Swirls by Laura Shell

She moves her arms, her hands, her fingers as if she’s floating in water. From an index finger, a swirl begins. It’s the air. Concentrated. Rotating clockwise. An inch in diameter. It bends all the light and all the colors in the room, yet remains clear.

She focuses on a framed picture of a moment captured, a moment of an outing with him. Smiles. Sunglasses. Coats and gloves and scarves and hats. The white mountain behind them.

What the picture doesn’t capture is the bruises he gave her minutes after the picture was taken.

The swirl extends forward in a straight projection. The end of it captures the picture like a suction cup. It lifts it, six inches, then three feet. Just like that.

Her focus sharpens and the picture dances high in the air. The swirl, churning faster, like a rope now, from the tip of her finger to the front pane of the picture.

She giggles, feels butterflies in her stomach, goosebumps on her arms. She wants to try the other hand now, the other index finger. She shifts her gaze to it. The picture remains levitated and if it has a will of its own.

Another swirl. The same size, the same movement, the same bending of light and color. The end of it sticks to a wall hanging three times the size of the framed picture. Can she do it? Can the swirl lift it from the wall and make it dance as well?

Seconds later, she has two framed images hanging in the air of the room. She giggles again.

Next, the middle finger of her right hand. Its swirl targets an empty red vase, lifts it from a table and makes it turn in circles.

This time, a full-on laugh, a belly laugh. How long has it been since she’s laughed like that?

Without a thought, she juts all of her fingers forward. Now she has ten swirls, but the picture, the vase, and the wall hanging have all slammed into the wall behind them and crashed to the floor. The high-pitched sounds of their unified collisions cause her to shriek.

Too much force. Good to know.

But can she have ten things dance in the air without touching one another?

Yes, she can.

Her living room becomes a vision of science fiction and fact. The ten swirls, all different lengths, all attached to an object, all manipulating their forms, laughing at gravity.

And then she claps. Just once. She doesn’t know why she has done so.  

The objects that once held space in orbit become an explosion of materials. So loud, the clattering, she lifts her shoulders to her ears and squeezes her eyes shut. Glass and wood and plastic and stone now a mingled mess on the floor. The swirls, however, are still in the air, separate, waving, the ends becoming sharpened points as if her fingernails have stretched to abnormal lengths and turned into daggers.

And then he enters.

He’s been asleep this whole time, hasn’t heard the first collision, still so doped up from last night. But the second collision has forced him from bed and into the living room. So angry, this man.

He has startled her, and in her surprise, she has jutted her fingers forward again, in his direction.

There he stands, a look of shock. The pointed ends of the swirls have found purchase within his flesh. This man of hers now has ten puncture wounds, four in his face, four in his chest and one in each arm. Spots of color invade the white of his clothing, the white of his skin. The color red. It takes over his body like a black ink blot spilled onto light paper. It spreads, it flows, it creeps.

And so does the joy of what she has done.

She balls her hands into fists.

The swirls disappear.

The butterflies in her stomach lurch into her chest and lodge into her throat, causing her breath to quicken. The goosebumps on her arms spread throughout her body, like the color red on his.       

This man of hers collapses to the floor.

Too much force. Good to know.

Now he does too.

She giggles again.

Laura Shell

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay – Finger pointing