story: Anna's Crumbs

Anna's Crumbs

By Kim Nowlin - Kimnowlin@Hotmail.com

Anna was made from scratch. She was never finished, and was constantly being remade, over and over again. It took her twenty-eight years to discover that she had been created incorrectly, that something in her was off. Anna was like a yellow, fluffy birthday cake with crumbs that had fallen off and holes dipped in where fingers had probed, slopped over with a decorative coating of rich and creamy vanilla frosting. Occasionally, when her lumps became visible, Anna would find some edible flowers and confetti to slap over her mistakes, to keep her looking like the symbol of delight that she desperately tried to resemble.

It had begun to seem unfair to Anna, that with all the expensive frosting and her time spent self-decorating, that she did not turn out just as she wished she should. She had spent years adding to herself, trying to make herself more interesting, sturdy, self-reliant and attractive. But as she reached her peak, where she found that she could not add much more to her collection, Anna found supreme disappointment in the realization that she never truly wanted a collection to begin with. "Why," she would ask herself, "do I have to become someone for everyone else?"

Anna had grown up in the suburbs, in a slightly non-descript tract home, with suburban values and non-descript friends. The first of her many best friends was, however, different. She was named, Jennifer German. It had seemed silly to Anna, that Jennifer's parents hadn't changed their last name, since they were in fact German. It was just all too funny to Anna's seven-year-old self. Jennifer was innocent and giggly and Anna became that too. The would spend their after-school hours designing Barbie's hair and arranging puffy stickers in their sticker books.

The Germans celebrated Advent, which to Anna meant, opening little doors of a cardboard, Christmas scene, finding chocolates to split for 24 days. The family was so different from Anna's. They were quiet and proper and stacked their records in the living room. On special occasions, Jennifer's Grandmother would baby-sit. To Jennifer and Anna, this meant there were at least two hours of uninterrupted goofing off with no penalties. Grandma German only spoke German, and therefore did not speak too much. This came in handy every time she played guardian, but once. The time that Anna had watched Jennifer's instructions on how to flip over the top of a bunk bed, Anna did not realize that you must hold on to the frame, not just the blankets and fell nose-flat on the hardwood floor below. The comforting words of Es ist okay liebes, simply did nothing to warm Anna's heart or cure her bleeding nose.

Long after the innocent years of her friendship with Jennifer, Anna searched her way through friend after friend, looking for the balance of peace and genuine happiness that she knew with her first grade companion. With each year, friends and acquaintances, just as Anna did, became complicated and diluted. Female friendships were so much harder than romantic relationships. When she got to know her boyfriends well enough, she could let them know when they did things that bothered her and she could try her best to change the unappealing sides of them. Getting that involved with a girl would require so much delicate egg walking that Anna never let her friendships get that far.

Each year she would find the best friend for those two semesters and perhaps a summer that would best match Anna's current likes, hobbies and humor. She spent her college years with friends who enjoyed discussing similar theories and watching the same movies, shopping the same stores, but never anyone memorable.

Spending the middle and second half of her twenties creating the image she had intended to, Anna became well versed in the art of "smoke and mirrors." With a job that everyone would compliment, as Art Director for a major advertising agency, she found true misery in Monday through Friday hours, but slight delight in the compliments from new acquaintances. She had become a master of knitting, scrapbooking, yoga, French and pastry baking. It was a Friday afternoon, two weeks before Anna's birthday and one week before her boyfriend of six months planned to propose that Anna would quit her job with ten minutes notice, go home to throw away her knitting needles and let herself die in her garage.

Something lovely inside of Anna had snapped the hot August afternoon, and it was then that she decided there would never be enough time left in her life to be beautiful. There were always too many new things to learn and become good at. Too many people to show her presentational charm off to and not enough to see straight through it, into the hole that was widening within her. The more she collected, the more Anna became crowded. Her thoughts and passions were drowned in self-inflicted responsibilities and attempts at completing the self-portrait that she thought should have been done by now. After she pulled into her two-car garage and closed the door, Anna's cake stood no longer. There would be no more bland kisses with her lover, no more Range Rover to continue leasing, no endless reading of Women's magazines. Her chunks of vanilla patchwork were melting away, leaving a mound of moldy cake to quiver into sleep. As she began to nod off in her toasty, pungent garage, Anna felt satisfaction in the one deed she had done solely to impress herself and no one else. She longed for Jennifer to sit in the passenger seat and sweetly sleep along side of her. As she gently prepared herself to die, Anna whispered, "Es ist okay liebes."

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Bio: Previous publishing history: Nov/Dec issue of Farmhousemagazine.com Essay: "Character"