Jennifer O'Grady

Occasionally he wakes, finds the cool cube of his room delirious with colors: blaring daffodils and rigid roses, petals a soft, translucent red like the inside of an eyelid. By the window, a clock's expressionless face near glossy skins of magazines, a telephone the color of frozen milk or silence, the color of old. He is melting, his bones grown paper-light, they travel over the bed's pale hills, the woman who's come to wash him. The ceiling is a landscape bleeding white as he floats through the muted winter sky, a boundless symbol of nothing. The woman draws the blind.

Adrift in the liberating, late light of August, delicate, frivolous, they make their way to my front porch and flutter near the glassed-in bulb, translucent as a thought suddenly wondered aloud, illumining the air that's thick with honeysuckle and dusk. You and I are doing our best at conversation, keeping it light, steering clear of what we'd like to say. You leave, and the night becomes cluttered with moths, some tattered, their dumbly curious filaments startling against my cheek. How quickly, instinctively, I brush them away. Dazed, they cling to the outer darkness like pale reminders of ourselves. Others seem to want so desperately to get inside. Months later, I'll find the woolens, snug in their resting places, full of missing pieces.

A gold box of Latin words rests in a dazzling, fanciful field someone raised to life, lavishing flowers with untraceable roots, histories too distant to discern, upon skin-pale, palm-sized vellum. Imagine the one who did this, lost in dwindling light, a trembling flame and painstakingly lovely colors: blood red, violet, heavy yellow and fierce, unnatural green. Framed like a window to the artist's heart, the mother and child, uncomprehending men offering what they can: the infant touches a tiny, gold-leaf casket. All around him the dark, heraldic blue of angel winds, night sky, her veil. And below him, you can see the word God printed over infinitely careful erasures.

The long road south, the pavement flat and black as a dash without end, no signs, no houses, the heat like an unseen fog and the sun a swollen crimson clot above fields where frazzle-haired palm trees rose sporadic and unwieldy, the miles of pasture where cattle of every conceivable color, rust and tobacco and ashen, fed and nursed their stumbling young, heavy heads bent to the ground. And insects that crashed against windshield so tiny, no body was left behind. Then a wooden shack where we stopped to pee and the shock of iron-red flecks against bowl, the water placid, unmoved. There was hardly any pain. What could we do but continue on as scattered street-lamps gradually revealed a landscape inhabited once again: the still shuttered windows of bungalows pink as scrubbed flesh, the small dark yards of abandoned Bigwheels and plots of petunias or cukes, the closed, expectant mailboxes and the living already dead inside me.