Questions Of Optical Illusions

• Mia Richardson , Grade 7
• Short Story
• 2016

She introduces herself as Laura, and informs me to not call her anything more or less. You would expect differently from someone you just met but, you could tell that she was odd from looking at her. She was wearing a patterned t-shirt that started with a circle in the middle and rippled outwards. It seemed to confuse my senses and her skirt and stockings were patterned as well as if she was made of optical illusions. I wondered what her wardrobe looked like in the morning.
“If the world was round why wouldn’t I walk off?”
She didn’t make sense to me, she obviously had no idea of what gravity was, and her questions seemed childish. I met her a couple of times again, one time with spider stockings, the other with triangles in different colours trying to escape her shirt.
Each time we met she would greet me with a different question;
“Why don’t we shave off our eyebrows, they don’t do anything?”
“Is there a name for all the fears?”
“Why do groups animals have odd names?”
Each day the questions got more tumbled in my mind. The questions became broader, I had no idea what to answer. I would think about that same question over and over again until we next met. One day I came up with an answer and I was excited to meet her.
“You can’t change words, just accept them the way they are.”
She gave me a sweet smile and as she departed she yelled form across the street;
“Who invented words?”
I knew my mind would be baffled about that one. I detected a pattern in her system of question marks, when the question was childish, I replied with a childish answer. When the questions where too hard I simply answered with a question or a statement:
“Let’s invent our own words, then we invented them.”
Some days we discussed the answers and questions. Our brief meetings turned into minutes, that turned into hours and soon my mum was wondering why I was liked the park so much. Whenever I met someone new I asked them a question, if it was something as broad as;
“Isn’t weird how we all see colours differently?”
Or something simple as;
“What’s your favorite colour?”
Some people didn’t like me asking questions, the people that did I got to know more and became my friends. Me and my best friend would do this to anyone that could be bothered to listen, some people got confused by her outfits, like I did when I met her, but we had a good time and a good laugh. I wondered how a silly question could have brought me this close to someone when I was so alone.