LUCY AVERAGE
Lucy Average was just that – mediocre, nondescript, nothing much to look at; bland, boring, plain. Her early years yielded no formative crises, no traumas blighting a smooth transition to adulthood, no earth-shattering events threatening to destabilise an otherwise aimless coast through life. She was born average, lived and breathed averageness, and looked set to remain average for the duration of her time on this earth.
Then,
one fateful day, everything changed. She saw him from a distance at the
debutantes’ ball and her heart, the room, even the world stopped. One held glance between
them as she checked his coat later that evening was all it took to confirm what
she had always known: that beneath her drab exterior lay the soul of a shining
seraph. In that moment, at that given time, the odds were too far stacked
against her, the vagaries of an indifferent class system too cruel for their circumstances
to ever solidify. But Lucy Average had a plan.
A
letter. A simple thing, tailored and crafted precisely for him, hand-delivered
on the brightest of occasions… but not just yet. Every day for the next seventy
years, she would write, erase, redraft and rewrite. Across two centuries, she fashioned
the perfect correspondence, labouring over each dot of punctuation and split
infinitive with the deliberation of an academic five times her standing. ‘The heart as a trophy / the heart in
atrophy’. Such a fine line.
In
the meantime, she played the stock exchange, the roulette wheel, dice and the
lottery, patiently waiting for the right combination of numbers to come up. As
the years went by, lovers came and went, children arrived and departed, but
still her heart belonged to him. Corners blunted, edges softened, the lines on
her face increased, but still she persevered. She wondered, in the midst of
each passing decade, if he wondered too: what path he had taken, what kind of
clothes he wore, whether he ever thought of her. Still, she wrote.
Over
time, the world took its toll on Lucy Average, bringing character and depth to
features which had once seemed to possess neither. Her skin softened and became
sallow, the corner of her eyelids crowed; the edges of her mouth crinkled like discarded
crisp packets where a beaming smile graced her cheeks. Her ashen pallor assumed
a flush of glowing colour: the fullest expression of a life well-lived. She
became, finally, as beautiful and radiant on the outside as she always was
within.
Then
one sunny day, at the ripe old age of 87, she tuned in to see her numbers hit
the jackpot. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 – a rolling series of perfect primes. Handing the winning ticket to a homeless veteran of three known wars, she placed the decisive
full-stop on the letter that afternoon.
Walking
briskly to she knew not where, she found herself carried by a breeze to his
doorstep on the corner of 9th and Broadway, where she found him, an
old man now, struggling with a cumbersome bag of groceries. Relieving him of its
weight, she presented her missive in a quiet gesture wholly devoid of ceremony;
he read it, and melted into a watery puddle on the sidewalk. Average no longer,
a princess among serfs, they lived together then, seeing out the rest of their
days in mutual respect, love and adoration.
And
that is how Lucy Average won the heart of Johnny Perfect.
C.C. January 2012
