room enough

i s s u e: 1

// f i c t i o n

Room Enough
by Phebe Jewell

          Ellie’s hands reach for jars of paint before she remembers. Colors are dangerous. Red and orange stretch her legs, purple lifts her chest and shoulders toward the sky. She swaps her paint brush for a graphite pencil and presses hard on paper. Better to stay behind parallel gray bars, keep herself tiny. A slap from her mother, a glare from her father, and she shrinks to half her size.

          Some days Ellie forgets, and ambles into the sunless kitchen, fingers stained turquoise and tangerine, hands and arms stretched by colors the dark house cannot contain. Those days her mother exiles Ellie to the dank room in the back, a hint of day escaping from a dirty window above her head. Stay here ’til you’re fit to be seen, her mother commands.

          Ellie’s teachers urge her parents to let their daughter take risks. But Ellie knows the drill: curl up into a ball on the edge of the hard plastic chair, avoid eye contact. Eyes down, she counts to one hundred and back while other kids hurl themselves down slides, conquer monkey bars. When Ellie’s teacher leads her to an easel, draping a smock over her tiny frame, Ellie shakes her head. Returning to her desk, she fills the paper with straight lines and arcs, birds flying low over a field, pressed under heavy dark clouds.

          When summer arrives and blue skies erase the dull of winter, Ellie is kept indoors, in case you get any big ideas, her father says as he shuts her door. Trapped, she lies down on the bed, eyes closed. But even in darkness the colors warm her, washing the slate walls marigold and cinnamon, vermillion and topaz. Chest rising, her legs lengthen and shoulders broaden. Lifting her arms, she traces blue green veins under skin. Ellie is so long now her feet dangle at the foot of the bed, her head pushes against the frame.

          It’s the biggest she’s ever grown. Standing up, she crouches so she won’t bump her head against the ceiling. On the other side of her window the fields stretch, shaded by deep forest. Ellie crashes through the stone wall toward the blaze of yellow and green.

          In the gloom of the kitchen, Ellie’s parents look up, startled by glass and brick shattering. They stare at each other, listening for clues. Nothing. They return to their bowls, spooning gray porridge into their mouths in silence. It must have been a sudden wind, shaking the walls of the house.

about the author // Phebe Jewell

Phebe Jewell’s (she/her) work appears in numerous journals, most recently “The Disappointed Housewife,” “Reckon Review,” “JAKE,” “Does It Have Pockets?”, “Bright Flash Literary Review,” “Across the Margin,” “Gooseberry Pie,” and elsewhere. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers for the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for incarcerated women, trans-identified, and gender nonconforming people in Washington State.

Website: http://phebejewellwrites.com