This month the fiction staff has selected a work of flash fiction by Ruth Joffre as our February feature. “A Girl Defies the Laws of Gravity” captures a moment of developmental incongruity, as an unnamed girl adapts to a radical new condition of embodiment: weightlessness. Joffre’s exacting prose observes the particular facts, without drawing inferences about the phenomenon. Instead, it’s the attracting force of a fellow girl that grounds A Girl; in describing a state that is at once uncomfortable and inelegant, she reveals the hidden extra dimensions of their shared world: once the pain stops, it’s like you’ve left your body. – The Editors and the Fiction Staff
A Girl Defies the Laws of Gravity
One night, in freshman year of high school, gravity loses hold of her, and her body comes unstuck from her narrow twin bed. She floats up toward the ceiling, into a galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars that her mother helped tack up on her fifth birthday. She has been watching television, streaming it on her phone, and as she drifts up her grip on the device loosens and her earbuds slip from her ears. As her back hits the ceiling, the main characters in her show kiss for the first time, sweetly and softly, and she watches from high above her bed as they engage in their first hesitant sexual encounter. Her mother finds her there in the morning, floating. Whenever she tries to push herself down, her body drifts back up again, and she has to stretch her arms out to avoid bumping her head on the ceiling. With the help of a bowling ball tied around her waist, like an anchor, she trains her arms and leg muscles to tread air. This permits her to go outside without floating away, like a balloon. In all, she misses three weeks of school just getting used to the situation. It attracts a lot of attention from boys, particularly older boys, and she’s careful never to wear skirts around them. Instead, she wears slacks and heavy boots that help weigh her down, and in the afternoons, while her classmates pile onto their busses, she floats out to the football field to gaze longingly at the grass as she waits for her mother to pick her up. One day, a girl on the track team catches her hovering around after practice. This girl is tall and thin, her face flushed with exertion, and as she speaks she peels the hair tie off of her ponytail and lets her sweaty hair hang loose. The track star asks the girl what it’s like (if it’s anything like flying), then describes how it feels when she runs: how somewhere after mile five the pain stops, and it’s like she’s left her body, like her feet aren’t even touching the ground. Hearing the runner say this, the girl feels something inside of her sink, and gravity pulls her down to Earth. After seven months of disuse, her legs can no longer support her full weight, and she crumples into the track star’s arms, clutching at the smooth, lean muscles of her back.