No. 2 : Color Your World
I know the green of trees. They were a comfort in my long, dry childhood. Leaf after leaf against a strong blue sky, crisp and unapologetic. I know the green of dark summer grass through which the pale praying mantis barely moves. How could something so frightening appear so kind to my little eyes? His insect skin, pale and vivid.
On a cold, overcast day, a girl leans her back against a cypress tree and feels the strips of rough bark through her coat, a coat that matches the sky. Her friends – aren’t they her friends? - rush to the other side of the playground, a fluttering flock of birds flying away from her. She closes her eyes and tries not to cry.
Everything is yellow. The day is yellow, my sleeveless over sized shirt is yellow, dad’s jeep is yellow, happiness is yellow. Summer is yellow too and it shows up as pale streaks in my long long brown hair. The day wears a July’s burn - though - it’s not really a burn but a cozy warmth in which we wear almost nothing.
I’m walking down the hallway to meet my friend Dhara for lunch. I smell wind and leaves. I pass classrooms, people spilling out into the hall, I see tan lockers, I hear the sound of lockers opening and closing. I feel footsteps, I hear people moving echo down the hall. I walk fast, I feel my muscles, strong from track team practices, the angular slant of my hips. Fluorescent lights follow me down the hall into the geometry room. Berkeley grey cool morning slants diagonally through the window into the class, which smells of chalk and desks and math smell. I smell the cold. And I hardly walk into the room and he’s there, luminescent brown eyes. He’s standing with Dhara, looking at math books, and I don’t even see him cross the room and he’s asking me about a geometry final. I hear him say, “Are you in first period?"
I want to be spared the wrecking ball, I want to stay in this place, the best place I've ever lived,
in the best city there is to live, forever. But my Brooklyn haven is a precarious nest because it's
slated for demolition.
My children, who I call the dwarfs, at the end of the day, after I've concocted them three meals, sometimes four, have a habit of asking for warm milk and a platlet of fruit or bowl of dried banana.
We shuffle in the grass. Andrea is close to me, much shorter in the dark. There is the smell of wood smoke among the bare trees, it is on the roof of my mouth. We search but there is no rope to see. We get our jeans muddy.
I definitely wasn’t expecting any of this and had no idea the night was going to take such a turn.
At 5 a.m. I heard the phone ring. It must have been the ring’s tail, because as soon as I heard it, it stopped. My first thought — a mistake. I returned to deep sleep snoring like a koala bear, hibernating. And as my body slowly sagged into to la-la land, I tried to revisit my dream, but alas, it was gone!
I live in Israel, Kate in New York. Since our parents died, my trips there have become less and less frequent. I hadn’t seen my sister in eight years. Suddenly she decided to attend my daughter’s wedding.
It hurts him so to see his love in pain that, to keep him from seeing her, he dream builds a very tall ice palace to keep her wandering spirit away from seeing him, from seeing that there is more to him than he lets his words convey.
How is it that you could make us laugh // even in the most dire of times?
Surely I knew, right? That I should be grateful. That I had something — someone — special sitting next to me? Didn’t I? Surely I appreciated the friend who put her life on hold for me.
“Did you ever imagine that Granny’s old oak table would serve this purpose,” I heard my daughter-in-law whisper to her father as she leaned over to him.
Sunrise at the sacred circle of stones. We have joined hands and now we separate with instructions to find the stone that calls to us. Some one else claims the one I was first attracted to.
I wondered about why our eyes change colors. Climbing up and down the wooden ladder of the ship throughout the night as if between the earth and sky.
You told me once,'
The heart has room for only one Lord'
I lean my face forward towards the tall glass of coffee, my nose fits inside the narrow opening with room to spare. The steam fills up my nostrils making my face feel warm a maybe slightly wet too.
I know my heart will never be strong as theirs and my senses never as clear. But for a moment my neurons get to mirror them, and for a moment I get to be much more than I actually am. I raise the mug to take a sip. It’s when I burn my tongue that I realize: I’m just sitting on a chair.
It was a Saturday afternoon. We were exhausted of and from each other. The room was full of anxiety. I guess it was a normal thing to feel if you were living in a new country, had secretly moved in with your also nineteen year old boyfriend and were supporting both financially with the money your parents sent you to pay for school and cover life expenses for one.
The light changes and off you fly, my body is still in yours. Knee touches knee, helmet cheek on helmet head. We’ve barely met. You pick me up from the station. We throw my weekend bag in the apartment. “Do you want to watch the recommended French movie?” you ask. I hesitate, “Yes!”
He came back to bed, bringing one glass of water for the both of them. She took it, quickly sipping a bit. She had no idea what she was supposed to say. She had no idea how she was supposed to feel. But the water was cold, and asked for nothing in return.
She wakes to the sound of sirens and calls out “Madelyn. Let’s go."
It was May. The garden was dressed in luscious greens and the water of the pool glistened outside. The outer porch had been contained with a screen structure. It kept the mosquitoes away and somehow gave the sensation of separating us from the heavy humidity of the air.
Share your story!
Popcorn is a bimonthly zine. We accept any and all submissions from current and former Sense Writing students. Story length should be 1000 words or less, and inspired through the Sense Writing practice. While every submission will not necessarily be featured in the upcoming edition, we are committed to featuring everyone's work eventually.
Edited by Hannah Sparks
I write this as a sit vigil in a hospital room. The walls are a pale shade of pink—a color known to soothe the seer’s eyes and mind. Yet the color pink is not as strong as my powerful melancholy, which seems to wash my world in grey. His skin is a deep purple against the crisp bleach-white of the sheets, and my eyes are red. But outside a warm, golden yellow glows through the cracks of a pale blue cloud, and the fabled silver lining appears.
Colors are the most basic and definitive descriptor (“Roses are red, violets are blue…”), and often assumed to be universal. But consider that the Japanese language originally had no word for the color blue. It's not that they don't have blue skies or birds, they just don't differentiate between the colors of grass and oceans. A translated description would paint a very different picture.
Animals developed eyes some 600 million years ago, before which color didn't matter. If all the animals of earth developed eyes at different points during evolution, how can we be so sure that my orange is the same as yours or another animals?
If a forest is green in a blind world, does it have a color? Is color so black and white?
As a matter of fact, we do know that the ability to see red is associated with the X-chromosome, and since women are born with two Xs to a man’s X-Y, scientists concur that women are able to perceive a broader spectrum of red than men. If, in theory, everyone may be perceiving colors differently, then how we associate the linguistic symbols for colors with certain ideas or emotions should yield some interesting literary illustrations. We’ll explore this with four stories from our Sense Writers.
“Being Sure,” deals with just this issue—perception vs. reality—but the eyes of Linda Moniz’s protagonist do not fool her even after all these years. Susannah Hardaway’s “Gray Ghost” shows us how a color can be imprinted with a lasting and poignant childhood memory. At one point, the protagonist describes herself as a ghost in limbo, stuck between heaven and earth. Yet, is grey not also a color in limbo, not quite white and not quite black? The repeating use of yellow in Iva Radivojevic’s “Soup” is somehow both appetizing and innocent. And Lynley Shimat's untitled piece is simply palpable and almost synesthetic in its colorful descriptions. In this issue of Popcorn, explore your perception of color in literature because, while colors may just be in our heads, it sure makes our world interesting.