Abysmal Bodies: Sepia (Shades - Part 1)
Series: Abysmal Bodies
Title: Shades (1/3)
Chapter: Part I - Sepia
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Gen. Pavel Chekov, various OCs.
Words: ~2800
Summary: The yellow days are the worst of all because because they are so few and far between. It is on these days that he starts to understand why the others hurt so and why they feel so betrayed. They are the worst because they remind them of what has been and what could be.
Notes: Special thanks to jessofthebugs for going over this for me and for being generally awesome. I wrote this about a month ago. Chronologically, this will be the first "Abysmal Bodies" story, so it shouldn't matter if you haven't read the other bits and pieces from this series. Warnings for mentions of an unspecifed mental illness.
Abysmal Bodies: Shades
A Bad Beginnings Story
Sepia
Pasha tugs at his necktie, squirming uncomfortably at the breakfast table. His eggs are growing cold and are congealing on his plate but he has no appetite this morning. He never does on one of these Fridays.
His grandfather leans over and smacks his hand away. “Don’t do that Pasha, or we will have to tie it again. Is it too much to ask that you look nice for -”
“I don’t want to go,” Pasha blurts out. “I don’t feel well.”
Dedushka looks disappointed; Natska kicks Pasha under the table. Pasha promised her he wouldn’t make a fuss this time, and while normally he and Natska are never too particular about the promises and threats that they make to each other, these particular Fridays are different.
“Come now,” Dedushka says, straightening Pasha’s tie. “Once a month is twelve times a year. That is not much to ask, is it?”
Pasha sneaks a look at his sister. She nods at him, scowling fiercely. Pasha sighs. “No,” he says.
Dedushka looks relieved that Pasha has given in without throwing a tantrum. “Good boy,” he says, and ruffles Pasha’s hair. “You are growing up to be very mature, little one.”
Pasha knocks his hand away and sticks his tongue out. “Nyaah!”
Dedushka chuckles. “Maybe you have someway to go. But I am proud of you. You are a big boy now, yes?”
Pasha doesn’t feel like a big boy. He is nine and people say he is a genius and a prodigy, but there are so many things he doesn’t understand.
He doesn’t understand why they have to visit Mama the second Friday of every month for one thing.
Andrei the Third is trying to get out of it again. He is twenty-one now; and is learning to take over the Business now he has returned from college - he is a Grown Up.
Pasha never thinks of his oldest brother as just Andrei; it seems wrong to. Pasha hardly knows him, not really. He knows enough of him to be afraid of him. The Third has always been grown up and distant and he regards Pasha and Natska as nuisances who do nothing but annoy him and get under his feet.
The Third’s rages are legendary and Pasha has been on the receiving end of them more times than he would have liked. Of course, Andrei has never done anything too bad to him, but Pasha does his best to stay out of his way - which is more difficult now that he is officially “helping in the business”.
“I am a very busy man,” Andrei the Third says. “I have better things to do than visit a mad woman.”
Papa, who is Andrei the second, grunts in acknowledgment, but he does not look up from his iPAAD screen. Nor does he make any sort of protest. It is Dedushka who frowns and hums in disapproval, just like it is always Dedushka who insists on these monthly visits. Family is important, he will insist.
“That is no way to talk of your mother,” Dedushka scolds. “Especially not in front of the children.”
Katya sneers into her coffee, her new nose peeking above the cup’s rim. “Oh, come on, Dedushka. It is true, isn’t it? Besides they don’t want to go either. None of us want to go.”
“I do,” says Nico, and Pasha looks up to see his other brother’s normally smiling face, pale and angry.
Katya laughs in the cruel way that she does when she isn’t really happy and calls Nico a sissy Mama’s boy; and Nico calls her a heartless bitch in return. Natska takes Pasha’s hand under the table as it looks like it is going to get ugly. She tugs slightly, as if to say, “Let’s go, let’s go now before it starts,” but before they can, Dedushka stands up.
“Run away, you two,” he says. “I think it is time that the adults have a little talk.” He looks at Katya and Nico in disgust. “And some who believe themselves to be adults.”
Half an hour later all of them, barring Andrei, have been packed off into the cold grey November morning to make their monthly pilgrimage to their mother’s side. .
The drive to the Summer House is always one of uncomfortable silence, and with Katya and Nico pointedly ignoring each other it is even worse than usual.
Natska takes Pasha’s hand now, once again, and squeezes. “It will be over soon,” she murmurs, so the other two can’t hear.
