Madly gifted

“Stella!”

As Stella’s ears begin to ring and reverberate, with the sound of her name, ducking behind an armchair and covering both of them with her hands. Yes she hears them. Stella, Stella, Stella. The sound of her mother. Do this, not that. This is the way we do things in the world. Stella! The sound of Lily. Stel, you’re not normal. Are you normal? You’re not normal.

9:35 AM

At the classroom

Miss Jane Locke calls in Mrs. Archibald

“Stella is a madly gifted child, Mrs. Archibald--,” Miss Jane Locke, the teacher said.

Mrs. Archibald interrupts her. “I’m awfully sorry, Miss Locke. Stella is terrible at math and science. She says she needs a tutor, but that’s something, we--me, and her father can’t afford. It’s so hard to make ends meet--”

“--she can draw; her art skills are commendable. And she’s only, what, seven,” said Miss Jane. Mrs. Archibald is pulling on her nerves and she can’t hide the sour expression in her face and the irritation in her voice.

Stella is working on her watercolors and paper. Not too close. But not too far. She was trying her best to listen in on the conversation. Snatching quick stolen glances at her mother and Miss Locke. So quick that they'd never even notice.

“Her art skills? All she ever does is paint. She bought all these expensive artist quality paint--oil, acrylic, colored pencils, that I didn’t know. That her father--”

Miss Locke holds up her index finger, a signal for Mrs. Archibald. “---is a construction worker…” Mrs. Archibald trailed off.

The teacher goes up to Stella, checking on her drawing. “Excellent, Stel. Here, the color should be, moss green, and the elves also green, but another shade. You know that shade?” Stella nods her head. “And add some values.” Again Stella nods her head.

Locke goes back to Mrs. Archibald, who entreats the issuing argument. She cannot believe her ears! Stel, or Stella, madly gifted! Preposterous. Farfetched. The daughter of a bastard. Lily, her daughter, is the one gifted! Cheerleader, long blonde hair and blue eyes. Well, both of them have blue eyes. “Dirty blonde,” Stella would say of Lily’s hair. “Dirty,” when Stella would walk up to her, and touch Mrs. Archibald’s hair. “Dirty.” She was never the one who encouraged ‘poetry’ or the ‘arts’, she doesn’t even know where Stella had been getting all those shit coming from her mouth! All those nonsense, and something about ‘passion--’, which is all Stella’s been blabbering about these last few days. Dreaming. Dreaming. Dreaming. She’s got her head up in the clouds. That one day, she’d be famous. Like Michelangelo or da Vinci. ‘The Masters,’ Stella would say. “Then Master up my ass,” Mrs. Archibald said, aloud.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Archibald, what did you say?”

“None. I didn’t say anything.”

From hereon, we take the story of Stella, a mad child, granted with the gift of creativity from the gods. And as we all know, with madness comes genius. Masterpiece. Insanity. It’s all buckled up in one package. You cannot take one and not take the other. It’s a given.

We take the story of Stella, artist, side poet, and representative of her heart, without slavery to logic and reason, we mold it into, craft it, a story of creativity. How passion breeds such sorrow in the heart; Oh! How it feeds the ego, how it fulfills, how it fills! But before all that, how passion plants itself to the marrow, until the entire organism itself

is subject to it.

Behold.

The story of Stella.