A Trophy Atrophy

Image borrowed from Bing

A Trophy Atrophy

Sue wondered what it felt like to be a winner. When she was younger, she used to look in a sort of disbelief at her best friend Ciara's trophies. They were displayed on a shelf in her bedroom that appeared on the verge of collapse from the sheer collective weight of Ciara's achievements. Sue wasn't envious of these trophies exactly. It was more that she was in awe of them, like meteors that had landed from some strange planet she didn't know the location of. Ciara was a champion Irish dancer. Sue had gone along to a competition once, and had sat transfixed as her friend leapt onto stage, her ringlets bouncing as she kicked her legs higher and higher with each a haon do trí. The dancing was impressive, but also alarming. Her friend looked like she was about to kick herself in the face. She wondered if Ciara would win a trophy for that too: Champion Irish Dancing Self-Face-Kicker, 1991.

Sue never won a trophy and over the years she came to accept this as her fate. Those shiny objects were things other people won and displayed on polished wood surfaces; not her. It wasn't that she was devoid of talent or special skills. If you were walking with her in a forest, she could point at any tree and tell you its name in both English and Irish. “Hawthorn, Sceach Gheal,” she would say, or “Ash, Fuinseóg.” Just by glancing at the sky, she could tell when it would rain, so she was never caught short without an umbrella. When she ate soup, she could pinpoint exactly which ingredients it contained – “onion, chicken stock, carrot, potato, celery, rosemary, thyme, sea salt and black pepper,” she would scrunch up her nose and declare – and whether the chef had used oil or butter to fry the vegetables.

She had special communication skills like Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer, except she was the crazy-old-man-on-buses-whisperer. These conversations were never initiated by her, but the alcoholic downtrodden, the down-and-outs, and the outright loons, always knew to plonk themselves beside her, as though alerted by some internal tracking device. Sue could feel the sympathetic eyes of the other people on the bus, but she enjoyed talking to these people. She never listened to music when she took a bus or a train so that they would feel free to approach her. Anyway, why cram your ears and drown out the sounds of movement, when that was all part of the experience of travelling? However, she did bring her knitting with her occasionally. There was no end to what she could knit. Even tricky things like sleeves were no bother to Sue. Clickety clackety click went her needles, knit one, purl one, creating an endless variety of knitted delights.

Yes, Sue was talented, but knowing the names of trees, talking to people on buses and listing the ingredients in soup, none of these things could win you a trophy. This thought occurred to Sue during the Olympics. She wasn't particularly interested in the games, but she was having a coffee in town and the athletics was on the TV in the corner . How strange, she thought, for your one great skill in life to be the ability to run very fast in circles. To spend your entire life practising running very fast in circles so that one day you could represent your country and race against other people from around the world who are also very good at running very fast in circles.

Then again, at least these people were applauded and admired for running very fast in circles. It was their job. And they won trophies. No matter how accomplished she became, she would never be spotted by a knitting talent scout or sent to a Listing-Soup-Ingredients Training Academy, or be asked to represent her country in the chatting-to-crazy-people-on-buses Olympics.

It was just after leaving the coffee shop that she saw it in the window of an antiques shop: a trophy so old that the inscription had faded to a series of random marks. Who had it been awarded to and for what? There was no way of telling. Here and there the gold overlay had faded to a bronze colour and there were small pieces of rust encrusted along the bottom. But there was no denying the satisfying shape of those two handles that protruded from the body of the trophy and as soon as she looked at it, she knew she would have to buy it; as the urge inside her grew stronger to hoist the thing up over her head and wave it there in celebration of every inconsequential moment of every achievement-less day of her life, until her arms would become heavy with a pleasing dead weight.

Maire T. Robinson

Posted over on her site More To Life Than Books
Listed as #20 over on Magpie Tales 42