The Ugly Duckling

Daniella nervously stepped back to take a better look at herself in her full-length mirror. She had chosen to wear a black knee-length dress and her favourite high-heeled black shoes that allowed the tiniest bit of her red toenail polish to peek through the open bit at the front. It was the customary Valentine's Day colour, after all. She leaned forward again and looked closely at the face staring back at her. Her face was fuller than it had been in years and her once defined cheekbone structure was barely visible. Her brown, almond-shaped eyes were framed by dark, angular eyebrows. Daniella didn't understand what Jason saw in her, but he must have thought she was mildly attractive if he asked her out on this particular day. She took a deep breath and dabbed some lip-gloss onto her lips. This date was a big deal for her.
 
At twenty three, Daniella had not dated many men. She had always been made to feel as though she was unattractive to them. Of course they had never told her this directly. No, that would be cruel. But growing up, her best friend, Andrea, had helped her understand this - that she just wasn't pretty enough and that unfortunately, the boys just didn't like her. Daniella could recall many times as a young teenager when she would be walking home with Andrea, and Andrea would try and coach her to help her with this problem. "You have to change the way you look. You're always frowning. It makes you look really ugly," she would say. "And change the way you walk. It's weird. You always look so stiff." On some days, she would try and get Daniella to work out with her, pushing her to do as many sit-ups as she could. "If you stay fat, the boys will never look at you. You need to work out every day of the week. I think that until you can lose the weight, you should wear long tops to cover your behind." Daniella continued to listen to Andrea's words of advice, working hard to lose fat that she could not see but had been told was there, desperately wanting to be attractive.
 
A couple of years into high school, Daniella moved away to another school and eventually lost touch with Andrea. As the years progressed, she continued to struggle with her body image, always hearing Andrea's words in her head. The situations Daniella would find herself in seemed to reaffirm what Andrea had told her all along. Daniella would meet men and develop a liking for them, but the attraction was never mutual.
 
One day, while Daniella was in her second year of college, she had received a phone call from Andrea's close friend, Terry. Andrea had taken seriously ill and been admitted in a hospital two hours away. As Daniella sat in the bus en route to the town where Andrea had been hospitalized, she recalled how Terry and Andrea would discuss her as they walked in front of her on the way to school as teenagers. Terry would say something like, "What's up with her? She's so strange. Why is she always so serious? And what is up with her tagging along behind us like that?" To which Andrea would respond, "I don't know what to do with her. Just look at how she walks, rigidly clutching on to her book bag like she's in the military or something!" And then they would howl with laughter as the tears would well up in Daniella's eyes.
 
When Daniella had gotten to the hospital, Andrea had seemed overjoyed to see her and had hugged her ever so tightly. Daniella had felt remorseful about the grudge she had held for seven years and had genuinely wished her friend a speedy recovery. Terry had also seemed much nicer than Daniella remembered but just as Daniella had begun to feel at ease, something had happened that made her feel like the awkward thirteen-year old again. Terry was trying to get Andrea to guess who she had met on the bus earlier that morning. "Come on, Andrea - take a guess! She was on the bus with her younger sister. You were in her Engineering class.?" Andrea had continued to look at Terry blankly. "Okay, I know you'll figure it out now - who is the ugliest, pudgiest girl we both know?!" It was at that point that Andrea had exclaimed, "Daniella!!!" and had burst out laughing.

 
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Daniella snapped back to reality when her cell phone started to ring. She held her breath as she reached for the phone, praying that it wasn't Jason calling to cancel their date.  The name 'Zara' flashed on the caller ID display. Zara was a girl who had moved in next door to Daniella, whom she had become close friends with. Daniella answered the call and heard Zara's voice on the other end of the line. "Hey Dannie! Why don't we go catch a movie or something? I can't be home on Valentine's - it's too depressing." "Er… I have plans tonight, Zara - I'm going out for dinner with Jason," Daniella replied. Zara sounded completely surprised, as though she didn't believe it. "You mean on a date?" she asked incredulously. "Yeah, I know. Even I'm having trouble believing it," Daniella responded as her stomach fluttered. As Daniella hung up the phone, she thought to herself how strange it was that she had plans on this day when Zara didn't have a date. Zara was a beautiful girl who accustomed to having men flock around her.