Pasha thinks that the hand holding is more for her benefit than his. Natska wants someone to comfort her and tell her that it will all be over soon. and Pasha couldn’t put it into words if he was asked, but he understands it is easier to pretend that you are just looking after your little brother instead of admitting that you want him to look after you in return.
There isn’t really a lot that Pasha can do for Natska. She is his big sister after all, not the other way round - and it is he who goes to her, for comfort, for reassurance and for no other reason than the fact she she is his big sister. He is compelled to follow her because she should not be allowed to leave him behind - and he knows, though unconsciously, that sometimes the only way to help someone is to let them help you.
So he squeezes back and doesn’t let her let go of his hand for a while, knowing that she needs this more than he does.
“Maybe she won’t want to talk to us today,” Pasha whispers back. “If its a grey day, then we can go home.”
Natska pulls the weird faces she always does when she’s trying not to cry. But then she swallows and gulps and blinks quickly, like she has something in her eye (dust or sleep or tears, it’s all the same). She smiles a fake, watery smile at him.
“Maybe,” she says.
Pasha lets her pull her hand away and they sit in silence, listening to their own thoughts and the motorised hum of the car.
Pasha doesn’t know what is wrong with Mama - or rather, he doesn’t know of any one thing that is wrong with her. There are several things wrong with her - she is sick in her head, sick in her body and sick in her soul. There are many names in English and in Russian for what is wrong with her but Pasha doesn’t know them.
To be entirely honest, he doesn’t care to find out. Biology and psychology hold none of the fascination that physics and mathematics do for him so he is not curious for knowledge’s sake. As for finding out for his mother’s sake - he knows her less than his father - less than Andrei the Third. He simply does not know her enough to care about her. None of them care about her, except for Nico.
Unlike Pasha and Natska, Nico remembers enough about Mama to care about her; and unlike Andrei and Katya he has forgotten enough to not feel betrayed. He stares fixedly at the road ahead, music in his earphones blaring so loud that Pasha can hear the thump, thump, thump of the baseline from two seats back. The universal signal for “Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk.”
That’s just as well. Pasha never wants to talk on these journeys and it is a relief not have Nico being determinedly cheerful and chattering away until Pasha wants to punch him in the face so he’ll shut up.
Katya has brought a novel and has plugged it into one of the built in screens. She is only pretending to read it, though. She’s been looking at the first page for over an hour. Pasha sneaks a look over her shoulder - "'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” says the first line. It all looks very boring. Pasha doesn’t really see the point of books with no pictures.
Katya is seventeen and thinks herself all grown up, and truthfully, she is. No matter how much Dedushka tries to keep her young, Katya is and always has been old for her age. Nico is not quite there yet but he is a teenager and his problems are those of the in-between phase that is either the best or the worst time of your life depending on who you ask.
Pasha rather likes being a child. He and Natska are uncomplicated. Nine is a good age to be, he thinks. If he could, he would stay nine forever.
*
The Summer House is supposed to only be used for when it gets too unbearably hot for the city houses for when Dedushka or Papa wish to take a break from The Business. But ever since Mama went mad she lives here alone.
The gardens are nicer than the ones in either St Petersburg or in Moscow, but now they lie under a thick coating of snow.
Pasha hopes selfishly that the grey and dreary day will put Mama in one of her grey moods. When she lies in bed and refuses to look at them, or sits by the window staring at nothing. That way they don’t have to stay there for very long.
On her blue days she will cry and say how sorry she is and tell them to leave and to let her rot here for it is only what she deserves for being such a horrible Mama. They can leave early on the blue days as well but Pasha doesn’t like them. Katya will purse her lips and look at Mama like she hates her and Nico will cry as well and tell Mama that it isn’t her fault and Pasha and Natska will huddle together as far away as they can and they will not cry, not cry until they are back home again and in the privacy of the nursery.
The red days are where Mama will scream and rage at them. She will call them names and say horrible, hateful things. She will say that she wishes she had never had them. That she wishes she had cut them out of her. She looks like Andrei the third on the red days and maybe this is why Andrei hates to come more than the rest of them. Maybe he wonders, like Pasha does, whether one day he too will end up locked in the Summer House.
On the red days Nico looks a lot like he looks now. His face will get thin and pinched and his eyes will bulge a little, as if the hurt and anger are trying to burst out of him any way they can. Katya will work herself up so that she is so mad that she is shaking and the Third, if he comes at all, will just laugh at Mama.
