Cindy watched, and Cindy waited.
Cindy was watching from the second floor of the house, out her bedroom window. Cindy was waiting for the snowball fight to start.
“You’re too little,” Rob had told her, and he hadn’t meant that.
“You’re a GIRL,” Charlie had told her, and he HAD meant that, and so had Rob.
“It’s for the best,” her father had said, without looking at her (he couldn’t look at her without not looking at the newspaper). “You could get hurt.”
“It’s alright,” her mother had told her, in that specific way that meant it wasn’t, but she understood and was sorry about it. “Snowball fights aren’t much fun anyways. Just slush in your shirt and cold down your neck.”
Cindy had already experienced slush in her shirt and cold down her neck because Rob and Charlie had thrown her in a snowbank before when she was being irritating, and she’d really liked the idea of having a chance at doing that to somebody else.
***
“It’s a very nice… something,” Cindy’s teacher told her. “But it’s not really proper for show-and-tell. It’s just a cereal box.”
“I made it better,” said Cindy. And she’d used scissors and markers and a few leftover stickers from Christmas to do it, too, turning it into a jack-o-lantern mixed with a spiderweb mixed with a snowflake, because Halloween was her favourite but it was winter now. It had taken some careful destructive thought, particularly when her mother had found her using the wrong scissors – the big, sharp kind.
“Well, that’s all well and good, and you’ve done a fine job. But maybe next time you’re making something better, try beginning with a different something.”
“Did I do it wrong?”
“No, no, you did it properly. You did a very good job with your canvas. But I bet you could do an even better job with better materials. A cereal box is just a little… mass-produced.”
***
Cindy had offered her brothers a snowball, as proof of her sincerity and drive.
“This isn’t really a snowball,” said Rob. “It’s all uneven and lumpy.”
“This is garbage,” said Charlie. “Look at how it just falls apart – did you even pack this? She didn’t even pack this. Did you just squeeze a handful of snow until it went hard?”
“You’ve got to roll them – like this, see?” said Rob, polishing the soft snow between his mittens. “Then it’s a proper snowball. Now it’ll hit what you throw it at.”
“Yeah, and it’ll stick together long enough to actually GET to it. This was garbage. Half of it’s just crust – you need to take softer stuff and pack it until it TURNS hard, look! Don’t you know anything?”
And Cindy watched, and Cindy waited.
***
“What’s ‘mass-produced’?” she asked her mother that night, as her homework was packed up.
“Oh, it means to make lots of something all at once in a factory, like I did during the war,” said her mother.
“What does it make?”
“I made bomb casings, but mass production can be anything as long as it’s being made in big batches. Like cars, or coats, or those cookies you wanted me to buy last week. As long as there’s lots of them and they’re all the same.”
“Oh. So it’s not special?”
“It’s a way of making things that are… sort of the opposite of special, yes.”
“Oh.”
***
She had gone inside and moved a chair from the dining room (quietly, because she wasn’t supposed to) and stood on it (VERY quietly, because she REALLY wasn’t supposed to) and reached up, up, up into the freezer where her numbing fingers quested and poked and prodded until they touched a slippery, plastic frame, brittle with cold and filled with cold little weights.
Then she brought them up to her bedroom.
And Cindy watched, and Cindy waited.
***
Just before bed, when her mother’s hand had just left the switch and the dark was new and fresh, she finally found the question. “Is there a way to make things that are special?”
“Of course,” she said, and Cindy’s eyes could hear her smile.
“How do I do that?”
“You already do it every day, sweet-pea. From everything around you.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
Cindy fell asleep fast. The thought followed her into it.
***
And Cindy watched, and Cindy waited, and Cindy AIMED, and just as Rob and Charlie finished shaking hands and turned their backs on each other to walk back to their forts she let fly and dropped a single, perfect, fresh-from-the-freezer ice cube from the cheap little plastic tray at her side directly down the back of Charlie’s neck.
Yes, thought Cindy as the slush flew – along with the odd fist and some VERY odd words – and repainted the back yard in a gorgeous, dizzying swirl of frigid meltwater and bitter acrimony. Yes, given the proper preparation and context, you can make art come from anything. Even from the mass-produced.