The Color of the Sky
Nicolas Poynter Leticia always dressed herself in the color gray. So when winter arrived, the sky thickening and cascading until it filled the city as a fluid, she was greatly camouflaged while walking the streets at night looking for men. Other pedestrians often did not see her until the last moment, if at all, and crashed into her, sending her to the hard, cold sidewalk again and again, until she began hissing like a snake when people came too close to her and did not seem to notice she was there. “I want to be marriod,” she told the men she approached on the streets. The men would mostly ignore her, but sometimes gave her directions to the 3rd Street Marriott. Sometimes they even put her in a cab. Leticia had no idea why she kept being sent alone to the 3rd Street Marriott and would hiss at the porter whenever she arrived there. “No take me that hotel,” Leticia told the driver after again being abandoned in a taxi. The driver, who had no mouth but glass eyes that reflected the damp red city lights, seemed to understand Leticia’s complicated dilemma and recklessly performed an illegal left turn across three lanes of traffic. Leticia grunted her approval. She closed her eyes and when she opened them they were moving through an abyss, the sky encapsulating them, the faint color of it dispersed evenly around them as if they were deep under the ocean. She could feel that they were both circling and rising and the sensation made her hopeful, made her think that maybe she was dreaming and the world was not real after all. When the bridge suddenly appeared in front of her, a layer of brightly lit fog rolling through it like a river, she joyfully clasped her hands together. Leticia had been watching the bridge adoringly from the city and had wanted to walk on it very much, but hadn’t known how to get to it and the people on the street were never able to help her when she asked them for directions. They never seemed to be able to see her or understand her or have mouths. So she happily allowed the taxi to abandon her there at midnight and began moving through the current of fog like a ship, her palms open and extended from her hips like rudders. She was halfway across when she heard the voice. She couldn’t understand the English but felt certain that it was desperate and not speaking to anyone in particular, but instead to the world in general or perhaps to God, and she hissed at it. “Who’s there?” asked the voice. Leticia stepped into a clearing, her dark features piercing out from her otherwise gray silhouette. He was perched like a bird on the railing of the bridge, grabbing a thick metal wire above his head tightly with both hands. “What do you want?” he asked. “I want to be marriod,” she told him exhaustedly, putting her arms on the railing next to his feet and staring across the bay. The sky receded for a moment and the city became visible, framed under a giant moon that glowed an incandescent white, as if it was really the sun and only pretending to be the moon. Leticia gasped. “Embruuujo,” she purred. The man, still gripping the wire, shifted into a seated position. “Why do you want to be married?” “Because I have no somebody... I want it. I want be able to say I am marriod. I don’t want be alone anymore.” “Oh, I don’t know. Being alone is not so bad.” Leticia didn’t believe him and her face wrinkled into a shape that indicated as much. “You want take me home?” She asked him… Sex,” she added in an effort to clarify, pointing at her breasts with both hands. “Me entiendes?... You like girls, yes? No?” “I like girls a great deal,” the man said, slowly putting his feet, one at a time, back onto the deck of the bridge, sinking them into a pool of fog, making it appear as if he had been cut off at the knees. Leticia showed him her face again and this time he gasped. “Embruuujo,” he said to her, mimicking her accent. She turned back to the moon and smiled. How long had it been since a man had made her smile? She couldn’t remember. Her hands instinctively smoothed the sides of her hair. She sensed him put his arms across the railing, like hers, his right shoulder gently touching her left shoulder, but so lightly that she couldn’t really be sure if it was him or the wind or maybe just her imagination. She remained like that long enough for the sky to again obliterate both the moon and the city, making her certain that the world was, after all, just some silly dream she was having. |
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About the Author:
Nicolas Poynter’s fiction and photography have appeared in many publications including North American Review, Citron Review, Chagrin River Review and So it Goes--the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. He is a high-school dropout, a graduate of the Red Earth MFA Program of Oklahoma City University and now teaches physics in South America.
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Nicolas Poynter’s fiction and photography have appeared in many publications including North American Review, Citron Review, Chagrin River Review and So it Goes--the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library. He is a high-school dropout, a graduate of the Red Earth MFA Program of Oklahoma City University and now teaches physics in South America.
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