“That time of the month, huh mother?” he will say. Pasha isn’t sure what he means by that. He assumes it means the time of the month that they all come to visit but the way Andrei says it - suggests it means something else.
It is worse when any of them try and talk back. If they are quiet and just wait it out the nurses will give her about twenty minutes to calm down before they usher them out again if it doesn’t work. But if they talk back - if Andrei makes one of those jokes, or Nico asks Mama to stop, or Katya starts to tell Mama exactly what she thinks of her - if they talk back, it quickly devolves into a horrible, screaming row that the nurses let go on because the doctors think that “confrontation” is good for Mama.
They scream at each other all the time at home. They’re always fighting. It’s all just part of being a family. Here though, here it feels different. It’s hard to get up and shake it off. These fights are not those of petty, every day squabbles - you took my hairbrush and you said I could take the car today and I said you couldn’t come in here. These fights are born of things, bigger, deeper and older than Pasha understands.
Natska will crouch down, backed against the wall when these fights take place. She will scrunch her eyes closed and stick her fingers in her ears and hum loudly. Tuneless and monotonous, so high-pitched it’s could be a scream. Pasha will sit down next to her; he doesn’t try to hug her but he will press up next to her, perhaps affording a little warmth to protect against the cold walls and the floor.
He watches on the red days. He can understand the rage of the red days better than he understands the despair of the blue days, and it fascinates him to watch the rest of his siblings stripped bare - vulnerable in their naked wrath - they all try so hard to keep their weaknesses hidden, but on the red days they’re all on display.
The yellow days are worst of all.
On her yellow days Mama will be happy and smiling. She will hug and kiss them and tell them how glad she is that they came and that she misses them.
She will ask how Andrei is doing at college. She will ask if Katya has a boyfriend and then she will laugh when Katya grimaces and change the subject to the books that Katya has read or if she has definitely made up her mind to become a lawyer. She’ll ask after Nico’s running and how well his football team is doing in the league.
She’ll talk to Pasha and Natska about their ballet and talk about how she was never the graceful sort, that she has never been able to make her body dance the way she tells it to, preferring instead to make numbers and equations dance in her mind. To watch them unravel from their complexity into their most basic forms - she will wink at Pasha when she says this as if he gets it.
And he does, out of all of this - his mother, her madness, the one thing he does understand is how she finds numbers preferable to people. Numbers are simple. Two plus two is always four in base ten. (He always remembers to add “in base ten” after Mama taught him, once when he was very small, that two plus two could be eleven in base three).
On the yellow days, Mama will usually give him a puzzle or a problem before he leaves, pressing it into his hand as she kisses him goodbye, like it is their secret.
“Bring me the answer next month,” she will say, but Pasha never does any more.
He used to, for a while. In the beginning, he remembers how excited he would get when he would get another puzzle. He would want to be left alone until he figured it out. He’d think about it in during his classes, ignoring his tutors. He’d think of it in the bath, during meals and before he went to bed.
The best thing about Mama’s puzzles, was that they were hard.
He remembers how much he’d look forward to giving her the solution - of showing her how clever he was only to invariably find that when “next month” came around she would be too sad or too angry or too wrapped up in her own mind to care.
Then about a year and a half ago, she’d been in one of her red moods and she’d ripped the paper up and thrown it in his face. Ever since then, Pasha has stopped bringing them back.
He will quietly solve the puzzle in his head and then put the paper away in a drawer.
No, yellow isn’t quite right. Yellow is too cheerful a colour, and these days are not happy days. Golden sounds too regal, too shiny, too looked-forward to, when really, Pasha dreads them. They are murky and filled with regret - brown, but not completely.
But yellow is a sickly colour too. A jaundiced colour. So maybe yellow fits.
A brownish-yellow, like the faded photographs Dedushka keeps. Regret and cheerfulness and longing all wrapped up in one single colour.
The yellow days are the worst of all because because they are so few and far between. It is on these days that he starts to understand why the others hurt so and why they feel so betrayed. They are the worst because they remind them of what has been and what could be.
Pasha can forgive Mama for the other types of days. The indifference of the grey, the anguish of the blue and the hurt of the red. He doesn’t need a mother. But on the yellow days he can see what is would be like to have one.
And that is something he can’t forgive.
Notes: Katya is reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Cut text from A better son/daughter by Rilo Kiley.
