#68 - Dot

Today’s words: Gregarious, Shoes, Magnificent, Elephant

Word count: 392

Completion time: 31 minutes

Summary: Shyness from the perspective of a little girl

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She sits on the wooden bench, knees pulled up, red school shoes on the seat and wonder what’s wrong with her voice. Why, when she wants to speak up, it shrinks back into her throat and pretends that it didn’t want anything, like a tiresome game of hide and seek.

Tilting her head up, she opens and closes her mouth like a fish, making popping noises every time she opens her lips. “Come out,” she encourages quietly, poking one cheek with her index finger and glancing at the grey gravel beneath her. “I bet you're great when you do...bet you sound...” she pushes her finger against the soft skin harder, “...magnificent.” The word she had recently learned comes out sounding like ‘malificent’, but she’s still satisfied.

She moves her finger away and pulls her hood up, looking at the other gregarious children playing ‘It’, ghost train, and hopscotch. They were all in groups, as if they were born with the inclination to gravitate towards other people like magnets, as if their bodies, their voices knew exactly what to do when faced with social situations. Some people just knew what to do, she thought, like they were taking a breath or blinking; you don’t need to think very hard when you do those.

There was a girl in class who always made the other kids laugh. Last lesson she put her arm against her nose and made a loud, elephant noise when the rest of the class were in the middle of a test. She got sent outside, she was a bad girl, but everyone laughed, even the teacher smiled to herself once she’d sent her out. All she could do was stare at elephant-girl as she skipped away, wondering how it must feel to have such a large group of people under your control.

It must feel like being a magician, she concluded, sticking her finger out and slowly waving it around in front of her. “Abracadabra,” she whispered, looking at her finger and smiling as if it were doing it all by itself.

“Dot, we’re going back inside now, come on!” one of the kids says, motioning for her to follow before running off in the direction of the school building.

She quickly got up and jogged to catch up with everyone else, pursing her lips together and bowing her head.