FFP#21 – Countdown
Since she had learned to count, she couldn’t stop. It wasn’t as though she counted out loud so everyone could hear her, but almost every waking moment she was thinking, One, two, three, four, five, six — and on and on. After the second grade, she counted by fives when she was nervous. In middle school, she counted her teeth over and over during English. When a boy in her health class tried to snap her bra, she repeated her locker number to herself and then punched him in the nose. She only had to count to one before his nose started bleeding. In high school, she fell in love with a skinny boy who sat in front of her in math class. She scrawled wet and rounded numbers on the roof of her mouth with her tongue. One day, he turned around and said, “What are you saying?” She looked at him, confused. Had she started counting out loud, without being conscious of it? “Are you reciting the Fibonacci sequence?” he asked her, more amused than annoyed. “Maybe,” she said. He laughed and turned back around. This was when she realized that if he kissed her, if she felt his body pressed against hers, if they melded into one, if one plus one could somehow equal one, she could finally stop counting. This was when she started counting backwards from one million.
Tags: flash fiction project
Uncategorized | 
May 31, 2010 8:22 pm
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