Brainchild

Here's the start of a short(ish) fiction piece I've been working on that I'm not sick of yet, which is good news.

I attribute the beginning of it all simply to the banality of the everyday. It was impossible for me in that gray suburb to wrench myself free of the damming refuge of discarded newspapers with half-filled sudoku squares, pale chalks used to make hopscotch boards, which the girls from the neighborhood with their straight-parted pigtails would jump on from 3 until dinnertime every evening, realtor signs with fixed grins of women with pearl necklaces and men with striped Oxfords and quickly congealing hair, all crowding up around me with the thick larded air and the brassy water of that gray suburb. I would hold my breath and close my eyes, plunge into the thick of it all and tell myself that when I resurfaced, I would have drifted somewhere more colorful, at the very least. But only when I closed my eyes did I see anything interesting.
The most penetrating color I’ve ever seen in my life, even since leaving the suburb, is that yellow circle that would focus in what felt like the bridge of my nose when I closed my eyes. It was a circle, but organic enough to be a curled up caterpillar some days or a lemony measuring tape other days. I took to walking around with my eyes closed. I would lay in my bed and exit the left side, dodging my nightstand and the slippery magazines that conglomerated in front of my door. My parents subscribed to loads of magazines. They felt that the easily digestible, transient spreads were the “greatest literature of popular culture,” and “most efficacious in displaying the general inconclusiveness society craves,” society including them, of course. They hoped to create a brainchild in me--meaning a brainy child who, with proper investments, would come up with some grand idea one day. I learned to sidle through a narrow space enclosed by invisible walls in the very center of the doorway, thus ensuring that my feet would not collide with slick “literature” and would be all-cleared to wade to the bathroom door, soldiers with toes curled overhead like guns to avoid contact with the scratchy carpet. When I walked like that, with my eyes closed and the arches of my feet tickled by the carpet underneath, feeling the heat of the friction that accompanies barefooted shuffling, I would see the yellow circle. I probably smiled, but I was never thinking about it. I didn’t know I smiled when I closed my eyes until I met Harriet on the brown neighborhood playground.
I was walking, blind as was then usual, underneath the monkey bars when our heads collided. She had been hanging from the crook of her knees when she saw an upside down me frowning wide, bearing down on her. I guess she thought I would change course or something, but I always kept my routes regular, for safety’s sake, like a blind homing salmon. When we both recovered she asked “How can you frown so good? Your face reminded me of one of a clown.” And so I tried to frown, but found that I couldn’t. My unsuccessful contortions must have been amusing, because she started laughing at me. I am fairly vulnerable to laughs. Some people yawn when they see others yawn, and others just from hearing the word. I catch laughing like that. So when Harriet started laughing, I laughed, even though I knew I was the joke. Harriet said “Aha! I can be such an ignoramus sometimes. I was upside down so you weren’t even frowning at all. You were smiling, which isn’t that hard to do.” “Oh. Oh. I had my eyes closed, so sorry for bonking you.” “Do you do that a lot?” “Not really. It hurts.” “No, do you close your eyes a lot? I mean, besides sleeping.” “I guess so. I like seeing the inside of my head.” “Wait, is that you see when you close your eyes?” “Of course.”