“This Story is the Kind for Telling”

I would like to tell you a story. If you are busy, or get bored part way through, I’ll understand. But I’m afraid I need to get it out all at once or I may ramble a bit and forget my tenses or make ends out of prepositions, something I often get marked off for. I will begin now.

There once was a girl. She was rather mundane in appearance, with brown eyes, brown hair, and an average, if slightly long, body that went from the tips of her toes to the very top of her head. Indeed, I must say it fit rather nicely. She sometimes thought to herself that perhaps her neck had not quite grown in long enough, for there was a bit beneath her chin that always seemed to hang. And the middle toe on her left foot never did fill in all the way; there were wrinkles of skin there that looked somewhat unpleasant when she wore sandals. But all in all, it was a good fit.

In fact, she had several features with which she was quite pleased. Her ears, for example, did not in the least bit resemble those of a monkey. Nor were they too small or too big. And they were just perfect for tucking the hair behind, and for wearing all manner of earrings (even those of which her mother did not approve). She took great pride in her feet, as well, for they were remarkably large. Though it was difficult to find shoes, she often went without as bare feet are well suited to walking over fresh cut grass, dangling in a pond, or grasping at tree limbs. She found her feet to be very useful and thought nothing of their unusual size nor of their fondness for going in the nude.

At times, she would spend long hours at the park. I can’t say she did anything particularly exciting on these outings but there must have been something of interest or I’m quite sure she would have stayed home to watch her shows. When there wasn’t frisbee games or dog doo to watch for she would use the green to practice silly tricks such as handstands and touching the toes to the chin. Of course, there were always new plants to discover, round stones to throw, and all manner of bugs to turn on their backs. There were some days when the sun would go down and she could barely see her own hand in front of her face before she finally went in for dinner.

At home, her room was not in the least bit spectacular. There was a bed with hand-me-down sheets and often, except when there was company, clean clothes from the dryer waiting to be sorted. She had a dresser and a bedside table, the latter of which was piled high with books and notes. In the corner was a closet with no door but instead a string of white holiday lights running across and down the side. Inside there should have been clothing, neatly arranged on hangers, and an impossibly tall shelf where Christmas presents are kept so children can’t find them (though they all secretly know that that is where they are kept). Instead, there was an assortment of boxes with labels crossed out and new labels pasted on over top, and with bits of things that did not fit hanging out.

On weekends and holidays she wore blue jeans and tee shirts with amusing pictures on them. Sometimes she put on mismatch socks and hid them under her pants cuffs so that no one would see and then she would smile to herself as she rode the bus or stood in line to buy groceries.

On the whole, she felt that her life was no more interesting than any other and so she would dream up fanciful tales to amuse herself. She would go to the pond down the hill and sit among the roots of a great-grandmother of a tree to write. She wrote stories full of fantastic heroes astride great beasts and spun tales of the elephant’s grand adventures inside a sewing box. She scratched and scribbled with her fingers down around the tip of the pencil and her neck bent at such an odd angle that she would sometimes have to stop midsentence and stretch before going on.

Her notebook was so fat with poems and stories until they spilled out the sides. They fell onto scraps of paper, napkin corners, backs of receipts, and empty calendar squares. Occasionally, she would get a great string of them and double it over to make more room.

Now I make no claim as to whether these stories were the kind that make themselves into books. They could, in fact, have been wholly unimaginative stories with torn bits and crumply ends so that they fit nicely into the trash bin. As they amused me, though, I would, on occasion, pocket one and bring it with me for reading on rainy days.

And while she has written a great deal on the fascinating life of a toaster oven named Bill, she has never written much about herself. It is for that reason that I have told her story to you, just now, and not any later. For if I had waited much later I might have forgotten and gone instead to make a sandwich.

So there you have it, with a nice tail at the bottom and all. She lived happily ever after, the end.