Any comments, critiques or thoughts are appreciated.
Title: Shades (1/3)
Chapter: Part I - Sepia
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Gen. Pavel Chekov, various OCs.
Words: ~2800
Summary: The yellow days are the worst of all because because they are so few and far between. It is on these days that he starts to understand why the others hurt so and why they feel so betrayed. They are the worst because they remind them of what has been and what could be.
Notes: Special thanks to jessofthebugs for going over this for me and for being generally awesome. I wrote this about a month ago. Chronologically, this will be the first "Abysmal Bodies" story, so it shouldn't matter if you haven't read the other bits and pieces from this series. Warnings for mentions of an unspecifed mental illness.
Abysmal Bodies: Shades
A Bad Beginnings Story
Sepia
Pasha tugs at his necktie, squirming uncomfortably at the breakfast table. His eggs are growing cold and are congealing on his plate but he has no appetite this morning. He never does on one of these Fridays.
His grandfather leans over and smacks his hand away. “Don’t do that Pasha, or we will have to tie it again. Is it too much to ask that you look nice for -”
“I don’t want to go,” Pasha blurts out. “I don’t feel well.”
Dedushka looks disappointed; Natska kicks Pasha under the table. Pasha promised her he wouldn’t make a fuss this time, and while normally he and Natska are never too particular about the promises and threats that they make to each other, these particular Fridays are different.
“Come now,” Dedushka says, straightening Pasha’s tie. “Once a month is twelve times a year. That is not much to ask, is it?”
Pasha sneaks a look at his sister. She nods at him, scowling fiercely. Pasha sighs. “No,” he says.
Dedushka looks relieved that Pasha has given in without throwing a tantrum. “Good boy,” he says, and ruffles Pasha’s hair. “You are growing up to be very mature, little one.”
Pasha knocks his hand away and sticks his tongue out. “Nyaah!”
Dedushka chuckles. “Maybe you have someway to go. But I am proud of you. You are a big boy now, yes?”
Pasha doesn’t feel like a big boy. He is nine and people say he is a genius and a prodigy, but there are so many things he doesn’t understand.
He doesn’t understand why they have to visit Mama the second Friday of every month for one thing.
Andrei the Third is trying to get out of it again. He is twenty-one now; and is learning to take over the Business now he has returned from college - he is a Grown Up.
Pasha never thinks of his oldest brother as just Andrei; it seems wrong to. Pasha hardly knows him, not really. He knows enough of him to be afraid of him. The Third has always been grown up and distant and he regards Pasha and Natska as nuisances who do nothing but annoy him and get under his feet.
The Third’s rages are legendary and Pasha has been on the receiving end of them more times than he would have liked. Of course, Andrei has never done anything too bad to him, but Pasha does his best to stay out of his way - which is more difficult now that he is officially “helping in the business”.
“I am a very busy man,” Andrei the Third says. “I have better things to do than visit a mad woman.”
Papa, who is Andrei the second, grunts in acknowledgment, but he does not look up from his iPAAD screen. Nor does he make any sort of protest. It is Dedushka who frowns and hums in disapproval, just like it is always Dedushka who insists on these monthly visits. Family is important, he will insist.
“That is no way to talk of your mother,” Dedushka scolds. “Especially not in front of the children.”
Katya sneers into her coffee, her new nose peeking above the cup’s rim. “Oh, come on, Dedushka. It is true, isn’t it? Besides they don’t want to go either. None of us want to go.”
“I do,” says Nico, and Pasha looks up to see his other brother’s normally smiling face, pale and angry.
Katya laughs in the cruel way that she does when she isn’t really happy and calls Nico a sissy Mama’s boy; and Nico calls her a heartless bitch in return. Natska takes Pasha’s hand under the table as it looks like it is going to get ugly. She tugs slightly, as if to say, “Let’s go, let’s go now before it starts,” but before they can, Dedushka stands up.
“Run away, you two,” he says. “I think it is time that the adults have a little talk.” He looks at Katya and Nico in disgust. “And some who believe themselves to be adults.”
Half an hour later all of them, barring Andrei, have been packed off into the cold grey November morning to make their monthly pilgrimage to their mother’s side. .
The drive to the Summer House is always one of uncomfortable silence, and with Katya and Nico pointedly ignoring each other it is even worse than usual.
Natska takes Pasha’s hand now, once again, and squeezes. “It will be over soon,” she murmurs, so the other two can’t hear.
