Pinocchia

By Megan Powell

My father goes to bed early. He's getting old, and needs his rest; and in any case, he loves the morning, and wants to rise with the sun.

I don't mind. His early retirement gives me time to think.

Time to think, I say. Time to brood, more accurately.

I stare out the window most of the time. Waiting for another miracle. I suppose it's unfair, in a way. Most people go through their entire lives without experiencing anything that is even the least bit extraordinary. Why should I expect every unhappiness I encounter to be solved by some mysterious, benificent power?

There's a mirror in the other room, but I prefer the window. The mirror is too acurate, too harsh in its portrayal of this flesh-and-blood body. The image in the window is ghostlike, imprecise. If I stare long enough, I can mold the features however I choose. I can watch the flesh harden, and change once more into wood; watch my eyes dry into depthless daubs of paint.

Or, I can soften the angles, make the lips fuller. I imagine longer, softer hair, a luxurious mane.

My father laughed, when I talked about how beautiful I found the fairy. He thought I wanted to touch her, possess her...or maybe he thought I just considered her a beautiful bauble, some object to be admired. But I want to be her.

Not her specifically. But like her.

It's so unfair. My father wanted a boy, but there was nothing masculine about my wooden body. Only the clothes were a boy's, and clothes can be changed so easily.... It was my father who called me a boy, so I assumed in my innocence that I was a boy. Or, rather, that I wanted to be a boy.

If you tell someone something often enough, they'll start to believe it. And for so long, I really thought that my one true wish was to become a real boy. No one ever detected that lie, that most significant lie, the one that I told the fairy. The one that I told myself every day when I saw how pleased my father was with his "son".

So now I sit by the window, and think that maybe, one day, the fairy will return. Maybe she will somehow hear my secret agony, or maybe she will just stop by to chat. And then, I imagine myself talking with her, telling her how much I cherish her gift of flesh, but how alien I feel in this boy's body. And how good I imagine it would feel to be in a girl's.

And then, then she will smile, in perfect love and understanding. And then she will touch me, and I will be transformed again.

Surely, that is a tinier miracle than changing wood to flesh. If I deserved the first gift, do I not also deserve the second, or must I pass some other test?

Perhaps I am being silly, waiting here every night for the woman who will probably never come again. And if she did, and told me what a selfish, spoiled child I have become, how I am never satisfied...?

I do not know if I could bear that. So one traitorous part of me hopes I never see her again, hopes that I never face my father's scorn. For surely, his forgiveness would be a greater miracle than changing wood into flesh.

But the rest of me, that is so desperately unhappy....That part of me will wait by the window, every night, hoping for my savior's return.

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