. Here she would concentrate on a random member of the audience and wondering where he came from would put her to sleep. The sleep was her time tested mechanism. She knew she was magician because the minute she lost her senses she created a new set where she was in a new place, hearing a new language and sometimes even she could see women with moustaches. The moustaches weren’t peculiar because she imagined she was also wearing one. Secretly, she hoped she was having a Hitler moustache because then she could also think of herself as Charlie Chaplin. She would then go see this new country and when she regained her old senses she would wonder why she returned to the same old couch of hers. And the TV still had the wrestling match on.
The magic of the pasta stopped working. Maybe it was because she couldn’t find penne anymore and wouldn’t use the other things some people made their pasta in. She resented such people and would pass a sound like tcch tcch when she crossed them. She knew them by the way their chin was shaped, that was her specialty. The chin which had a blunt end to it, were people who had pastas with overcooked sauce. The double chins were the kind that ate anything but deep within they knew how to categorize the food. The pointed chins loved their pasta with red sauce, the scary red that reminded of murder. But why is she thinking of chins now she thought. She had to go to a different country and she was left choice less.
She passed around her living room that was spic and span that could leave anybody’s mother in happy tears. The bookshelf was loaded with books that weighed as much as the land it stood on. Passing by she noticed the shelf that was arranged in mix of heights and thickness. Atlas shouldn’t have Shrugged she blurted out. Pride was whose Prejudice she wanted to know. And yes, the eternal question that was still unanswered, why have Great Expectations? She swirled in her frock like Anna Karenina and her fingers pulled out books from the shelf and it flew all across the house until she found the one piece of useless literature the world forces you to possess if you want to travel from one place to another. She turned the page as if reading a boring novel and seeing her own self she let out a shrill scream. She scratched her chin, her pointed chin, in deep thought as how she looked so old in the picture and wondered if she was seeing the future.
The woman in the photo looked extremely elegant with a strand of grey pulled over her ear. The grey was hidden in the photo but she could sense it like your dog that knows when you will leave the house. She gulped a huge lump of saliva that passed through her throat which she always imagined to be a ship sailing across a small creek. Scratching her chin she held the page with the photo in different positions. Up towards Mars, down towards the groundwater and even side-ward where she knew God existed because she had a poster of Elvis Presley right there. But then after all the twists and turns her eye did, she still seemed old in the photo. She hated herself for that.
Her emotions as volatile as a stock market, she walked into a kitchen that was stuffed with chilies and peppers. She searched for the one piece of chemical that when rubbed created light. But she told the chili stacked all horizontal that would have taken hours to decorate — the light also burns like you, you just burn differently and she laughed at her own joke. She found the stick and took it across to her balcony. She looked down and the ground was so far below that maybe you could even see the end of a well but not this ground. She was scared to look up because there was another God there, but she was certain even He can’t sing like Mr Elvis Presley. But maybe that’s because He’s actually She. That made sense to her. She lit the stick and kept the flame burning over the photo pronouncing that she was creating a world that had no boundaries and she was the pioneer of this movement. She threw the book down the balcony and watched it fly like a bird that had lost its wings, moving in a linear pattern down unable to fight gravity and lift off. That’s when she remembered that book was her only chance of going to another country and eating in exotic places that had animals she couldn’t even dream of. They had some buildings that had a shape even with a rubber band she couldn’t reflex it to.
She put her one foot on the balcony rail as if climbing a podium and she fell off in an attempt to catch the one book that could take her places. On the way down she told herself, okay so I don’t need that passport, I can actually fly.