Pasha thinks that the hand holding is more for her benefit than his. Natska wants someone to comfort her and tell her that it will all be over soon. and Pasha couldn’t put it into words if he was asked, but he understands it is easier to pretend that you are just looking after your little brother instead of admitting that you want him to look after you in return.
There isn’t really a lot that Pasha can do for Natska. She is his big sister after all, not the other way round - and it is he who goes to her, for comfort, for reassurance and for no other reason than the fact she she is his big sister. He is compelled to follow her because she should not be allowed to leave him behind - and he knows, though unconsciously, that sometimes the only way to help someone is to let them help you.
So he squeezes back and doesn’t let her let go of his hand for a while, knowing that she needs this more than he does.
“Maybe she won’t want to talk to us today,” Pasha whispers back. “If its a grey day, then we can go home.”
Natska pulls the weird faces she always does when she’s trying not to cry. But then she swallows and gulps and blinks quickly, like she has something in her eye (dust or sleep or tears, it’s all the same). She smiles a fake, watery smile at him.
“Maybe,” she says.
Pasha lets her pull her hand away and they sit in silence, listening to their own thoughts and the motorised hum of the car.
Pasha doesn’t know what is wrong with Mama - or rather, he doesn’t know of any one thing that is wrong with her. There are several things wrong with her - she is sick in her head, sick in her body and sick in her soul. There are many names in English and in Russian for what is wrong with her but Pasha doesn’t know them.
To be entirely honest, he doesn’t care to find out. Biology and psychology hold none of the fascination that physics and mathematics do for him so he is not curious for knowledge’s sake. As for finding out for his mother’s sake - he knows her less than his father - less than Andrei the Third. He simply does not know her enough to care about her. None of them care about her, except for Nico.
Unlike Pasha and Natska, Nico remembers enough about Mama to care about her; and unlike Andrei and Katya he has forgotten enough to not feel betrayed. He stares fixedly at the road ahead, music in his earphones blaring so loud that Pasha can hear the thump, thump, thump of the baseline from two seats back. The universal signal for “Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk.”
That’s just as well. Pasha never wants to talk on these journeys and it is a relief not have Nico being determinedly cheerful and chattering away until Pasha wants to punch him in the face so he’ll shut up.
Katya has brought a novel and has plugged it into one of the built in screens. She is only pretending to read it, though. She’s been looking at the first page for over an hour. Pasha sneaks a look over her shoulder - "'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” says the first line. It all looks very boring. Pasha doesn’t really see the point of books with no pictures.
Katya is seventeen and thinks herself all grown up, and truthfully, she is. No matter how much Dedushka tries to keep her young, Katya is and always has been old for her age. Nico is not quite there yet but he is a teenager and his problems are those of the in-between phase that is either the best or the worst time of your life depending on who you ask.
Pasha rather likes being a child. He and Natska are uncomplicated. Nine is a good age to be, he thinks. If he could, he would stay nine forever.
*
The Summer House is supposed to only be used for when it gets too unbearably hot for the city houses for when Dedushka or Papa wish to take a break from The Business. But ever since Mama went mad she lives here alone.
The gardens are nicer than the ones in either St Petersburg or in Moscow, but now they lie under a thick coating of snow.
Pasha hopes selfishly that the grey and dreary day will put Mama in one of her grey moods. When she lies in bed and refuses to look at them, or sits by the window staring at nothing. That way they don’t have to stay there for very long.
On her blue days she will cry and say how sorry she is and tell them to leave and to let her rot here for it is only what she deserves for being such a horrible Mama. They can leave early on the blue days as well but Pasha doesn’t like them. Katya will purse her lips and look at Mama like she hates her and Nico will cry as well and tell Mama that it isn’t her fault and Pasha and Natska will huddle together as far away as they can and they will not cry, not cry until they are back home again and in the privacy of the nursery.
The red days are where Mama will scream and rage at them. She will call them names and say horrible, hateful things. She will say that she wishes she had never had them. That she wishes she had cut them out of her. She looks like Andrei the third on the red days and maybe this is why Andrei hates to come more than the rest of them. Maybe he wonders, like Pasha does, whether one day he too will end up locked in the Summer House.
On the red days Nico looks a lot like he looks now. His face will get thin and pinched and his eyes will bulge a little, as if the hurt and anger are trying to burst out of him any way they can. Katya will work herself up so that she is so mad that she is shaking and the Third, if he comes at all, will just laugh at Mama.
