Counting Claire

✰ COUNTING CLAIRE ✰
A short story

You learn to count before you learn what counting is. It's coded into your DNA – the simple fact that one plus one makes two, and two plus one is three, and then four, and five, and six. On and on and on, like a voyage to the end of the universe, a slow trudge to an impossible limit – infinity.

Infinity: the numbers from one onwards.

Infinity: the numbers between one and two.

Infinity: the number of planets, of solar systems, of galaxies, of universes. Of people like me. Of people like my mum. Of treatments that should've fixed my broken DNA.

I knew better than anyone just how large an infinity was.

Infinity was the time it took for my grandmother's coffin to be lowered into the ground, the cries of the ravens eerily drawn out, as if the entire world had decided to slow down for that very moment. It was raining and it was cold and the wind seemed determined to knock me down into my grandmother's grave, but I don't think I'd have minded, not then anyway.

Infinity was the time it took for the medication to wear off as the rain slapped my cheeks – for the last of the LSD to seep out of my pores and mix with the world, fleeing a body it never should have entered in the first place. It was mum's idea of a solution to the problem of insults – hers and mine. The idea was that if it stuck the pieces of my broken self back together like some kind of atomic super-glue, I wouldn't have to put up with the snide remarks from the kids at my school, and she wouldn't have to worry about the phrase that followed her everywhere, like a second shadow: refrigerator mother.

Refrigerator mother – a term for cold, indifferent mothers who had spawned broken children as a result. She was the cause and I was the effect. Together we made a disorder.

And that was my family: a mother lacking warmth, a grandmother lacking life and a few assorted siblings, sprinkled in like consolation prizes for losing at the lottery of life the first time. And me, Claire, a girl lacking intelligence, as I'd been told. A girl obsessed with numbers and counting, as I'd been told. A girl who was broken because her mother didn't care – never cared – just as I'd been told.

The priest was saying some words but I couldn't hear him over the winds cry. My mother stood a few people to my left, the tears on her cheeks anything but subtle. I wondered for a moment if I would be this sad when she died, but then I realised that, chances were, I'd probably kick the bucket before she did anyway. I was on the verge of my eighteenth year and I already had the build of an old rusty machine, my insides squealing every time I breathed – or, at least, that's how it felt to my brain. The doctor had said that my disorder only attacked the mind, so the rest of me should've been fine. That was his exact wording: should be fine. Not will. Should.

So now, instead of just being brain-dead, I was also a spastic with a ticking time bomb for a heart, according to my mother. Her logic stated that if a disorder existed, I probably had it, because the doctor hadn't said otherwise.

There was a chocolate space food stick clenched in my hand, and I brought it up to my mouth and took a bite – disgusting, as always, but better when you thought about tastebuds, and how mine were still functional even though I was broken, even though my grandmother was dead.

Another bite brought with it a collection of memories –

Twelve-year-old me riding desperately home on my bike, space food stick in hand as the moon hovered over my shoulder, no longer empty, no longer alone, cradling a lot more than just rock on its rugged surface.