Short Stories

Felix.

1

This is stupid. She will never love me. No one will ever love me. I keep telling myself that I can be a writer. But I just can’t. And to put the two things that I will never achieve into one, will just embarrass me. And I don’t need any more embarrassment in my life at the moment.

I looked up at Madeline, the girl I want to love, and I saw her staring at leaf. Just a regular leaf. Nothing special about it…just a leaf. Maybe she was bored. I decided to go talk to her. My psychologist told me it is good to talk to other people, besides my parents.

I walked over slowly and sat beside her on the yellow bench. It was early in the morning; so wet drops of condensation were still dripping off of the picnic bench in a rhythmic beat. I counted it. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Before I eventually worked up the courage to talk to her, she turned to me and started to speak.

“Don’t you wonder about the life outside of earth? Do you think it’s possible that we are the small germs or bacteria living off of someone’s body or world? What if all of our science is wrong? What if there is actually more than one earth or world? If so, I wonder where they live. I wonder if they have the same characteristics as us. I wonder if we have the same characteristics of the germs and bacteria that we have. We could be the small ones. Don’t you ever wonder that? Do you?”

She said the last two sentences with such force as if I had the answer to everything. I was lost. How does one person figure that out just by looking at a leaf? I had to say something.

“Um. Well I don’t know. How did you figure out all of that?” I asked confused.

She stared at the girls across the playground in the school grounds. The school was quite beautiful actually. The oak trees had grown since I first came to school and they stood majestically, swaying in the steady breeze. The children playing tag laughed and screamed in delight when they narrowly missed the tagger. I missed that life. Being a fifteen-year-old boy, you can’t really play tag unless you want to be the laughing stock at school. Well, at least at my school.

The girls in my year level were laughing and gossiping about the “not so cool” kids at our school. Every once and awhile they would glance at Madeline and smirk evilly at her “not so cool” style. Their faces were loaded with makeup, which made them look fake. They were all wearing clothing that their rich daddies had bought them. None of them were nearly as beautiful as Madeline.

“Well,” she started. “When you have grown up without friends, you tend to have some spare time to over-think things. I was never into dolls and handbags. Just books and pencils. Plus none of the girls would play with me. I have an odd sense of humour. If you don’t mind, I would like to ask you a question. Why do you want to talk to me?”

I didn’t know how to answer the question. I stood up slowly, brushed my trousers off, and said to her,

“Because you are the only one that will treat me as if I am not... how should I say it? Me.”

I walked away without saying a word and thought to myself, ‘Oh Madeline.’