 
Daniella took one last glance at herself in the mirror before she settled down in the living room with a magazine to wait for her date to pick her up. About ten minutes later, the doorbell rang. Daniella took a deep breath, adjusted her dress for the umpteenth time, and opened the door. To her complete surprise, it wasn't Jason who stood at the door, but Zara. "Oh, I'm so glad I caught you before you left the house," Zara said as she pushed past Daniella and made her way into the house. "I have absolutely nothing to watch and I was hoping to borrow a movie from you." Daniella glanced nervously at her watch, thinking that Jason would be arriving shortly and she really did not want them to be late for their dinner. But Zara was already flipping though the booklets that held the movie disks. As Zara sat cross-legged on the plush rug, Daniella couldn't help but notice how effortlessly pretty she was. She was dressed casually in a pair of shorts and a tank top, wearing just a hint of eye makeup that made her hazel eyes pop.

 
The doorbell rang again. As Daniella opened the door to let Jason in, Zara jumped up and walked over to say hello to Jason. Zara had never been too fond of Jason so it surprised Daniella when Zara stood on her tiptoes and leaned in to hug Jason. It was then that Daniella realized that Zara was wearing possibly the shortest pair of shorts she owned. "Jason, you don't mind having a seat for a few minutes while I pick out some movies, do you? Maybe you can help me go through these movies," said Zara. Jason barely looked at Daniella as he settled down into a comfy armchair, holding the movie booklet in his hand. Daniella watched helplessly as she saw him grin at Zara as he seemed to completely forget that Daniella was even in the room. She then watched in utter dismay as the vivacious Zara settled down on the arm of the chair, swung one perfectly toned long leg along the length of the arm as she flicked her hair back and flashed a dazzling smile at Jason who said, "Maybe we should just stay here and all watch a movie together"...

Kitty Cat

Tanya wore her hair in two pig-tails tied with pretty red ribbons. Her once shiny Mary Jane black shoes were now covered in dirt and her white, knee-length socks had streaks of brown on them too. The bottom of her red and white plaid pinafore touched the wet earth beneath her as she couched on the grass, intently watching a pretty red ladybird as it crawled up a blade of grass. She was a charming little child with a mind as curious as that of most children her age. She was fascinated by nature and all living creatures, often wandering off into the garden outside her home to observe the little insects that roamed freely around the plants.

Without warning, the ladybird suddenly spread its wings and flew off. A little startled, Tanya stood up and looked around to see if she could spot the insect again. This time, however, she spotted a beautiful butterfly fluttering its wings lightly as it flew over the lawn. With a look of glee on her face, Tanya skipped merrily alongside it, her little pig-tails swinging from side to side as she did. Her mother watched from inside the house, through the kitchen window, smiling fondly at her daughter.

The garden stretched from the driveway leading up to the house, all the way to the stone brick walls at the periphery of the compound. Unlike most homes in the area, these walls did not have electric wiring running over them to deter burglars. Instead, there were short iron rods with sharp arrow-like tips placed vertically at regular intervals on top of the walls all around the boundary. Close to one edge of the garden, the walls gave way to a sturdy wrought iron gate which was always manned by a surly-looking guard who watched with disdain as Tanya played in the garden.

Along one edge of the garden, close to a mango tree that stood by the wall, lay a small, crudely-constructed shallow pond with oddly shaped rocks that formed its border. In the centre of the pond, a birdbath had been erected that attracted different bird species from time to time. Tanya moved slowly towards the pond, careful not to scare away the beautiful little birds that had gathered at the moss-covered birdbath. She stopped a few feet from the pond and relished in the sight of the birds dipping their beaks into the water, ruffling their feathers and twittering away gaily.

A rapid movement in the rose bush close to the pond drew Tanya’s attention away from the birds. She watched the bush as the leaves rustled and a couple of loose pink petals fell off the flowers and onto the grass. Then, from in-between the branches, a most adorable little tawny kitten poked its face out. Tanya squealed in delight, clapping her tiny hands together. The playful kitten frolicked about the rose bush before its eyes settled on all the activity going on in the birdbath, a few feet from the rose bush. It then pranced forward and clambered up the mango tree whose branches extended over the pond, brushing against the boundary wall.

