Margo Stutts Toombs - Performance Artist
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Picture

Paper
Published in the Flow edition of Synkronicity
https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/

Here is the flash fiction piece - Paper, but it is more fun to read it in the journal with the other literary works and virual art!
 
At the long-term care facility, the occupational therapist enters her room. She doesn’t remember why he is here, but she enjoys his young good looks and the trace of eucalyptus lingering on his skin from the morning shower. She recognizes the items on his therapy tray - blunt-tipped scissors, colored pencils, crayons and a stack of junk mail. He helps her open each envelope, hunting for paper that is gleaming white on the backside. They examine each piece for blemishes, finger its smoothness, and sniff the ink. 
 
In a midcentury house in the 2010s, the mail slides into a locked box, clean enough to keep the paper pristine and soft to the fingertips. Fresh paper snaps when she cuts it into scratch paper. Notepads bought in stores are too fancy for casual notes: things to squeeze into the “To Do” list for the day or random thoughts to glide into a poem. She keeps the prized scratch paper in a cubby near the dining room table.
 
The occupational therapist glides her fingers through the holes of the kindergarten scissors. With his guidance, she frees lopsided squares from the curated paper.
 
In a midcentury house in the early 1950s, she plays office with her next-door neighbor. This girl has special bits of paper: ledgers, blank receipts, colored tablets brought home by her bookkeeping father. What an honor to play with the neighbor’s stash of office paper. Her clumsy fingers tremble a ittle. It is so easy to mar the paper with too much ink or pencil graphite. Teachers have scolded her many times for being messy.
 
Now, she picks up a crayon and scribbles on the back of a perfect piece of paper. Here she can use as much color and canvas as she wants. Here, she can color outside the lines. On her pages, the grass is blue, the rainbow is pink, aqua and chartreuse, and the sky is gold.