Larger Than Life (Novella) by Jodi Picoult

Author:Jodi Picoult [Picoult, Jodi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Contemporary Women, Literary, Sagas
ISBN: 9780553392104
Google: yXYZBAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2014-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

One day when I was seven I came home from school to find that my mother had redecorated my bedroom. My shelf of stuffed animals was gone, replaced with all the books on math and science she had used in college. The small table where I had tea parties for my dolls had likewise been cleared, and was now a laboratory—covered with a broken toaster, the guts of an old desk phone, a screwdriver, a wrench. But the jewel in the crown was a microscope, complete with preprepared slides. There was fiber and blood and cork. Salt crystals.

“Take a look,” my mother said, showing me how to peer into the microscope. She slipped a slide into place—the small brown fleck that was onion skin, stained with iodine.

I gasped and jumped back from the eyepiece. Up close, that little sliver of nothing became a wall, each brick a cell surrounded by others. “What do you see?” my mother asked, her voice falling like a secret into my ear.

“It looks like cars,” I told her. “Stuck in traffic.”

She laughed. “Does each car have a driver?”

“Yes, a brown dot.”

“That’s the nucleus,” she told me. “It’s like the command center for the cell. And it’s floating in fluid called cytoplasm. And the cell membrane, that’s the brown circle around each one.” She watched me marvel over each slide and then, abruptly, said it was time to set the table for dinner. “Make sure you put everything away neatly,” she told me. “That way it will last.”

But I didn’t, because I was using the microscope every free moment I had. Magnification was a miracle to me. I wondered what I was missing with my eyes, just going about my day; I couldn’t believe that some scientist or doctor hadn’t invented contact lenses or glasses that allowed us to look at our surroundings as if they were underneath a microscope at all times. I began to regard the world differently. Simply because I couldn’t see something didn’t mean it wasn’t there. I had dreams where I opened my eyes and saw everything larger than life—magnified ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. I could look at any organism and know what made it behave the way it did, because I could scrutinize what lay hidden to ordinary people. I imagined this was what it felt like to be psychic.

About a week after I got my microscope, I was itching to see more than the slides that had come with it. I ran into my bedroom after school to find my mother reshelving all the books I’d left open specifically to the pages of organisms that I hadn’t yet seen under a microscope—mold and strawberries and hair cells. “This room is a disaster,” she said, frowning. “Didn’t I tell you to clean up?”

“Please,” I begged, taking the books out of her arms, hoping to tamp down her anger. “Can you teach me how to make more slides?”

I thought for a moment she was going to walk away.

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