POPPY TO ROSE

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Drawn by the Fire

His stubby cigarette sat in the ashtray on the edge of the escape. A light rain wisped the smoke about. Six floors down paramedics loaded a long black bag into an ambulance. He sighed with the thunder in the distance. He knew his friend’s family would be here soon, to tear at the deceased’s belongings just as he had seen a pack of wolves fighting over a hunted carcass on the television.  He also knew his friend’s family had not been here to visit for three years.  Three years of he and his friend sharing the fire escape and watching the city.  Three years that included the entire period of diagnosis to death.  He lit another cigarette.  “Bunch of cunts,” he said aloud.  He heard their footsteps across the hall as he finished his sentence. He yelled, “fucking vultures!” The family outside paid no heed to his words. He was their Uncle’s kooky neighbor, anyways.

She kept the place barren besides a heap of canvases and her supplies of paint.  Even her bed was a lone twin in the corner under the far window.  White sheets. Her pillow was the same.  It was the way that she left the rest of the room, so as not to interfere with the colors of her mind.  Every day she’d stir in the first creeping of dawn, and walk the squares, and eat her egg and toast, and find her coffee house to sit a while before the rest of the world arrived. She would do this and then return home, lock the big bolt, and paint the people rushing for their tired days. She watched as they got ready on the trains, as the sounds of construction and car horns and angry yellings blotted out the bird songs she enjoyed only hours earlier.  Solitude was her dear friend. She shuddered when her mind went back and the colors went red on the violent night.  No. What she had now, her white walls, and blank canvasses were all she wanted and all she could handle in the world. Lonely coffee, a quiet breakfast, and back to her roost, where the clink of brushes on paint tins complimented her slow breathing. She thought that they had broken her.

Photo by Tyler

A light rain fell. They were happy it wasn’t too cold. They watched the joggers and the cyclists and the occasional loony pass by before the river.  Words were effortless. Laughter was their companion. They thought they might stay beside the city forever. After all, they had what most in this life sought after.  A jeering faith let them sit comfortably on the stiff bench. They would die for each other, but it was more important that they live.

The boy ran across the bark that baked in the sun. His father followed. The boy believed himself to be faster than his father most days. But there were times when his father surprised him.  He saw the other kids with their mothers and wondered how fast a mother could be. He watched the mothers hug, and kiss, and cradle those who burned their legs on the slide, or shaved their knees on the bark. He wondered at women.  But the boy was young, and the tall slide was of greater importance than thoughts on mothers.  Besides, he knew he would see his tonight in his father’s stories. She was the finest mother of all. Better at cradling and kissing and mothering.  His father spoke of her great dark hair, and a laugh that gave life to the boy.  The boy smiled at the thought of the coming stories and proceeded up the ladder to the tall slide where the rush of wind carried him back down to his father, who was faster some times more than others.