Silly Putty

She kept a piece of putty in her pocket. It kept well in its zip lock baggie. She could discretely unzip it there at any moment and knead it, like bread, like vital release of excess creativity. In a pinch, she could, if she wanted, share it with another body-- maybe an overexcited child, a crying elder, a forlorn stranger. She didn't worry much about germs or phobias, the convoy chariots between life and death, that mock like the hands in blind man's bluff. She didn't think of Freud, or Jung, or Pavlov.

She'd never see others as they see her, really. They'd never be seen as she sees them. The mirror of existence is impartial that way. Shapeful and shapeless. Recognition, of being to being, is what the eyes reflected back even in the most casual of glances.

She rolled the putty. Invisible.

Sometimes stretched, pulled, torn, squashed from pieces. The tan, a color of post-mortem, still lively between her fingers. Only she would feel that. She won her putty in a slot machine--the chain store kind--a quarter in, and out pops a surprise gift.

Yes, life is what we make of it.

11.25.2023

Shapeful? Shapeless challenge @MeeJong