Unpredictable

The dictionary kept fluttering, page after page surrendering its words to the hacker’s search, but failed to find a match with my splintered self – numbers and characters slipped between alphabets.

“Don’t make yourself too predictable, Kiara, not because the world is watching, but because the world is always searching for a clean definition, a convenient label, a password simple enough to crack.”

The viral clips, the googlies, the praise, the outrage belong to people thumbing through their private dictionaries, looking for the word that would contain me – Hero, Villain, Genius, Fraud, and failing.

Softly, almost imperceptibly, the second skin settled into place, after I snapped out of myself, and then the next one, and it was not a disguise or a safeguard,

Mutability broke the fraudsters’ tools before the fraud could begin.

Kiara saw them slowly retreat, and reaffirmed her wholeness – she had redefined integrity.

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Six Sentence Stories