Mrs Metamorphosa’s Emporium

A Flash Fiction by Alison Wassell

Photo by Oksana Zub on Unsplash

I am twelve when my father, returning from a Parents’ Evening where more than one teacher has asked “Who?” observes that I have no personality. Too young to understand that he means the one I have is simply not to his liking or, more specifically, that I am not the sport-loving son he had hoped for, I have no idea how to defend myself against this accusation.

“Never mind,” Gran says. “I’ll knit you one.” She gets to work right away, her needles clicking late into the night, and by the morning my personality is ready. Brightly coloured, multi-textured and stand-out-from-the-crowdish, it appears amazing draped over my bedroom chair, but when I try it on it looks all wrong. Too hot, too heavy, too long in the sleeves, too baggy at the knees, it makes me itch and sweat, and sneeze. Everyone laughs when I wear it to school and asks who I am pretending to be, and by the time I get home it has begun to unravel. I return to skulking in my original, nondescript skin.

“You have to see it, before you can be it,” Gran says. “Show me who you aspire to be, and I’ll see what I can do.” I offer up a girl from school, two years above me, the kind who holds court in the playground, has her classmates hanging off her every utterance, following her trends, turning over the waistbands of their skirts to make them shorter, just because she does, copying her tinkling laugh, the way she tosses back her hair. Gran does her best, but on me the charisma looks comedic. People imitate me, not in a good way, but behind my back, sniggering as I walk by. Gran concedes that her knitting skills may not be up to the job.

She takes me to Mrs Metamorphosa’s Emporium on the High Street.

“You can trade in what you already have in part exchange,” Mrs Metamorphosa says. I start to tell her that I’m only here because I don’t have a personality, but Gran holds up her hand to silence me. Mrs Metamorphosa makes no comment as I hand over my bland, lacklustre offering. Holding it gingerly, the way you might hold a dead mouse by its tail, she takes it through to the back room.

The off-the-peg personalities are arranged alphabetically on rails, using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator.

“In my day, folk were either good or bad,” Gran mutters, as we go through them. Some I reject outright, just because of the label. Executive, for example, makes me think of too stiff, too smart suits and too brightly lit offices, too busy days doing stuff I’m good at but don’t love, no time to stop and wonder why we can hear the ocean in a seashell, nor why giraffes have blue tongues.

Some I consider seriously, holding them up against myself in front of the mirror. A few I get as far as actually trying on. Thinker, at first, feels perfect, but within minutes my head fills with dark clouds of self-doubt and memories of everything that has ever hurt me. Commander sounds like something that might satisfy my father, but the strident voice that comes as part of the package makes Gran scrunch up her face and place her hands over her ears. It causes me to feel so cold I’d need to wear a chunky cardigan with it, even in Summer, and I’m relieved when she tells me to take it off.

“I’m assuming my made-to-measure range is beyond your means, but there’s always the pre-loved option,” Mrs Metamorphosa says, when I have rejected every item on the rails. She takes us through to the rear of the shop, where there is a strange smell that she describes as “experience”, and Gran says is more like stale perspiration. Mrs Metamorphosa takes umbrage and stomps off, leaving us to our own devices.

The second-hand personalities have been flung onto the rail any old how, and some of them have slipped from their hangers onto the floor. It looks as though Mrs Metamorphosa has thought up descriptions herself and written them in uneven letters with a red felt-tipped pen. “Loud and Obnoxious,” “Nice but Dull”, “Tries Hard But Never Quite Succeeds”, “Feckless and Wild”. “Quirky and Creative” is on a mannequin in the corner. It seems like the best of a bad bunch, so Gran helps me squeeze into it. Mrs Metamorphosa begrudgingly agrees that we can have it on a week’s trial, as long as we pay a deposit.

At home, I start wearing odd socks deliberately and eating only purple food – beetroot, red onions, grapes, blueberries. I cover canvases with random paint spatters and pen poems even I can’t comprehend.

“Creative doesn’t necessarily mean talented,” Gran says.

We return to the emporium so often that Mrs Metamorphosa sarcastically offers us a loyalty card.

I’ve never had a customer so hard to please,” she says, emerging from the back room with a screwed up something in an Aldi carrier bag, which she tosses at me.

“This is the only other thing I can offer you. If it’s not right, there’s nothing more I can do.”

I take my last hope out of the bag and climb into it. It slides on smoothly, silk-soft, sweetly scented and strangely familiar. I wrap my arms around myself in a “welcome home” hug.

“This is the one,” I say.

Gran only smiles.

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Author: Alison Wassell is a writer of short and very short fiction from Merseyside, UK. Her work has been published by Fictive Dream, Does It Have Pockets, Gooseberry Pie, Books Ireland, Bath Flash Fiction, FlashFlood Journal and elsewhere. She has no plans whatsoever to write a novel.

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