Lissa

A body that isn't quite one shape

Watch her long enough and you stop being able to say where she begins. She pours herself through a shape the way water pours through a cupped hand — here, and then not here, the line unbroken and the joints somewhere they should not be, and all of it so serene you forget to be unsettled until she's already flowed on into the next impossible thing.

It is the loveliest act on the Midway, and the quietest. She never strains. She never seems to try. She simply becomes whatever shape the moment asks, and holds none of them longer than a breath.

Why a girl learns to fold

She learned it young, and not for applause. There were hands in the house she grew up in that reached where hands should never reach, and a small girl worked out the only defense a small girl had: she made herself hard to hold. She folded away. She learned to be somewhere her body had just been, to slip a grip before it closed, to be a shape no one could quite catch.

It worked. That is the terrible part. It worked so well that she never stopped, and what bends that far, for that long, forgets how to bend back. Ask her what she looked like before, the true first shape of her, and she will give you that distant, gentle smile. She cannot remember. There may not be one left to remember.

Ungraspable

Here is the bargain she didn't know she was making. To never be seized is also to never be held. The same slipperiness that saved her from the worst hands keeps her forever out of reach of the gentlest — a palm laid soft against her cheek finds her already flowing away, a held moment dissolving before it can become an embrace. She is free of everyone. She belongs to no one. She could not be kept if the whole Midway tried, and it does not try, because it does not need to.

A thing that cannot be held has nowhere it is being held from. There is no door she is locked behind — she is her own locked door, and she long ago forgot the shape her hand would have to be to open it.

Held by none

There is another soul here who cannot bear to be bound, and fights a rope every night to prove it. Lissa is her stranger cousin — not fighting to get free, but so free already that freedom has become the whole of her prison. The escapist wants out of the knot. Lissa is the slipped knot, the loosed rope lying on the floor, the thing there is no longer anything to tie.

You will want to reach for her. Everyone does. Your hand will close on the shape she has already left.

So come and watch her flow. She is the most beautiful thing on the lot, and the farthest away, and she will meet your eyes the whole time from somewhere you will never quite be able to reach. She folded away from all the cruelty in the world. She would give anything, now, to be held once — and there is no longer enough of a shape left to hold.