Twelve Blue

Now that everyone on earth wore beepers (or so it seemed in a walk through the Galleria), she wondered had it lost its sense of expectation or rather was the phenomenon now simply more widely shared. It seemed as if the whole pedestrian world strolled with small plastic packets of electronics at their hips-- in shades of pastel now as well as basic black-- all of them pleasantly abuzz and mildly aroused, awaiting word of what would be, word of what had been.

Everything can be read, every surface and silence, every breath and every vacancy, every eddy and current, every body and its absence, every darkness every light, each cloud and knife, each finger and tree, every backwater, every crevice and hollow, each nostril, tendril and crescent, every whisper, every whimper, each laugh and every blue feather, each stone, each nipple, every thread every color, each woman and her lover, every man and his mother, every river, each of the twelve blue oceans and the moon, every forlorn link, every hope and every ending, each coincidence, the distant call of a loon, light through the high branches of blue pines, the sigh of rain, every estuary, each gesture at parting, every kiss, each wasp's wing, every foghorn and railway whistle, every shadow, every gasp, each glowing silver screen, every web, the smear of starlight, a fingertip, rose whorl, armpit, pearl, every delight and misgiving, every unadorned wish, every daughter, every death, each woven thing, each machine, every ever after

They believed each other's stories and knew they were not minor characters.

She didn't need to know the sign for drowned. It was like thinking he couldn't shout. Not so much wrong as backwards, as if he were you. He wouldn't need to know the sign for what he was. She wondered if that was what love was, how you thought what the other thought was what you thought or something. The words all backwards. Now she would never know. (It would have been useful to know it, actually, had he come back: Thought drowned: two signs. Smile. Hug. Make the sign for worried and heart. Love.)

Follow me doesn't have much of a ring to it, though god knows there's music for a fifteen year old girl holding tasteless blueberry cotton candy on an August afternoon and flirting with a gap-toothed carny, arms brown as twisted rattan, hard thighs in jeans black as grease, jack o'lantern smile below a thief's indigo eyes. Music likewise for a woman, shivering in the air conditioning and half having to piss, seated years afterward bare-legged and squirming upon a gray leather banquette lit by dim cobalt sconce lights, her reflection and the candle's weaving together in the Art Deco mirror, its woodwork burnished like the luscious brown arm of one of Gauguin's sleepy girls, yellow arabesques across her full breasts.