wonderful

When she wrote on the walls, no one paid it any mind. It was as if in this world, writing on the walls was acceptable – just another way to decorate a world otherwise painted in tones of determination and desperation. From that moment, she couldn’t look back into the world where writing on the walls was bad. The memories of that time still glided to the surface when she called them, but the pencil on the wall said her parents didn’t know how beautiful thin gray lines looked against white wash.
“Yeah, that’s how it’s spelled,” said Ruth. She didn’t notice the texture of the pencil on the wall. Mia nodded too. Quinn wrote the rest of the sentence just for the feeling of pencil against wall, then smiled and lay back down in her bed.
‘Sure, that’s how it’s spelled,’ thought Quinn, closing her eyes.

Quinn looked back at the wall the next night. It said ‘wonderful’. It was wonderful. It would stay there, gray and a little smudged, until she decided to take an eraser to it. Her converse would stay dirty, too, stained with colors from berries and when she did tye-dye with her sister. She could clean them, but that would mean banishing the dirt as well. Character came with either suffering or dirt. She’d run out of bandaids, so her converse stayed dirty.

“Wonderful,” she whispered, rolled over, and went back to sleep.