Color

It’s raining outside. I’m busy fingerpainting, but I keep getting distracted by the roar of thunder outside. The sound interferes with the rumbling bass coming from my speakers until all I can hear is a booming heartbeat. I’m lost in the colors dripping from my fingers, dripping down the canvas. Rainbows splatter all over my clothes. I love it. It makes me breathe faster. My arms ache and I move them faster. It smells metallic and sweaty and kind of muddy as some of the rainy air drifts through the window. The rain is making rivers down the glass and my fingers are making rivers down the canvas.

The phone rings. For a minute, I don’t understand it. It’s something from another place.

The phone rings again. The caller ID screams at me in pale blue letters, sterile letters, KRIS.

I step towards the phone. It rings at me encouragingly. I look at my hands helplessly. The rainbows climb wetly up to my elbows.

The phone rings twice more and then shuts up. The song ends and then all I can hear is the rain pattering and thudding and crashing outside.

Dimly, I go the bathroom and wash my hands. Rainbow swirls down the drain. The water runs inside and outside and trails down my arms. When I’m done, I go to the phone and try to call Kris back.

He lets it ring a good long time before he picks up. “Hello,” he says calmly. He was always patient.

“Sorry,” I say immediately. Looking at my painting across the room, it looks less magical. The colors crust up like old blood and sit staunchly against the canvas, bleeding slightly into brown. The thunder murmurs incoherently and then settles down again.

There’s silence on the other end. Something’s rustling. “It’s all right,” Kris says at last. “Just wanted to check up on you.”

I glance out the window. It’s only noon. The clouds have turned the sky too dark. It’s nighttime. “Why? What’s up?”

“How’s your dad?”

“He hasn’t come back.” I look down at my clothes. The ancient jeans are speckled in rainbow. It’s all over me and it will never go away. I can feel the color leaking into my being, every little particle burning through the skin and into my soul, like tiny meteors pelting through the stratosphere into the earth and embedding there, mixing into the natural rock like perfect invaders.

“You all right?” The crackling sound continues over Kris’s end. Then he breaths out and the static rushes over the earpiece at the same time the thunder starts up for another long growl.

“Are you smoking?” I change the subject. Tokyo Police Club comes on my stereo. Their music dampens my senses, and I turn them off. Suddenly, it’s too quiet. The rainbows glare at me in the dim lighting of my room and the lightning.

“Yeah, I am.”

“What’s that crackling?”

“The letters.”

He’s been getting nothing but letters from his mother. Ever since she found him doused in rainbows. It was my fault. It was raining then too. I loved to fingerpaint.

“James?” His voice cracks, just barely. He lets out another wavering breath. I can almost taste the smoke coming from the mouthpiece. I can’t breathe. The paint is all dry and flaking on my nails. The rainbows.

“I’m here.”

“It’s been a month.” Sensing he needs to elaborate, he adds in his own deliberately slow way, like he’s savoring the words like he always does, “Since the last letter.”

He savored the words I told him last year. When the rainbows rained from my fingers with thunder.

“She probably just hasn’t had time, Kris,” I say. I’m not the type to be rational. We both know it. He always was the one who knew, who had a sense for these things – who told me, “No” when I wanted to do something stupid. He told me “No” until it really mattered.

“She probably hasn’t had time,” Kris echoes, and then there’s another long pause. He breaths out twice. He didn’t smoke last year.

It hurts when he trusts me. I’m all he has and I hate it. He has to cling to the person who cost him everyone else, because I’m all he has left.

“I love you,” he rasps at me.

I stare at my hands. Little rainbows peer from the deepest creases in my palms. Little bits of glory that couldn’t be scrubbed away in the rain. There’s a quick burst of light from the windows and then a heady, instant roar, loud enough to shake my core.

I left my paints open.

“All right, Kris,” I say. “Okay.”

“Really.” He sounds like he really needs to say this. He sounds impatient. It’s how I know he’s about to do something bad.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” I say quietly. My own voice seems washed out to me amongst the roars and the determined hammering of rain on the windows, but Kris hears me. He always hears what I’m saying, even when I’m not saying it.

“I’m outside. I’m in the lobby. No, I’m in the bathroom – I can’t smoke in the lobby. James.”

“Put the cigarette out.” I rub my hands hopelessly on my jeans. Bits of rainbow fleck off onto the floor. They’ll never come out. They never came out of the shag carpet at Kris’s house, when he rolled through it and left beautiful rainbow trails, running from his mother’s umbrella as it came down after him on winging shrieks. The water had rained down on the two of us indoors from that swinging weapon, onto my bare skin, and it had felt so cold and so like beautiful terror.

“Are you going to come up?” I ask Kris. I can’t breathe. My breath is a whisper.

Something clangs. The only thing I can think of that clangs in bathrooms is the trash. The rustling suddenly stops.

“Yes. Yes, I will.”

Then it’s quiet. I can hear him breathing shallowly on the other end. The telltale quiet rushing of air over his cell phone as he walks. He always walks so fast, too fast. I’m sure he walked. I’m sure he’s wet. I’m sure he’s leaving trails of water after him everywhere he walks.

“Kris?”

Faintly, he says, “I can’t find the door.”

“From the elevator? To the left.” My voice is so feeble. The window cracks open suddenly, horribly, banging off of the wall and leaving a crack in the hotel wall. Rain crushes in through the space. It strikes the canvas. The colors run.

There’s a knock on the door. The only noise is the roar of thunder.

I can’t move.

Rainbows drip down onto the carpet and spread like rivers.

-- The end

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