Different People

When Gilly was young, she lied to her diary. It was not a toy diary. She had dutifully filled several of those already, notebooks in girlish colors, with ostentatious locks and miniature keys.

- Clare Sestanovich

This new diary had a dull-brown cover and no means of protecting itself. It was an object she could imagine becoming an artifact. She wrote in smooth black ink that glittered mysteriously until it dried, and she chose her words carefully, the longer the better. There were some words—squeezed to fit in the narrow space between lines, much narrower than she was used to—that she wasn’t sure how to pronounce. She wrote for an audience. She was twelve years old.

The problem was that her life was uneventful. She had a mother and a father and a back yard, and although she didn’t have a dog or a cat, she had been permitted to have a bird. It had a paleblue breast—she said breast without embarrassment, or tried to, because it was childish not to—and black-and-white feathers that looked like an elegant houndstooth coat. These colors were much better than the bright green and raucous yellow of other parakeets, but there still wasn’t much to write about a bird. In a hundred years, when Gilly was dead, or so old that her skin had turned to paper and all her words to pure, precious truth, no one would want to read about cleaning out the birdcage, no matter how much she had thought about it. Dread consumed her for days in advance of the task; disgust overpowered her as she swept the small, hard pellets into the trash. The bird, released from its cage, sometimes sat on Gilly’s head, its pale, bony feet pressing into her scalp.