An offering of flash fiction where a young girl not only finds one super power within her, but multiple…
by: Sarah Daly
She had a force-field around her, she decided.
It was invisible. You couldn’t feel it, you couldn’t see it, you couldn’t smell it.
But it was there.
She decided to try it out. She closed her eyes and held her breath and extended her hands, to see what it felt like. But all she noticed was empty air.
And even though she could neither see nor feel it, she believed that it was there.
It was why nothing ever happened to her. Why she never got invited to parties, or won the raffle at school, or had her stories read aloud by the teacher in class, or had any of the adventures that she read about in books.
No one even bumped into her when she went shopping at the mall.
Maybe it was because she wore glasses. Maybe the glasses gave her some sort of super power, gave her the Shield.
It was yet another super boring Saturday, the type of Saturday when she wanted school to start again, even though she hated getting up early.
It was hot too, even though the leaves were starting to change color. She wanted a lemonade, but had no money to buy it. Suddenly, a group of kids on bikes came down the street, and she waved at them from the front lawn, but they just ignored her.
She grabbed her coloring book and traced trees in crimson, flowers in grey, and oceans in the blackest of blacks. The crayons melted beneath her fingers, she was coloring so quickly.
And then the strangest thing that ever happened to Mary Ella, happened.
Even though the crayons melted away, she could still color. The color streamed from her fingertips, like ribbons, but more malleable, more precious.
And she could just think about a color, and it would rainbow across the page.
She told no one about the colors. Coloring in her books was a strange secret, made of whirling paintings with shifting faces. Faces of people and animals and fantastical creatures that would melt away as soon as she recognized them.
She realized that there were many other worlds, much different than hers’, but maybe even more wonderful. That she could glimpse them, and the many lives that she could live. If she could only go beyond, to step beyond the Shield.
She thought about this, every day, in many places, like the playground, the school, and the park. And one afternoon, when a bully attacked a little girl and punched her so hard that she crumpled to the ground, Mary Ella realized that she could not hold in the colors any longer.
The darkest black, blacker than midnight, shot out of her fingers and launched the bully far into space. The little girl screamed and ran away, but Mary Ella kept going.
Instead of black, she colored the streets green and the houses orange and the lawns purple. Everything was changed, everything was different because she was there.
Soon everyone was wondering: Who is this girl? Who is this witch?
Mary Ella just smiled and colored Love and Happiness and Peace throughout the world.
Sarah Daly is an American writer whose fiction, poetry, and drama have appeared in forty-four literary journals including The Inflectionist Review (nominated for Best Spiritual Literature Awards, Orison Books), Bullshit Lit, Boats Against the Current, The Big Windows Review, Flight of the Dragonfly, and Anti-Heroin Chic.