Tanya, enthralled by this display of playfulness, watched in glee as the kitten settled on top of the wall, wiggled its little behind and hunkered down, its wide eyes fixated on the birds. The birds splashed away in the birdbath, unawares.  

Suddenly a gruff voice sounded behind Tanya. She looked over just in time to see the surly guard raise his arm and hurl a small rock towards the kitten who sat perched atop the wall between the iron spikes. Tanya watched in alarm as the kitten jumped up in fright to avoid the hurtling stone.

Tanya let out a blood curdling scream and began to wail as her mother rushed outside to her and enveloped her in an embrace. She lifted Tanya into her arms and stroked her hair, trying to comfort her daughter as she walked briskly back to the house. Tanya, still howling, watched blurrily over her mother’s shoulder in utter horror as the guard picked up a stick, smirking as he tried to lift the kitten’s bloody carcass off the iron spike that had speared its body as it had landed…

Best Friends

Sarah and I clutched our towels around our bathing suits, squealing as Danny chased us around the pool. From her sun bed, my mother lifted her head, shading her eyes from the bright sun with her book, and called out sternly to us to be careful. Sarah and I collapsed onto a sun bed, giggling while Danny pulled one of the thin cushions from another sun bed to the edge of the pool and lay down with his right hand dipped in the pool, mischievously threatening every so often to splash the cold water onto us.  

It had been a glorious three days. We had hardly spent any time inside the hotel. I was so glad that Sarah’s parents had agreed for her to come away with my family on a beach holiday. And I was secretly even happier that Danny just happened to be there with his parents too. I had had an enormous crush on him since the sixth grade and although it had been an entire year of turning bright red each time he so much as looked at me, neither he nor Sarah knew how I felt. Although she was my best friend, Sarah had a way of making me feel like most things I said or did were laughable. It was better that she didn’t know about my crush on Danny.

As the azure pool glistened in the sun’s golden rays, we took turns at jumping into the pool to see who could make the biggest splash. We would start off a distance away from the pool’s edge, running towards it and finally take the biggest leap we could, hugging our knees mid-air, just before we hit the water. Sarah managed to capture everyone’s attention (as was the case most of the time) with her immaculate underwater hand-stands. I could tell that Danny, in particular, was impressed and that this seemed to please Sarah greatly.

Before long, my mother was beckoning us to get cleaned up and changed for lunch. We promised Danny that we would meet him the following day for a game of water polo and then ran barefoot back to our hotel room. “I don’t want this holiday to end!” Sarah moaned as she stood at the balcony window, looking out onto the beach. “We still have another whole day left before we have to go back”, I replied optimistically but I too felt the sinking feeling that our holiday was coming to an end too quickly. For me, it meant fewer opportunities to see Danny, once we were back at home.

Sarah and I washed up, donned our shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops, and made our way down to the hotel’s dining room. My parents were already seated at a table, waiting for us. As we approached them, my mother looked at me and exclaimed disapprovingly, “Look at how dark your skin has gotten! Didn’t you use any sunscreen?” I looked down at my arms and legs and realized that I was really tanned. I never understood why that was a bad thing. I thought my skin looked so beautifully dark and flawless. I looked over at Sarah whose skin had a light bronze glow all over, except for her nose which was a reddish brown. She gave me a look of triumph as though to say, “I managed not to mess up like you did!”

I sulked through most of the lunch, perking up only when my father said that Sarah and I could have some money to go and get our hair braided on the beach. We hastened through our meal and excused ourselves from the table, dashing out into the sunshine again. We scampered past the pool and through the little gate that led onto the beach, whipping off our flip-flops and letting our feet sink into the powder-soft sand. The great big leaves of the palm trees swayed in the wind as the ocean drew closer with each wave. The almost-translucent crabs darted across the white sand, seemingly daring us to step on them. Some distance ahead of us, a man with a stick led a camel down the shoreline, a little boy nestled between its humps, his little legs dangling high off the sand. Beach vendors dotted the hotel’s periphery, their beautiful paintings and carvings laid out on a background of sand, and their exquisitely colourful sarongs flapping in the wind. As Sarah stopped to pick up a shell, I spotted two ladies sitting under the shade of a palm tree. A piece of cardboard stuck in the sand with the words “RASTAS DONE HERE. WELLCOM” written untidily across it told me we had found our hair-braiders. I called out to Sarah and we walked over to the women to get our hair makeovers.

