Yellow (Short Story Practice)
I woke up Sunday morning, pushed my phone off the bed to shut off the alarm and rolled back over.
Right. So much for getting up early.
About an hour later, the sun reflecting off of the neighboring building’s wall bounced into my face like some electromagnetic, grey, dirty puppy. Only, you know, lighter. Weight wise. Guess it works on the ‘light’ front, too. My humor isn’t the best early morning: all the neurons in my brain sorta shrivel up in the night, wrap their arms around themselves and go ‘fuck it’. A pun is the best I can hope for. I swallowed, mouth tasting like death. The cliché is ‘something crawled up there and died’, and in my place, I could believe it. Something funky had taken up residence in my mouth, fuzzed over my teeth and gummed my saliva up. The light from outside, never bright in my dingy flat, was managing to make my eyelids light up, filtered bright red and orange. My head was pounding along with my heart, so I groaned.
Didn’t help much. Just made me sound like I was dying, and some of my morning breath got up my nose and I felt like I was dying.
Drinking. I had been drinking last night.
Why?
I sat up, bleary-eyed, making a sound of ‘Ohmygod’ and maybe a belch. I dunno. They were both pretty equal in sound. Ended up being this vibrating ‘mmnaenmegod?’ Like humor, I’m not good for speech in the morning, either, not when I had tried to mummify my brain with ethanol.
I was still dressed in black.
Now, as you can guess, a smooth gal like me is totally the kind to fall asleep in the clothes from the funeral she attended last night. Morning. It had been a morning. Bright and early, with family and friends I hadn’t seen since I was in high school, all of them dressed in black. Silent figures, tall figures, black pines clustered around a bright, white coffin with bright, colorful flowers.
Well. Not all of them. The guest of honor, dressed in white, I had been seeing for quite some time after high school, when we were both undergrads and found ourselves at the same college. Out to change the world, get good grades and I dunno, party hard? I’m not big on parties: too much noise, too much movement, too much alcohol. It smells, the floor gets sticky from spilled beer and you end up worrying where that group of boys is dragging that poor kid.
She liked parties, though. Don’t think she would have liked this one.
Yeah, we dated. For awhile, in fact. I really liked her, but I’m not going to lie, she was crazy. Maybe that’s why I liked her: nutty as a loon. Not really sure what a loon is, I think it’s a bird, but that works for her. She was bird-like, all hollow limbs and big eyes and bright colors. She liked to sing, too, and hover from idea to idea like they were each little, delicate flowers. I didn’t think the dress they picked out for her really fit; oh, sure, it was her size, but it didn’t fit the personality. I don’t think she ever wore a dress in the time I knew her. Always suits, polyester, vibrant, matching suits. Her favorite was yellow. Or nothing. She was big on running around naked, dark brown body streaking in the sun of our airy apartment.
I got up, pulled off my clothes in honor of her (left them in a black heap in honor, too) and padded, naked, to the bathroom. Getting my shower to work is a complicated ritual: I’m not big on gods, but nothing has me praying more than my bathroom. It’s like my church. When I finally get the hot water to work, I step under the spray, curse because it’s too damn hot, turn it and end up with it being too damn cold. Around then, I give up, ducking my head under what has now become a waterfall in the bloody Arctic and stand there, taking my fate. Let’s me think better.
She’d killed herself. I hadn’t been the one to find her, that had been the new girl. Seventh girl after me, less than seven months. I’d like to think, in that deep, dark part of me that everyone has that tells them to steal candy and push old ladies into the street, that she did it because she longed for me. That somewhere, under the crazy, she loved me and missed me like I had missed her.
But that wasn’t it. I knew it. She was crazy all the way down. And crazy burns out. Burns bright, burns quick. That’s why that guy that flings feces and hears God comes up with the next big piece of modern art, or why, if we’re getting more popular, Van Gogh goes and cuts his ear off for his gal. Crazy. Better than art school. People like me, though, pull on our black clothes, look terribly butch in our short hair and pudge, the black shirt purchased in the men’s section tucked into our black pants, and head to the funerals of the crazy. Mourn them. Get left behind.
I snorted, ended up inhaling water, and coughed.
