She was five feet tall in boots and somehow took up more room than anyone else in the house.
Not physically. The house simply seemed to reorganize itself around whatever she decided to become that week.
On Monday she was learning violin, so the dining table disappeared beneath sheet music. By Wednesday she had taken up breadmaking, and every surface wore flour. Friday brought astronomy, three library books, and a secondhand telescope that blocked half the bedroom window.
Her partner called her “a li’l bit of a lotta gal” after finding her simultaneously repairing a lamp, listening to an Italian lesson, and fermenting cabbage.
She liked the phrase enough to keep it.
The trouble began when the hobbies started staying.
Usually she moved on. Knitting became pottery, pottery became birding, birding became amateur locksmithing. Yet one morning she discovered she could still play the violin passage she had abandoned six months earlier. She could identify Orion without looking it up. She could pick the bedroom lock in eleven seconds and explain why the sourdough starter smelled wrong.
Then came languages she had barely studied, dances she had watched once, recipes she had only bookmarked. Skills accumulated inside her without permission.
Soon she could do nearly anything badly and an alarming number of things well.
People began bringing problems.
A broken watch. A tax form. A sick orchid. A leaking pipe. A suspicious mole. She helped until there was always someone at the door.
Her partner finally found her sitting on the kitchen floor surrounded by tools, yarn, legal forms, sheet music, seedlings, and an accordion she did not remember buying.
“I can do everything,” she whispered.
“That sounds useful.”
“It was.”
The next morning, every unfinished project was gone. So were the books, instruments, tools, and half-learned ambitions.
On the refrigerator she left one note.
I’m going to find out who I am when I’m not becoming someone else.
Her partner smiled, and left the kitchen exactly as she had left it, because finally, there was room.
©2012 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
Leave a Reply