Red and Yellow and Pink and Green, Orange and Purple and Blue.
If you can’t say anything nice try not to say anything at all. Isn’t that what they tell you? Only I can’t think of anything nice to say and I can’t think of anything nasty. It’s like he did it. He managed. He’s killed me.
There’s a green and yellow-blue bruise and it itches around my neck like a hangman’s noose, and when you peer very closely you might be able to see the unique little rings that belong to my executioner. My Enemy so I’m told. And all of this over a pair of yellow shoes worn back when I was just a kid.
When I was very little I went to a swimming pool. It glittered under an artificial sun and was perfect in it’s symmetry. Everyone was wearing colour and children were screaming with laughter as their fathers scooped them up and plunged them back into the pool, they wore Orange Yellow Green bands full of air around their arms and bobbed up to the surface like apples at Halloween. There was a great purple slide that you had to climb a ladder to the stars to go down. An important looking man with a red whistle sat on a high throne and surveyed the world.
And I was with my Dad.
He put me in the paddling pool, and said for me to wait while he did some lengths. The water was cool but pleasantly so around my ankles and I watched him go to that big perfect rectangle and dive in. He swam like a shark. I so wanted to be like him, I so wanted to be like him…
I couldn’t swim. I couldn’t find the edge of the pool. I couldn’t find the surface of the water. I remember staring up, and a bird flew overhead. I swear I saw a bird.
I never went swimming again. He wouldn’t take me. After my little lungs coughed up the perfect blue and he had me changed and back in the car He was so angry with me, he was so so angry with me. I died that day and 23 years later I died again.
Only there was no Perfect Blue, Just a Grey Snake and a steady hand.
There’s a green and yellow-blue bruise and it itches around my neck like a hangman’s noose, and when you peer very closely you might be able to see the unique little rings that belong to my executioner. My Enemy so I’m told. And all of this over a pair of yellow shoes worn back when I was just a kid.
When I was very little I went to a swimming pool. It glittered under an artificial sun and was perfect in it’s symmetry. Everyone was wearing colour and children were screaming with laughter as their fathers scooped them up and plunged them back into the pool, they wore Orange Yellow Green bands full of air around their arms and bobbed up to the surface like apples at Halloween. There was a great purple slide that you had to climb a ladder to the stars to go down. An important looking man with a red whistle sat on a high throne and surveyed the world.
And I was with my Dad.
He put me in the paddling pool, and said for me to wait while he did some lengths. The water was cool but pleasantly so around my ankles and I watched him go to that big perfect rectangle and dive in. He swam like a shark. I so wanted to be like him, I so wanted to be like him…
I couldn’t swim. I couldn’t find the edge of the pool. I couldn’t find the surface of the water. I remember staring up, and a bird flew overhead. I swear I saw a bird.
I never went swimming again. He wouldn’t take me. After my little lungs coughed up the perfect blue and he had me changed and back in the car He was so angry with me, he was so so angry with me. I died that day and 23 years later I died again.
Only there was no Perfect Blue, Just a Grey Snake and a steady hand.