096/100 aka 236/365

THE GIRL WHO
Word Count: 387

The girl with cochlear implants had seashell ears, pearly pink and superbly formed. Her ears were one of her finest features yet they were useless from the day she was born.

She arrived too many months early and color had not yet painted her eyes. They were crackled crystal marbles and if you looked deeply into them, you could see the inside of her head. She could not see well enough out of them but she tasted the air with her tongue and it spoke to her mind in colors and angles and swirls.

The girl with cochlear implants escaped into a world of her own every night, gobbling up pictures and notes that sang in the air. In her crisp cotton bedding she put them together; a cow with the strut of a rooster, a man with the smile of a child. She wove threads into remnants that became tapestries to line the walls of her memory. New information left them draped onto the floor.

Her physical beauty was known to all but herself. Instead, she gleaned data from comments she sipped from the words they left in the wind. Her deep copper hair became purple. Her porcelain skin was burnt brown. This was how she learned to see people, in relation to her own version of self. As we all tend to do.

She grew up loving flowers and oranges and simmering beef stew. Her sense of scent was the only thing normal. However, if you looked at our world from her perception, normal was normal as normal could be.

She fell in love with a shoe salesman, a man who had the smile of a child and a voice that she tasted as honey. He was a different sort of man, one who fit well into her world but not so well into anyone else’s where he slipped between cracks if he didn’t take giant steps when he walked. Her mother tried to keep him away from her daughter. The harder she tried, the more desperate the lovers became and one day, they ran away.

The girl with cochlear implants now lives at the edge of the moon with her honey-voiced man and two children. One is a boy with the smile of a man and the other, a purple-haired little girl.