Anna

Anna enjoyed her job on the high school newspaper. Ever since her fourth grade teacher had introduced her class to the famous Palindrome A man, a plan, a canal - Panama!  Anna had been hooked on words.

She knew her own name was a Palindrome, and figured it was her calling to become some kind of word smith. Anna was the second youngest of five children and never felt like things were fair or equal around her house. Her sister Bess, or Little Ma, was the eldest, and did all she could to not be associated with The Children. Bruce The Musician was second and so devoted to his clarinet that the sound of his practicing totally occupied the hearing of everyone at home. Celia was third and had been designated The Beauty, and so had to prepare for pageant after pageant. And Cleve, The Baby was doted on by everyone. Second to last Anna had no title, unless you counted Oh yeah, Anna.

To make things feel somewhat balanced in her out of balance home, Anna began counting how many times each one of her siblings spoke at the dinner table. So for example, if Bruce had spoken the most with a total of eight times, and Celia had only spoken three times Anna would ask Celia five questions so that Celia's total would add up to the eight that Bruce had set the precedence with. She did this with each sibling, and got to be so quick at it that her game was over before they had finished loading the dishwasher. She never told anyone about her little game, and reveled in the knowing that she alone had outsmarted them.

Anna's job on the school newspaper was designing crossword puzzles, Anagram contests and her first Palindrome Challenge. Most students could complete the crosswords, a few had some amusing Anagrams like The Classroom for School Master and Bad Credit for Debit Card, but no one had entered an answer for the Palindrome Challenge. She had given the starting word Dogma and had thought someone would see the obvious Am God, or even hoped that someone would use Dogma as a starting place and add more words to make a sentence Palindrome. No such luck.


Two more publications went by without an answer and school closed for the Winter break. Anna heard rumors that a new family had moved in to the district from England. There would be a new guy in their Senior class. No one thought much about him until they were all back in classes and met him for the first time. Bob was a tall guy with dark hair and the nicest smile Anna had ever seen.

After lunch one day, she went to check her Inbox for the paper and found a typed sentence that read: Dogma: I am God, submitted by Bob. Not only the winner of the Palindrome Challenge, but how perfect that their names were each Palindromes? Anna could see it all now, they would compose Palindromes together as a hobby and hopefully do so much more together. She sent him a short note, Please me by standing by me please, and asked him to meet her at the newspaper office after school. He arrived with a written note that read: You know, I did little for you, for little did I know you. Anna had finally met her equal.

click here for more from Theme Thursday and this week's prompt: Equal