A short story about a girl who wakes up each year fluent in a different language. By Nadya.
Miffy was a normal girl from a normal town in rural England. Everything in her life was ordinary and she never even stopped to think about her own culture. She wasn’t aware of what languages and culture were, she just vaguely knew that the world had different countries with different languages that sounded like melodies she did not understand.
One day, aged 6, she found herself violently vomiting all night. She woke up the next morning as her own self, but fluent in Spanish, living in Spain with Spanish parents. From this moment, she lived on the outskirts of Madrid, could only speak and understand Spanish, had seen only movies in Spanish, only read Spanish, and had only ever seen movies and cartoons in Spanish.
She had no recollection of the Miffy from before; the Miffy from England. Miffy lived this way in Spain for a year, completely sure and convinced that this was how her life had always been, until one night she experienced the same sickness as before, and woke up the next morning in a reality where everything had changed again.
For a year, she had a life in China, with no recollection of Miffy’s two cultures from before. Now, she had only Mandarin Chinese friends and family and could only speak and understand Mandarin Chinese.
Every year, the same thing happened to Miffy, with a different identity and culture each time, until she was 21. At this point, the truth was revealed to her: she was in a video game. During each language and culture, she played a different level: different people who express themselves in different ways, different foods she always ate, different sceneries, different education systems, different music, a different political situation... the list goes on.