Mind the Gap is a collection of fiction short stories. They vary in style, themes, tone, characters and length. The aim is to provide a different lens colour to look to reality. It's also the sandbox where I tried different voices, where I experimen...
This is the story about a girl I know. She is called Narcissa and she is so tall that she can see all her face in the mirror above the table, at her home hall.
Every day, going out of the house, she turns her head, looks into her big hazel eyes and mentally says 'Rain or sunshine, happy or sad, I will always be by your side and you will never be alone'.
At school she plays with her friends and sometimes fight.
One of her teachers is somehow special. She is the only person who can see her retractable butterfly wings beneath the nursery robe. She always listens because she knows how important it is all what Narcissa explains. In those moments, the girl thinks about becoming a teacher herself in the future, and use her x-rays superpowers to see the wings children wear under their clothes.
But when she is out of the school, she remembers that, actually, she wants to become a professional mountain climber, a sea diver and a painter, with some spare time for singing and dancing. One of her uncles told her once that there are peaks so high, that you become breathless as you ascend them; and her antie told her that, in the Nile delta, you can see fish clearer than in an aquarium.
And every evening, when she returns home and see her eyes reflected in the mirror, she smiles and renews her promise.
"Yes! Climber-diver-painter-dancer-singer is the perfect profession for me.
The problem will be to find the right excuse for the grown-ups who resist the idea."
Author's note: I wrote this story for my niece Eva on her first birthday celebration. At the time, I was concerned about how some girls grow up without a healthy degree of narcissism. Time has proven that my concerns were unfunded. 😎
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