Aelinor "Elle" Silverman // D4 // fin

  

I grew up in a house without mirrors. I’d see my upside-down reflection in tin spoons, or warped along the spout of a faucet. Sometimes, when the water was very still, and the sun was at just the right angle, I could see myself floating over blues and browns and greens. I’d watch myself across the glass display cases when I walked through town, floating over breads and shoes and coats. Isn’t it natural for a girl to be curious about what her face looks like? But for most of my childhood, the only mirror I could get to was the clouded, cracked one in the girl’s bathroom of the elementary school. I could never stay in the bathrooms for long, because the stuffy room bothered my asthma. Eventually, I stopped going to the bathroom at school altogether.

Some things I could see for myself. I had white skin that turned red from too much sun. No freckles, and not much of a tan, despite burning again and again on summer days. My father says I inherited my mother’s skin, like porcelain, but I wanted his: tanned and weathered like soft leather. And if heaving a disposition toward sunburns wasn’t bad enough, when embarrassed or stressed, I blush, fiercely and often and full-body. Red decidedly doesn’t go with the blonde hair and blue eyes I’ve got going on. I had long, slender hands. Pianist’s hands, my father says, although I’ve never touched a piano in my life. Instead, I tie knots. I learned how to weave nets out of the coarse rope found on the boat. A District 4 tradition, some say. I think it’s more about needing nets to eat. I have long legs, and at least now they seem to be a good feature. As a child, I was teased because I was the tallest out of almost all my classmates. I was ‘gangly’, to be specific, and despite not knowing what that meant when I’d overhear it, I didn’t like the way it sounded. Gangly stuck on the top of my mouth. It was a word that didn’t fit between my teeth right. Luckily, I seem to have stopped growing at 5’9”.

I really like helping other people, especially my family. My brother calls me a pushover, but I think it’s good to be useful. A virtue, even. Just because I did our entire group project in 10th grade on the history of fishing, doesn’t mean that I’m a pushover. Jessica had to get her chicken pox vaccine renewed, Nathan said that there had been an earthquake in his kitchen, and Sam had to attend a funeral for his goldfish. They were all very busy, I was just being helpful like any other decent human being. Sometimes I honestly don’t understand him. He says his use of sarcasm is a distinct art, and he’s frankly offended that I don’t get it. I don’t know how much there is to get about a 15-year-old boy, though. It’s worse with other people, that’s why I usually try and mind my own business, unless they need help with something, of course. I struggle with reading comprehension too. It was always my worst subject in school. Math was much easier for me. I don’t think my teachers ever cared one way or the other about my progress though… I would be sad if I was a teacher too.

I love cooking for people, even if we can’t afford a variety of food stuffs sometimes. I like flowers and washing my hair and following rules. I’m very shy, and I get easily flustered in situations outside of my comfort zone. Cue the full-body blush. I really like to sing. It’s a fun way to pass the time when I’m weaving or doing laundry or cooking. Sometimes, my father will try and coax me into singing for him, but it’s not the same in front of people! The stage-fright is too much. Singing is something that I do for myself. Is it wrong to keep this one thing all to myself, just one little thing to make me happy? Even my necklace is not my own. It’s a delicate silver chain with a tiny silver pendant on it. It was given to me as an infant, after my mother’s death. I’ve never taken it off. It’s come to the point where I don’t know what my neck feels like without it on. And yet, it’s always my mother’s first.

Sometimes it’s hard sharing something precious with a dead woman- not that I would ever take this away from her. The moments of peace on my father’s face are reward enough for carrying her memory around my neck. Of all the things about myself that I share, I think it’s fair to keep singing for myself.

I’m used to sharing things. I shared a bedroom with my brother, a kitchen with my father, my time with the families in the neighborhood. My new bedroom still feels foreign. After my mother’s death from childbirth, my aunt moved in to help my father raise two infants. She passed away last winter with a fever. It’s still hard. She was practically my mother. She would shoo away the weird bugs I was too afraid to touch, and make sure the angry sea-gulls never got too close. She’d sooth my stutter by making me tell stories until my words worked again. She never made me go in any small spaced I didn’t want to go in, and always offered a warm embrace when I start to panic. She’ll hold me until the world settles. That’s a mother. I hope to be like her one day: helpful and warm and solid.

I lived four years of my life before we discovered my asthma. I don’t remember it very clearly, only the inability to breathe and pure fear. My father tells me that’s why I’m so afraid of thunderstorms. I don’t think I was meant to know, but one day my father was talking to my aunt in the kitchen, retelling the story of my first asthma attack. I know I wasn’t suppose to listen because it was very late, but I stayed anyway. Apparently we had been doing construction on the house with a little extra money we had saved, fixing the roof and the porch steps. There was sawdust everywhere, and a giant gust of pre-storm wind stirred it into the air. My dad was so panicked when he found me coughing and having trouble breathing that he immediately picked me up and carried me to the clinic. Of course it started pouring on the way there, but the clinic helped me.

I’ve gotten multiple inhalers over the years. You have the renew the medicine that’s inside of them. Now I know the few nurses that work there. I want to do that job one day, but I don’t know if I will be able too. There is so much still up in the air after my aunt’s death, but I think I’m meant to be a nurse. I understand how the human body works, even if I don’t understand what humans say sometimes. I’m meant to help people. If only I could muster up the courage to apply.

Codeword: Odair
Face Claim: Penelope Mitchell