Only For Today

by AlexM

I’m red pen-marks on three orange post-it notes, but only for today. Yesterday I was a yoghurt carton, discarded on a roadside and licked clean by foxes. Tomorrow I could be anything–your staple-remover, perhaps, or a cobweb in a farmer’s barn.

I gave up trying to control the changes when I was seven. After two years of daily becoming something new, despite my concentration on the mental image of ‘little girl, brown hair, brown eyes, brown skin,’ I had to realise the truth.

It’s been six years now. I’ve been more things than I remember.

I wish I hadn’t sneaked a drink of one of my mum’s potions. All those bright liquids, some of them polka-dotted or striped, lined up in jars along the wall of her study–they looked like sweeties. The stripy green and blue one tasted like liquorice and I went and sat outside, feeling light-headed, and thought I would like to be a balloon so I could float above the village and see it laid out like a map.

And I became a balloon, and I saw the village.

The next day, I was a button on a telephone. I haven’t seen my village since.

I want to see my mum again. But I never shape-change into a painting in the living room, a cushion on her bed or a note written in lipstick across her bedroom wall.

Sometimes, though, I can pass on messages. Like today. I hope that someone will find one of these messages and take it to her, quickly, before I shape-change into something else, and she’ll take one of her potions from the shelf and pour it over me and I’ll be a girl again.

She lives at 3 Berrey Close, Windyham, W Sussex, England. Please hurry!