I shook my head firmly, “We are going to Alice Springs for heaven’s sake! You are not bringing those gloves!”
I leant across the coffee table to grab my dagger from on top of a pile of books balanced precariously on the far side. Sheathing it I slid it into its home on my fire-proof superhero belt, “I hope whatever’s wrong out there can be fixed quickly.”
“Bu-but I can’t! Not bring them, that is!” My sidekick exclaimed. A hot pink glove lifted off the copy of The Secret Garden my friend had been reading. The finger shook itself violently.
Up until now it had never bothered me that my sidekick was just a pair of pink gloves floating in mid air
“Come off it Damira, you will get heatstroke!” I reached forwards and grabbed the fingers of one glove trying to wrestle it off Mira’s invisible hand.
“NO!” she screamed. The other glove came up and slapped me.
“Why won’t you take them off?” I asked, “And why that colour?”
“I can’t!” Mira replied, tapping me on the head.
“Why not?”
“Well hot pink is my favourite colour, and-”
“Of all the colours to fall in love with you had to choose the one colour that can’t be made invisible.”
“It’s not my fault!” Mira said angrily, “I’m not like this by choice!”
“What happened? How did you come to be wearing them?” In the whole time I had known her I had never once seen her remove her gloves.
“I-, well it’s a long story and we need to be going.”
I sat down on a nearby arm chair, “The desert crisis can wait, the story can’t.”
“Fine. The story starts all the way across Australia on an unknown island in the Great Barrier Reef. I lived there with my parents and siblings and the turtles and other animals as my friends. When I was nine I saw a boat sailing towards the beach, and assuming it was my father back from a fishing trip I ran into the water, swimming towards it with a small pod of bottlenose dolphins.
“Oie there! Look, it’s a fish gal!” A man had shouted, his voice as rough and ragged as his weather-beaten appearance.
Sensing that it would be best to vanish, I faded into the dolphin I was riding as I came close to the boat.
“Can you pass my gloves?” the other person on the boat, a straw haired woman asked.
“Righty-oh,” the man replied, throwing a pair of pink gloves at the woman. They sailed over her head landing in the water and sinking down under the waves.
“What’d you do that for?” she shouted angrily.
Thanking the dolphin for my ride I gasped in a mouthful of air and swum down to grab the gloves. Carelessly I slipped them onto my hands to keep me from dropping them. By the time I had got back to the dolphin the gloves had shrunk on my hands so tightly that they couldn’t be removed.
I’ve tried cutting them off with scissors, I’ve tried soaking them in hot water to try and make them stretch, I’ve even tried running the tip of a red-hot needle down the sides to try and burn the seams away.
I can’t get rid of them and I haven’t been able to make myself visible since then either…” Mira finished with a sigh.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I exclaimed, “I’m sorry I never thought to ask, if I’d known I would have tried to help.”
“Well, we had more important things to fight,” Mira replied.
Her pink gloves floated off into her bedroom, closing the door. A few minutes later a pink kaftan and magenta hijab returned. “That should fool people into seeing me,” Mira commented, pulling on a pair of pink boots. “I’m ready, let’s go save the world!”
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