by Connor Goodwin

Created on: December 21, 2011

            To ensure the girl washed well, her mother would take black marker and fill in her belly button, the idea being she’d have to scrub the whole of her body as vigorously as her belly button.  It was rather ineffective in its designated purpose, but incredibly detrimental in other ways.  No one in the history of human kind had ever more strongly wished for an outtie rather than an innie.  Every Christmas, birthday, July 4th, Arbor Day, occasional prayer, whatever.  This girl always wished for an outtie.  The girl figured the whole of her life would be different if she had just a bit of protruding flesh.  Having early on excluded the possibility of surgically gaining an outtie belly button, she was left to discover other means.  She became a member of the one percent.  One of those weirdos you see walking around one foot on the sidewalk the other plopping itself below the curb on the street, wandering every which way, pausing too much, staring too much.  Not going anywhere, one of those weirdos.  That oddball percentage of the population that only makes up one percent.  They skirt to the edge of that great liberty bell curve of normalcy finding comfort in between those two snug lines, which only they can squeeze into.  She became a social freak, to put it flatly. 

            If a case study were to be done, her belly button would not have been mentioned anywhere.  Her social, psychological, digestive, pedagogical, humorous problems all would’ve been traced back to something like “unstable family background of a mother with extensive drug abuse history and likely heavy drinking during pregnancy, a father prone to depression carrying lists of awful suicides in his back pocket that switches from wallet to wallet when not even his kids grade school pictures make that switch.”  Or something like “confused sexual orientation, and gender identity lead to an experimental creation of self in which the individual manipulated clothes, letting a pink thong sneak out from under black, baggy pants, made ten pounds heavier by chains, and a carabiner holding everything necessary for a human to survive with the addition of everything a female needs not to be raped:  night stick, whistle, pepper spray, bottle opener adaptable as a knife.”

           

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