Flash Fiction #1: La Différence
There are stories waiting in all unlikely places. Single Story.
The chairs stood perfectly arranged, unwittingly betraying the messiness of life.
Akane stood at the ground floor of the Rodin Museum. Children from at least three schools — given away by their differently patterned uniforms — filed about in orderly queues.
Are Parisians born with this innate sense of organization? she thought.
She sat against one of the columns, dropping her tired headphones to her neck.
“Numb like never before,” she sang lightly. Her eyes hopped between the straight lines of the marble pillars and their mirror-like distortions in the tiled floor. Two groups of children were already milling orderly up the squared spiraling stairs.
Some kept throwing her curious looks — a few even squinted, as if trying to mimic her.
A kid — all spectacles, ears, and chubby hands — approached her. On his chest, a sticker spelling “Bonjour, je m’apelle” flashed bright red against the green and white pattern of his uniform. “ALI” jumped out of the sticker in its careful blue cursive.
“Why are you sitting on the floor?”, he asked, avoiding eye contact. “You’ll get your uniform all dirty.” His words were direct, biting, the “r” fully pronounced. A household American accent; yet a trace of French seemed to be settling in: the r was just a bit too pronounced already.
“I guess I just like to do things differently. Don’t you?”
His eyes focused on the wall behind her. His right hand moved towards his glasses, fixing them. They ended up even more slanted than before.
“Not really,” he mouthed. “Different is bad.”
Now that’s an unfortunate sentence.
“You look different,” he continued.
“Do I look bad?”
Ali considered this for a moment. He nervously checked his surroundings, looking for his group from the corner of his eye. None, save a long-skirted teacher, stole a glance to where he was.
“You look like mom when she finally sits on the couch.”
Akane considered this for a moment; then, deciding it was as accurate a description as she herself could give, made a move to get up. Ali stood in front of her, eyes fixed at the wall beyond, his small hand extended in her direction.
She grabbed it, making sure not to put any weight on him as she got up. She exchanged a smiling glance with the skirted teacher, who smiled back. A tacit approval if she’d ever seen one.
“Do you want to sit for a bit?”, she asked, motioning towards the empty chairs.
He replied by moving towards them. He waited until Akane had taken a chair, then sat next to her, lightly pulling the chair towards her first. The perfect symmetry has been broken.
Ali sat on the edge of the seat, his little legs moving back and forth as if recalling any other swing.
“So do you like Picasso?”, Akane asked, pointing towards the relief hanging on the other side of the hall.
He looked at it, squinting as if in effort.
“It’s a guitar,” Akane revealed, noticing his waning interest. “Do you see it?”
He looked at her for the first time, his green eyes resting on hers for a moment. He had a small, black mole right below his left eye. His eyes seemed to be struggling to keep still; they veered here and there, like an ungoverned motorbike digging for friction on gravel.
“It looks nothing like a guitar,” he finally said. “His women don’t look like women either. Their noses are nothing like yours.” His legs stopped swinging for a bit, as if he had rerouted energy towards something else. “Well, they look a bit like mom’s, but they’re still too much.”
Akane agreed, and they both stared at the guitar for a bit.
“I like Picasso,” Akane confided.
“Why?”
“Have you seen the video of him upstairs?”
“No.”
“When you get there, ask your teacher to watch it. Look at Picasso: really look at him. Look at the way his eyes smile and his mouth shines when he speaks about his art. Notice how simple he is, how warm and welcoming.”
How peaceful.
“Picasso did everything differently: exactly as he was. And people loved him for it, you know?”, Akane continued. “It shows in his cats; in his birds, in his horses; his carts, his hands, his robots and his women.”
“Picasso was just Picasso?”, asked Ali.
“Picasso was just Picasso,” Akane agreed. “And Ali must be just Ali, just as Akane” — her hand moved towards her chest — “must be just Akane”.
Ali stood in silence for a few minutes, as if considering everything she’d just said. His legs had even stopped bobbing back and forth; his small hands rested upon his knees, just like Picasso’s “La Colombe” rested against the abyss.
Ali’s teacher waved with a smile; the group was now moving up the stairs.
“I see the guitar, Akane,” he whispered. He smiled at her reaction. “Now you look just like mom does when we’re back home,” he added, before trotting back to the teacher. She smiled at Akane, gently nudging him up the stairs alongside the other children.
Akane smiled as he looked back towards her, waving goodbye.
She stood after a moment: just long enough not to hear footsteps anymore.
The museum was hers again.
Almost.
Akane glanced back towards the chairs before disappearing through one of the museum’s arches.
The chairs stood imperfectly arranged, unknowingly betraying the beauty of life.
This story was written solely from the above photograph. I wanted to learn more about Akane, the character from another flash fiction I wrote, Active Idling. I wanted to explore how she would react to this situation, what would be her concerns as a Japanese trying to integrate into contemporary western (no, Parisian) society. I don’t know how Ali came up, however. But I wanted him to be memorable.