Almost three hours later, we were finally done. We stood up, shaking off the pins and needles in our legs, and looked around. The tide was out and the beach had emptied out considerably. Sarah and I took a little walk along the strip of sand that had been under the tidal waves earlier that day, digging our toes into the wet sand, trying to unearth pretty little shells. Once we got closer to our hotel, we sat down on the soft sand and watched the waves breaking against the reef in the distance. I absent-mindedly picked up a handful of sand and let it pour through my fingers as I daydreamed about Danny.

A man’s voice behind us startled me back to reality. I looked over my shoulder and saw a man, wearing a cap, holding a bunch of leather bracelets and wooden key-chains in different shapes. Sarah began to engage him in conversation about the price of the key chains and so he moved in front of us and crouched down to face us. There was something about this man that unnerved me. I pretended to be disinterested in the conversation, looking out to the ocean, but from the corner of my eye, I could see that he kept turning to look at me.  I drew my knees in and hugged them. He was making me decidedly uncomfortable. Sarah, completely oblivious to my discomfort, asked me if I wanted to get a personalized key-chain. “No!” I snapped in response. I wanted the man to go away. Couldn’t she see that I was uncomfortable? As he stood up to dig into his pockets for some paper on which to write Sarah’s key-chain order, I took a good look at the man. He had protruding veins that ran over his smooth ebony skin, from his wrists, over the bulging muscles in his forearms and disappeared under the sleeves of his loose, button-up shirt. Hanging from underneath his cap, were short braids, not unlike those we had just gotten. His eyelids were droopy, as though he was sleepy and in his mouth, he chewed on what looked like the end of a twig.

He looked up at me suddenly, catching my stare and I felt a surge of panic shoot through my body. His eyes… they looked like dark beads set against a thick yellowish backdrop, taking me in, bit by bit, through their droopy eyelids. I looked away quickly. I wanted to get up and run back into the hotel compound but my body wasn’t listening. Sarah chatted away, answering the man’s questions, each of which he asked in a drawling voice, slowly averting his gaze every so often to look at me. I stared directly ahead of me at the ocean, praying that my fear was not apparent to him as I grew increasingly nervous.

He asked Sarah where we were staying and she pointed to the hotel behind us. I wanted to scream out and shake her and tell her to stop giving this stranger all this information but I could not seem to get my voice or my body to obey my mind. I began to tremble. The beach was now practically void of any people, save the man with the camel. All sorts of thoughts raced through my mind. I began to have flashbacks of an incident that occurred when I was nine years old, and a drunken man had accosted me outside a restaurant’s restroom. I shuddered as I closed my eyes and saw those eerie translucent-green bloodshot eyes boring into mine.

“You, you look like a tourist because you have a white skin,” the key-chain vending man said to Sarah, “but your friend – she look more like me.” I could feel his stare burning into me. “Me, I prefer this colour…” He reached over and slowly but deliberately stroked my thigh upwards.

That was it! My body finally kicked into defence-mode as I shoved his hand away, got to my feet and with all my might, kicked the fine sand into his eyes. I didn’t even stop to look at Sarah as I then whirled around and bolted for the hotel entrance. Just as I approached the incline to the open hotel gate, I felt my left foot hit something hard and before I knew it, I was laying face-down in the sand, my ankle resting atop a piece of driftwood. I hoisted myself back up again, and as the tears came hot and furiously down the sides of my sand-covered face, I heard the distinct sound of Sarah’s laughter behind me...

His Eyes

Katie ran across the grass and up to her mother, her ponytail flapping about like the tail of a horse swatting flies. “Mummy, did you see? Did you see how high I can swing now?” Her mother smiled tiredly down at her. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon and the playground area of the family restaurant was teeming with screaming little children. “Can I go on the merry-go-round now?” the little girl asked her mother expectantly. “Not now honey. We have to get home soon.” Katie reluctantly waited as her father took out his wallet and pulled out some money to pay the bill for the lunch they had just had. She looked forlornly at the other children gleefully whooshing around on the merry-go-round and wished that she could stay on.