Now, here’s where it gets crazy. So we’re all standing there, right? Just like sane people, the kind that crazy folks leave behind when they off themselves. Funerals are hard for me: too many sad people, too many crying. My brain kinda crosses itself, and I think, ‘well, fuck, wouldn’t it be awful if someone just… burst out laughing right now?’ and then, there I am, chewing on my lip to keep from giggling like a fiend.
Mr. Chuckles, that’s me. Always been.
And maybe she saw that, from up in heaven, or down in hell or with the Buddha or whatever. Maybe, somewhere, my crazy girl remembered my little personality tick. Because, just about the time we were trying to finish up, the guys working the cemetery showed up in their cowboy hats and boots and, get this, brought a tractor.
A tractor.
For the dirt. This big, giant yellow thing, rusted over in places, covered in grave dirt in others. It was some environmentalist’s nightmare, spewing noise and smog and looking just big and mean and [i]yellow[/i]. So here we are, all of us, shoulders drooped, eyes bloodshot from crying, sack clothe and ashes on, and this giant [i]bulldozer[/i] shows up.
Yellow metal. Big teeth. Giant shovel.
And this tiiiiiiiiiiny little Latino guy driving it.
You can’t fault me for what I did then. I burst out laughing, big, whooping, high-pitched hyena laughter. And this didn’t turn out like a Disney special: no one laughed with me, no one turned on the grateful waterworks, no one hugged. The whole funeral turned, one black mass and stared at me while the tractor did its work. By that time, I was unstoppable. The laughter had gone even more manic, because now I was the center of the group, pudgy, bespeckled, dressed in a black shirt with sleeves that were too big for me, my dirty old sneakers white against the green grass. Man. If looks could kill. I’m still surprised her mom didn’t push that poor Latino guy off the bulldozer and run me over.
I pressed my head against the slippery tile, letting the heat leave my body as I breathed in the sent of mold and cockroach shit. I could remember how good it felt to laugh like that, laugh in a way that made my lungs heave in need for my inhaler. It was like being with her, one last time.
That day, I went out and bought some yellow roses. They were the only color in my drab apartment, sitting on the table in some cheap, plastic vase I’d pulled out of the trash, but maybe I’d repaint the place.
Could do with a bit more yellow.
Right. So much for getting up early.
About an hour later, the sun reflecting off of the neighboring building’s wall bounced into my face like some electromagnetic, grey, dirty puppy. Only, you know, lighter. Weight wise. Guess it works on the ‘light’ front, too. My humor isn’t the best early morning: all the neurons in my brain sorta shrivel up in the night, wrap their arms around themselves and go ‘fuck it’. A pun is the best I can hope for. I swallowed, mouth tasting like death. The cliché is ‘something crawled up there and died’, and in my place, I could believe it. Something funky had taken up residence in my mouth, fuzzed over my teeth and gummed my saliva up. The light from outside, never bright in my dingy flat, was managing to make my eyelids light up, filtered bright red and orange. My head was pounding along with my heart, so I groaned.
Didn’t help much. Just made me sound like I was dying, and some of my morning breath got up my nose and I felt like I was dying.
Drinking. I had been drinking last night.
Why?
I sat up, bleary-eyed, making a sound of ‘Ohmygod’ and maybe a belch. I dunno. They were both pretty equal in sound. Ended up being this vibrating ‘mmnaenmegod?’ Like humor, I’m not good for speech in the morning, either, not when I had tried to mummify my brain with ethanol.
I was still dressed in black.
Now, as you can guess, a smooth gal like me is totally the kind to fall asleep in the clothes from the funeral she attended last night. Morning. It had been a morning. Bright and early, with family and friends I hadn’t seen since I was in high school, all of them dressed in black. Silent figures, tall figures, black pines clustered around a bright, white coffin with bright, colorful flowers.
Well. Not all of them. The guest of honor, dressed in white, I had been seeing for quite some time after high school, when we were both undergrads and found ourselves at the same college. Out to change the world, get good grades and I dunno, party hard? I’m not big on parties: too much noise, too much movement, too much alcohol. It smells, the floor gets sticky from spilled beer and you end up worrying where that group of boys is dragging that poor kid.
She liked parties, though. Don’t think she would have liked this one.