“That time of the month, huh mother?” he will say. Pasha isn’t sure what he means by that. He assumes it means the time of the month that they all come to visit but the way Andrei says it - suggests it means something else.
It is worse when any of them try and talk back. If they are quiet and just wait it out the nurses will give her about twenty minutes to calm down before they usher them out again if it doesn’t work. But if they talk back - if Andrei makes one of those jokes, or Nico asks Mama to stop, or Katya starts to tell Mama exactly what she thinks of her - if they talk back, it quickly devolves into a horrible, screaming row that the nurses let go on because the doctors think that “confrontation” is good for Mama.
They scream at each other all the time at home. They’re always fighting. It’s all just part of being a family. Here though, here it feels different. It’s hard to get up and shake it off. These fights are not those of petty, every day squabbles - you took my hairbrush and you said I could take the car today and I said you couldn’t come in here. These fights are born of things, bigger, deeper and older than Pasha understands.
Natska will crouch down, backed against the wall when these fights take place. She will scrunch her eyes closed and stick her fingers in her ears and hum loudly. Tuneless and monotonous, so high-pitched it’s could be a scream. Pasha will sit down next to her; he doesn’t try to hug her but he will press up next to her, perhaps affording a little warmth to protect against the cold walls and the floor.
He watches on the red days. He can understand the rage of the red days better than he understands the despair of the blue days, and it fascinates him to watch the rest of his siblings stripped bare - vulnerable in their naked wrath - they all try so hard to keep their weaknesses hidden, but on the red days they’re all on display.
The yellow days are worst of all.
On her yellow days Mama will be happy and smiling. She will hug and kiss them and tell them how glad she is that they came and that she misses them.
She will ask how Andrei is doing at college. She will ask if Katya has a boyfriend and then she will laugh when Katya grimaces and change the subject to the books that Katya has read or if she has definitely made up her mind to become a lawyer. She’ll ask after Nico’s running and how well his football team is doing in the league.
She’ll talk to Pasha and Natska about their ballet and talk about how she was never the graceful sort, that she has never been able to make her body dance the way she tells it to, preferring instead to make numbers and equations dance in her mind. To watch them unravel from their complexity into their most basic forms - she will wink at Pasha when she says this as if he gets it.
And he does, out of all of this - his mother, her madness, the one thing he does understand is how she finds numbers preferable to people. Numbers are simple. Two plus two is always four in base ten. (He always remembers to add “in base ten” after Mama taught him, once when he was very small, that two plus two could be eleven in base three).
On the yellow days, Mama will usually give him a puzzle or a problem before he leaves, pressing it into his hand as she kisses him goodbye, like it is their secret.
“Bring me the answer next month,” she will say, but Pasha never does any more.
He used to, for a while. In the beginning, he remembers how excited he would get when he would get another puzzle. He would want to be left alone until he figured it out. He’d think about it in during his classes, ignoring his tutors. He’d think of it in the bath, during meals and before he went to bed.
The best thing about Mama’s puzzles, was that they were hard.
He remembers how much he’d look forward to giving her the solution - of showing her how clever he was only to invariably find that when “next month” came around she would be too sad or too angry or too wrapped up in her own mind to care.
Then about a year and a half ago, she’d been in one of her red moods and she’d ripped the paper up and thrown it in his face. Ever since then, Pasha has stopped bringing them back.
He will quietly solve the puzzle in his head and then put the paper away in a drawer.
No, yellow isn’t quite right. Yellow is too cheerful a colour, and these days are not happy days. Golden sounds too regal, too shiny, too looked-forward to, when really, Pasha dreads them. They are murky and filled with regret - brown, but not completely.
But yellow is a sickly colour too. A jaundiced colour. So maybe yellow fits.
A brownish-yellow, like the faded photographs Dedushka keeps. Regret and cheerfulness and longing all wrapped up in one single colour.
The yellow days are the worst of all because because they are so few and far between. It is on these days that he starts to understand why the others hurt so and why they feel so betrayed. They are the worst because they remind them of what has been and what could be.
Pasha can forgive Mama for the other types of days. The indifference of the grey, the anguish of the blue and the hurt of the red. He doesn’t need a mother. But on the yellow days he can see what is would be like to have one.
And that is something he can’t forgive.
Notes: Katya is reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Cut text from A better son/daughter by Rilo Kiley.
Any comments, critiques or thoughts are appreciated.