Swirly Steve
and the Swirling Sturvish
a practice of writing without inhibitions by Wilson’s Writing Worms
Part 1
Steve is in my third grade class. He sits on a donut, he insists on sitting on the donut. It’s a pillow with a hole in the middle and decorative sprinkles around its top.
We said to him, “Steve, why do you sit on that donut?”
He said, “I have to since I broke my butt. My mom got it from the doctor who fixed my butt, but it’s not all the way fixed yet, so I gotta sit here since it makes my butt better.”
We don’t ask about the donut after that since we can tell he is really proud of the specialness of the donut and the attention that it gets him.
Steve doesn’t play with us during recess. Everytime we go outside, he goes for the chalk and decorates the parking lot with swirls. Just all kinds of colorful swirls, big, small, crazy or precise. Swirls that become the tail of an animal, like especially pigs because they have a sweet little curly tail anyway. Swirls that swallow cars and swirls that stick to shadows.
He gets the name Swirly Steve, since it’s nicer than broken-butt donut Steve.
We aren’t supposed to say butt.
After a recess-long swirl session, Steve comes inside with streaks of yellow, red, blue all up and down his arms and legs. It rubs off on us when we sit by him.
‘Did you get a bit woozy that time?’ Momma chuckles.
I look up through my hair, hands on my knees, panting.
‘You have extra heads,’ I say.
She crosses her eyes and sticks her tongue out.
Part 2
Steve, having earned a nickname, began to take his swirls more seriously.
We, the other third graders, didn’t notice, but his family did.
At school, maybe we saw the swirls getting more colorful. Back in our desks, it was more of the same, chalked rubbed off on our sweater, but yes, more color. Green, purple, orange - we had learned the secondary tier of the color wheel.
Lines in his design were more defined, but we didn’t realize.
At home, Swirly Steve was creating mandalas round the mailbox. His mother couldn’t get him inside to eat, wash, sleep, because the mandala was mathematical. Steve was serious and precise about this. Mother was in distress.
One day, we ask him, “Swirly,” while he’s bent over, chalk in hand, concentrating, “excuse us, Swirly Steve,” then he looks up. “What’s in your hand?”
He turns his attention to his palm, lays it open, flat. “Oh, this?” he mutters, disoriented since we disturbed the trance.
We peer into the palm, we see the chalk we expect to see, but there’s something else. Steve pops it off and hands it over. “This is the thing I use, see how the swirls are better now?” We inspect. It appears to be the same we used in class a year ago to learn how to hold a pencil, the oddly shaped rubber grip. It’s big, it fits a whole third-grader-sized hand.
We take turns passing it around. Steve suggests, “Does anyone want to give it a try? Because swirls don’t have to be only mine.”
“My baby loves his bath time, doesn’t he?” Momma giggles.
I stop splashing my toys and look up at her, smiling.
“Yes, and we got all that chalk off,” she murmurs.
All the colors in the rainbow slip and slide into each other on the surface of the bath water.