Tiptoe

I can see everything from up here.

You would think that three inches doesn’t make much of a difference, but you’re wrong. It makes all the difference.

It starts with corn. Ever been in a cornfield? I always thought the ears were up high, higher than my head, but no. It’s the tassels that are high. The ears grow along the stalk, like cocoons stuck to a pole.

Corn always reminded me of teeth.

But it’s the tassels I am thinking about now. Being up high like this, I can see them for what they are. They’re sex! Come here, they say. Come and get me! I have no idea how corn plants go from tassels to ears, but there you go.

Up here everything is quiet.

When I feel taller, I know I can do anything. Be anyone. Today I am Marie Curie. Was she tall, like me? I could Google her, but instead I’ll go on. I am pretty sure that no one has been curious enough about her height (and weight, if you must know), to insert that information on her Wikipedia page. The people who wrote that were probably more interested in chemistry, or maybe just sex. Did Marie Curie get it on in the laboratory?

Say that out loud once. Lab-OR-a-tory. Now say it with a Peter Lorre accent. Good.

Up here, it smells different too.

You would think: cleaner, fresher, purer. Right? But no. Up high is where the “bad air” goes. You have to get low and crouch if you want to crawl through a burning building, for example, and not die from inhaling too much smoke. Get low! Crawl! Crawl or die!

Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to stand up here on tiptoe, thinking I’ll die if I throw my chest out (hi, breasts!) and my head back. It’s hard to not be invisible.

It’s lonely up here.

~~~

This is part of a 30-day foray into the art of ekphrasis, or writing from art. What you read today was 10 minutes of unedited writing from the tiptoe’d feet image you see. Each day I will choose a new image and write for 10 minutes using the image as a starting place. I call the category Phantasm, which according to my dictionary is a figment of the imagination; an illusion or apparition, or archaic, an illusory likeness of something.