The Proper Way to Shatter a Girl
One of the topics Senjuti and I explored this year was perfection and its illusory qualities. I used some of the ending words Senjuti chose for her sestina to create a fictional piece that explores how abandoning false ideals of perfection can be liberating.
There was a girl who was made of glass. She was perfect, and she lived in the garden.
The garden was small and tidy. The girl kept it so, though being a perfect glass specimen required a certain level of caution.
Every day the girl filled a pail with water and sloshed it over the peonies and daisies. She plucked weeds, pruned branches, and turned the sunflowers toward the sun when they got confused.
Time passed. The plants grew. The girl grew restless beneath the glass. She pricked her finger on a thorn just to see what would happen. She let the vines grow high. She stopped helping the sunflowers find the sun.
There was no inciting incident. There was no hero’s call or villain in the village. Nothing changed at all except the girl let herself feel hungry.
So she grabbed a vine and she was not gentle. She clamped one hand over the other and shimmied up. The plants wailed and thirsted beneath her. What would they do without her?
The girl did not relent. She climbed until the greenery thinned and she could see that there was light and clouds and blue, but between her and all that wide freedom was a wall. This was not a garden at all but a cage.
She climbed until her hair grew wild and her muscles thick. Until her head bumped the ceiling. She reached up a fist and knocked, pounded, raged. She punched until the crack widened and the cage shattered around her and she fell and fell and braced herself for the inevitable fracturing the ground would bring.
Only—and this is where things get interesting—when she fell she was damaged, yes, less beautiful than before, of course, and hurt beyond imagining. But the world was before her. And she did not land on her feet, but she didn’t shatter, either.
She lived.