Yeah, we dated. For awhile, in fact. I really liked her, but I’m not going to lie, she was crazy. Maybe that’s why I liked her: nutty as a loon. Not really sure what a loon is, I think it’s a bird, but that works for her. She was bird-like, all hollow limbs and big eyes and bright colors. She liked to sing, too, and hover from idea to idea like they were each little, delicate flowers. I didn’t think the dress they picked out for her really fit; oh, sure, it was her size, but it didn’t fit the personality. I don’t think she ever wore a dress in the time I knew her. Always suits, polyester, vibrant, matching suits. Her favorite was yellow. Or nothing. She was big on running around naked, dark brown body streaking in the sun of our airy apartment.
I got up, pulled off my clothes in honor of her (left them in a black heap in honor, too) and padded, naked, to the bathroom. Getting my shower to work is a complicated ritual: I’m not big on gods, but nothing has me praying more than my bathroom. It’s like my church. When I finally get the hot water to work, I step under the spray, curse because it’s too damn hot, turn it and end up with it being too damn cold. Around then, I give up, ducking my head under what has now become a waterfall in the bloody Arctic and stand there, taking my fate. Let’s me think better.
She’d killed herself. I hadn’t been the one to find her, that had been the new girl. Seventh girl after me, less than seven months. I’d like to think, in that deep, dark part of me that everyone has that tells them to steal candy and push old ladies into the street, that she did it because she longed for me. That somewhere, under the crazy, she loved me and missed me like I had missed her.
But that wasn’t it. I knew it. She was crazy all the way down. And crazy burns out. Burns bright, burns quick. That’s why that guy that flings feces and hears God comes up with the next big piece of modern art, or why, if we’re getting more popular, Van Gogh goes and cuts his ear off for his gal. Crazy. Better than art school. People like me, though, pull on our black clothes, look terribly butch in our short hair and pudge, the black shirt purchased in the men’s section tucked into our black pants, and head to the funerals of the crazy. Mourn them. Get left behind.
I snorted, ended up inhaling water, and coughed.
Now, here’s where it gets crazy. So we’re all standing there, right? Just like sane people, the kind that crazy folks leave behind when they off themselves. Funerals are hard for me: too many sad people, too many crying. My brain kinda crosses itself, and I think, ‘well, fuck, wouldn’t it be awful if someone just… burst out laughing right now?’ and then, there I am, chewing on my lip to keep from giggling like a fiend.
Mr. Chuckles, that’s me. Always been.
And maybe she saw that, from up in heaven, or down in hell or with the Buddha or whatever. Maybe, somewhere, my crazy girl remembered my little personality tick. Because, just about the time we were trying to finish up, the guys working the cemetery showed up in their cowboy hats and boots and, get this, brought a tractor.
A tractor.
For the dirt. This big, giant yellow thing, rusted over in places, covered in grave dirt in others. It was some environmentalist’s nightmare, spewing noise and smog and looking just big and mean and [i]yellow[/i]. So here we are, all of us, shoulders drooped, eyes bloodshot from crying, sack clothe and ashes on, and this giant [i]bulldozer[/i] shows up.
Yellow metal. Big teeth. Giant shovel.
And this tiiiiiiiiiiny little Latino guy driving it.
You can’t fault me for what I did then. I burst out laughing, big, whooping, high-pitched hyena laughter. And this didn’t turn out like a Disney special: no one laughed with me, no one turned on the grateful waterworks, no one hugged. The whole funeral turned, one black mass and stared at me while the tractor did its work. By that time, I was unstoppable. The laughter had gone even more manic, because now I was the center of the group, pudgy, bespeckled, dressed in a black shirt with sleeves that were too big for me, my dirty old sneakers white against the green grass. Man. If looks could kill. I’m still surprised her mom didn’t push that poor Latino guy off the bulldozer and run me over.
I pressed my head against the slippery tile, letting the heat leave my body as I breathed in the sent of mold and cockroach shit. I could remember how good it felt to laugh like that, laugh in a way that made my lungs heave in need for my inhaler. It was like being with her, one last time.
That day, I went out and bought some yellow roses. They were the only color in my drab apartment, sitting on the table in some cheap, plastic vase I’d pulled out of the trash, but maybe I’d repaint the place.
Could do with a bit more yellow.