Blue

I: Three

Dark and chill was the solemn cell that we were positioned inside. The shades were drawn across windows like arthritic eyelids, allowing no light to enter from the dazed streetlamps outside. All was quiet beyond the threshold of our pen, the adults past the dimly illuminated doorway either unconscious in their vomit or fully sedate with a needle pressed inside one arm. The floor we slept upon had been stripped of carpet after it had been set ablaze by careless marijuana rolls, baring the skeleton of concrete to our cheap cotton pajamas (yours were Superman, mine were X-Men). The Friends were not coming to play with us tonight and we had been instructed by barbaric motions of hand to claim repose. We could scarcely see through to the ugly little room with the lemon-colored walls, as it was lit by a single swiveling lamp on the floor. Silhouettes littered the murky lighting like mountains that had collapsed into valleys, indistinguishable from one another. You curled against me on an old sarong (which was our comfort-zone due to its bright colors and soft tassels) and I tutored you in fearlessness. Mama knew not how to hold without dropping, nor Daddy how to smile without the wire framework of heroine sewn into his mouth like a scarecrows’ leer. So I held you, beautiful, and you did the same for me.

You never uttered your parents’ names when you trembled, for they were syllables that meant ostracism and neglect. You spoke with a tongue younger than your age yet I understood every word which you relayed. I taught you my name and you told me yours, and we smiled at one another in the dawn hours as our fingers intertwined in trust. I told you tales of threads marching to glory and you wove me in your simple questions. How, what, when, where, why? I tutored you in all that I could, but my capacity was limited with such a shrunken husk of existence strangling my every breath.

You knew no different and nor did I, and yet still instinct whispered impulses of trepidation when Daddy swayed in searching for his second stash. His boot left a little dark cleft in your side when he stumbled and I traced it with the tip of my nose. I called it the moon and you the sky, for this made you smile like the sun coming home. For all his shortness of attention a child knows when he has been wronged by the unfortunate circumstances of life and human defect. The animal hunger that begged for crackers clawed our bellies and we filled ourselves on dust and stories. Agony is not a subject we learn in school, and we discovered it far too early. Mama, Daddy, and The Friends could not hear my gentle words for only your ear was small and near enough to cup them. I sang to you of wordless things, ghosting kisses across your ripe cheeks when you sniffled. I did not know precisely how to help you, but I knew that I must try. I was born to love you, beautiful.

Mama was sometimes called Cheryl, but we did not address her thus. You spoke to her in wounded cries and I glowered in silence when she turned aside. Fractured words tumbled from your pale lips like shot doves but she cringed and ran with her infinitely longer legs. We studied her when she had taken something that made her happy, relishing the proximity as she bent and told us silly things that she dreamt. She must have been beautiful, long ago, for the fine structure of her cheekbones and the dull remainder of ice-colored eyes was the scaffold of someone with a glorious twinkle to her features. I had her long, matted brown hair that you curled in your fist when we slept and violet eyes like Mama’s nicest Friend, Luke. You asked me why this was, once; why your eyes were blue like Mama’s but mine were not. We shared our freckles but nothing else, and you told me that you hoped I would be kind like Luke. I was kind to you, beautiful, I always always was.

Daddy frequently neglected to feed us for days at a time while Mama was no better. With the residue of tenderness she thrust stacks of Saltine’s at us for supper, Grape juice for lunch. Breakfast was an unknown feast. You always got more than I did, but that was alright. I wanted to give you the world and if that meant three crackers, so be it. There was a tall thing in the lemon-colored room that emitted cold and smelled of rank food, and when Mama and Daddy dozed or left us to Luke’s care we crept toward it in search of rations (your tummy hurt, you whimpered, and even my hugs could not make it better). I tried to reach the freezer for you… but I just wasn’t tall enough yet. My toes were short and my arms so frail and the distance yawned on further than my scope of motion. You cried and I held you, as I always had, until you slept with your wet nose against my neck. I promised that I would grow, beautiful, if you would do the same.