Katie’s mother took her hand and followed her father across the garden towards the parking lot of the restaurant. They reached the car and Katie clambered into the back seat, pouting slightly. As the car pulled out of the parking spot, she suddenly felt the urge to use the bathroom. One glance at the stern look on her father’s face as he drove out onto the main road told Katie that she was better off holding it until they were home.

As they drove down the road, Katie tried to distract herself by reciting the poem they had learnt a few weeks ago in school over and over again:

Solomon Grundy
Born on a Monday
Christened on Tuesday
Married on Wednesday
Took ill on Thursday
Worse on Friday
Died on Saturday
Buried on Sunday
And that was the end of Solomon Grundy

After she had recited the poem for the fourth time, she leaned forward and tugged on her mother’s sleeve, “Mummy”, she said in a soft voice. “Are we almost home? I need to pee!” Katie’s father looked at her through the car’s rear-view mirror exasperatedly and asked, “Why didn’t you go at the restaurant?” Katie slumped back in her seat and didn’t answer. She was all too familiar with her father’s temper and was too scared to say anything else to aggravate him.

They must’ve still been a while from home, because Katie’s father pulled into a gas station that had a small restaurant. Katie’s mother got out of the car and opened Katie’s door. “Hurry up, now!” she said, as Katie scrambled to get out of the car. They walked towards the restaurant which had dark windows and the smell of roasted meat coming from it.

Katie’s mother stopped a man who was standing just inside the door of the restaurant and asked him where the bathroom was. The man looked disapprovingly at Katie and then nodded towards a corridor past a few tables. There was a man sitting at the bar with a glass of a yellow frothy liquid. A couple of tables with a few more people seated, using their hands to pick up pieces of meat and bite into them. Katie’s mother led her down the narrow corridor and then left towards the door with the silhouette of a woman on it. The door opened into a tiny single stall with a wash-basin. Katie’s mother tugged on a toilet-seat cover from behind the toilet and placed it on the seat. “I’m waiting for you outside – hurry up!” she said to Katie as she slipped out of the stall and Katie went in and shut the door.

Thankful to finally have relieved herself, Katie stood up and yanked the flush handle and then turned around to wash her hands in the wash-basin. The hand-drier was too high for her to activate so she wiped her hands on the back of her dress and opened the door of the stall.

As Katie stepped out into the corridor, about to make her way back into the restaurant, a raspy voice behind her said, “Hello, there!” Startled, Katie whirled around and found herself staring up at a man. His legs didn’t seem to be able to support him very well because he had his hand on the wall of the narrow corridor. He wore an old jacket over a t-shirt and a pair of stonewash jeans. His yellow-tinged skin was covered in stubble and his lips were dry and cracked. His curly hair looked tangled and unkempt. But his bloodshot eyes were what frightened Katie the most. His eyes were of an almost translucent quality. His pupils were like two tiny black dots in a sea of semi-transparent green with bright red veins running haphazardly towards the pupils. He stared at her hauntingly, as his lips curled eerily. Katie froze. She felt her heart thumping against her chest but she couldn’t bring herself to move.

From somewhere behind her, another man’s voice sounded, “Hey, Maurice! What’s taking you so long, man?” With his creepy eyes still boring into Katie’s, the man replied, “I’m enjoying the view from here!” He spoke with difficulty, slurring on every second word. As though it had been given permission, Katie’s body began to respond. She spun around but she felt the man grab her arm and whirl her back around as she saw those eyes fixedly staring at her again. They seemed to pierce right through her and she felt her vocal chords let out a blood-curdling scream.

Her mother must have been right at the end of the corridor because it seemed as though she had appeared in seconds. She grabbed Katie’s other arm and pulled her from the man’s grip. As she dragged Katie through the narrow passageway, she turned her head to yell obscenities at the man. Once they were outside the restaurant, Katie’s mother knelt down and stroked her daughter’s face. “I’m so sorry, honey... I’m so sorry”, she whispered, pulling Katie into an embrace. Katie shut her eyes tight but all she saw was the terrifying man’s eyes staring menacingly at her…