Adventures in Short Fiction #03: Inverse

(haven't posted much lately since I spent a few weeks in Japan and I'm now working heavily on a new series... so here's another short story from back in the day.)

Melinda's parents wanted their child to be smart. A noble idea, certainly; but, as if secretly ashamed of the idea of education, or just doubtful that their little girl could operate without a sugar coating, they decided it would be best to educate her through a cornucopia of "edutainment" products. Most of these were cheap videos starring googly-eyed anthropomorphic puppets who, over the course of 22 minutes, learned various life lessons about sharing or the Dewey Decimal System while singing catchy songs about shapes or the letter B. As an only child with working parents, this was Melinda's primary method of learning and communication for a good while; where some parents used flash cards or read the newspaper to their children, Melinda got The Mayor of Math and Geography Gina 2: Greece's Pieces. At first she was a little insulted by these egregiously obvious attempts to pass off learning as recreation. Not because she disliked learning; the tyke loved it, and that was the problem. The parts she found interesting, such as lists of prime numbers and the average rainfall of the Amazon basin, were regularly obscured by pedestrian story arcs featuring skittish wallabies or jive-talking rodents. But Melinda's folks mistook her sieve-like thirst for knowledge for a serious interest in edutainment products, so the videos, activity books, snack packs and Sing-a-Song cassettes kept coming.

Before long, Melinda had grown accustomed to digesting information in bite-size, song-accompanied chunks. She memorized the entire soundtrack to Timothy's Tiddlywinks and couldn't count to ten without seeing Ensley Elephant carefully climbing up that infamous flight of stairs. In grade school, Melinda would make up songs to help her learn state capitols, and constructed a menagerie of puppets to ease memorization of the Declaration of Independence. Though these endeavors were generally successful, they didn't improve her grades - her methods of learning were just too complex and time-consuming to keep up with her ever-increasing workload. While the rest of her sixth grade class was memorizing lines of Shakespeare word-by-word, Melinda was designing 16th-century garb for a dozen glassy-eyed Montague monkeys and Capulet squirrels, pondering each puppet's motivation. In middle school she found that the good grades expected of a "weird dork" like her were getting harder to attain; she redoubled her efforts, inventing bookfuls of rhyming couplets which formed an impenetrable map of the foundations of her knowledge. Lunchtime was mostly spent alone, furiously scribbling through sketchbook after sketchbook. To the other kids, she began to seem less "eccentric" and more "nuts".

High school found Melinda suffering two nervous breakdowns (the first fueled by heavy amounts of Mr. Pibb and Mountain Dew freshman year; the second, much later, from LSD and battery acid), developing three different eating disorders, and single-handedly derailing a 10th grade production of "Guys and Dolls". During English tests she would mutter convoluted rhymes under her breath at breakneck speeds, grunting when she tripped over her own tongue. Her graveyard shift at Wal-Mart funded her ceaseless search for rare Etiquette Goats merchandise (only $75 for the rainbow shirt - original pressing!) and whatever other edutainment-related nostalgia she could revisit from the days when everything was simpler. She even flirted with a brief puppet-crafting career, until one of her more twisted creations caused a boy to wet his bed for a month straight. One day at lunch, a popular girl decided to steal Melinda's sketch book to prove some kind of point; neither her parents nor the principal could understand why Melinda retaliated by trying to bite the girl's nose off. Stanford was pretty much out of the question by this point.

Thirty years on, life is still interesting. Melinda now lives in a treehouse in Sarasota filled with hundreds of stuffed animals and notepads full of scribblings, strange loops and formulae that would baffle cryptographers. She speaks in fragments and symbols, cooing quiet, garbled melodies as she sews new clothing for her puppets. She has created a rickety, steam-powered machine which paints perfectly careening mobius strips of any size or color; her mind houses a 10-year oral history of her synthetic housemates which dwarfs Ulysses in scope and grandeur. Her life might have turned out far differently if she could remember how to connect with people; but that's far behind her now, the possibility an old uninteresting relic. Maybe someday her sidewinding genius will be recognized and appreciated. It just has to be communicated first.