"Yellow" from synesthesia

She’s his best friend’s girl, he says, former addict and anorexic; she looks good in just bones. Pinpricked crevices between her toes, she’s awful anxious to show ‘em with those cuticles painted pink. Her bath robe is always between one-half to 5/8th open, but I’m pretty sure she has yet to notice, and the protruding ribs and razor-sharp hips, I would be inclined to say, have never looked so good.

He’s a medical miracle with those flapping gums, a real humdinger, a medical anomaly to shock the docs, the folks back home. They’re all over the place as the ’72 Chevy ejects sparks into the atmosphere, like shooting stars, like fleas jumping on the back of a dead Great Dane. He says that he just wants to see her for a minute or two, to provide a place where she might rest her head and be at peace.

You should come, it’ll be a blast, you should see this place, there’s never been one like it, I swear it. C’mon, c’mon, really, there’s no reason to worry. It’s only an hour drive, we’ll back, sitting in these same chairs before the day’s over, chatting up the good old times we had at Marie’s.

As brakes squeak, squeal, squawk, there’s a cloud of dust that clears and settles and comes to rest on an old crone that waves on the porch. She doesn’t seem to mind the dust. She sits on a can of paint thinner, marked 30 in red, that props the door open, better than the neon signs glowing a world away.

It’s a winner, he says, he’ll be back in a bit or an hour. He crosses the threshold with its taciturn cracks chock full of grime and grit, crossed a million times over by the local meandering philanthropists that – after a long day of giving rations and lessons on sexual protection – enjoy all the natives have to offer.

Her body was a rail and clothes hung from her bones. The face was borrowed from magazines and newspaper clippings of a fanatic spouse, with glib and knowing smiles with teeth without spaces, skin without pores.

She’s a machine, he says.

In the room, upstairs, second from the left, her mechanical words rekindle his heart’s hearth, creating sparks like his ’72 Chevy, setting his body ablaze in passion and poison. His own attempts at romance are futile, phrases flubbing against an iron corpse, and you can’t strike fire on iron. She paints their body in colors, in reds and whites, browns, whites, and speckled with the remnants of a prodigious unborn progeny. She works like a painter, painting paints on painted flesh (might have been souls if they had ‘em). Cheeks were done up with blush, lips moistened never once dry, a stretching of certain body parts toward God.

She attempts to instill a sense of adventure in the brief intermissions with mixed up stories she’s heard once or twice before (and forget that she already knows him):

“But with the loss of conscious thought, so too was the voice lost in a sea of technology and alcohol, smelling strongly of cheap whiskey and typewriter ink. It dropped like a stone into the oil, lighting fires in the waves and blackening the lungs of the forefathers that drifted nearby like great sea lions, tusks bared, tooth and nail ready to defend the precedent. They barked. And snarled. And within corpulent bodies, there was a stifled glow, like a sunrise seen from beneath a stone, barely noticeable from where we watched in a tub miles and kilometers away off in the distance.”

(He slips his tongue within the separation of her radius and ulna, sweeping dirt into the sheets).

“The candle maker wept, a sorry sight we all agreed. His tears tore apart the plaster sinews of our impromptu sea-faring vessel, and as the politicians and gulls overhead were burst into flames, we, our tub included, took on oil and disappeared forever, awash in the sea of technology and alcohol."

(He hadn’t seemed to notice that the story had ended.)

On the dusty sheets, she recalls her history, a terribly interesting situation, she explains. Or was and perhaps still is. When she went to the doctor when she was a little girl, sugars and saccharines and Reds 5-30 were the only things that could make her smile, and show her teeth, and let the doctor peer down her throat, and make the tear ducts parched. Daffy Duck and Tasmanian Devils, beating each other into submission on her arm only offered the most basic of fleeting conciliation, more comfort and reflections of battle scars than incentive to smile. But now she likes the needles, she says.

He turns his face to face hers, eyes squinting through a veil of methamphetamines and barbiturates and various depressants, licks his lips to make the words come easier. It’s not before he’s repeated himself a few dozen times before she’s able to make a coherent whole of the multitude of syllables and phonetic aberrations. This is about as much as she (and I, later facing imbibed explanations) is able to pull from his words:

Won’t you come away, though I sincerely hope that you won’t mind driving with someone who has a warrant out for his immediate arrest or execution?

She’s hesitant at first, but is convinced by a length of rope, as it’s passed and looped across her narrow frame. The lanterns that hang in her eyes she tries to relight, as they trot down the stairs and out the door, but it’s been too long since they have shown brightly.

They get in the car, playing a role-playing game, he says through teeth clinched too tight, of kidnap-the-whore-against-her-will-beneath-a-dusty-sun-and-the-haunting-eyes-of-her-mother-who-sits-in-front-on-a-can-of-paint-without-saying-a-word.

It’s a hundred and degrees outside, and I don’t mind sacrificing the talk of turbans, towels and Talibans for the cool breeze that makes a mess on the floor of his ‘72 Chevy pickup truck, silting with sand and motor oil. She speaks softly through the gaps in her teeth, lips chapped and blazed, trying to remember how to pray.

We’ve already ridden into the sunset, a trio of madmen and addicts, when her mother stands to report the loss of her investment.





Fiction is dead, sometimes.