Color of Echoes

D. Byron Patterson

Morning.

Half-naked.

Night-beaten.

Drug-drenched.

Two lovers sit. Fatally facing each other. Woman magnetized and full-frontal. Man half-cocked and quiet. They smoke. They talk.

He leaves today. His gaze. Cold and full of goddamn blame.

“Please,” she reaches over, brushing away auburn strands of his hair.

She looks over his shoulder and pleads with the sun. She blows cigarette smoke. Swallows bittersweet and sour sips from a half-glass of something watered down. All night bumps for days of wear and wind and descending down. Light is evil. It paints the morning Dali and Van Gogh.

One more bump.

The nose-burn and tingle-eye blinking drip-down. She watches oil and flesh upend the bloodshot canvas sky. It vomits clear brilliant blue into the dawn.

“Today is a waltz,” she whispers.

Her eyes focus out-of-focus on the end of her cigarette. Beyond her periphery, just now, a small butterfly plays in the verdant, dewy grass shards of the manicured lawn.

“You’re leaving today,” she says.

“I’m leaving today,” he says.

Onyx fiddles with the white powder in the spoon. Little crystals like Gulf beach white sand bits. Clumped together in vice. He snorts the tiny piles, tossing his head back to feel the back throat drip-down.

“You’re leaving today,” she whispers.

Silence.

Cigarette smoke and imbibed libations. Liquid and crystal sins. The ingestion of temptation. Another curse for the morning. Another for the sound of birds. One for the grasshoppers.

“This doesn’t seem like morning,” she offers.

“No, it doesn’t.”

Billie laughs.

“I keep telling that goddamn fucking sun to go down and it won’t,” she says. “I want shadow. And fire. Let’s pull the curtains, hmm?”

“Why?”

Swallowing a cry, she leaps at him. Hands and mouth. Spills drinks and the make-shift picnic. Cracks the vials of illegal pharmacy into rubble glass and unbumpable powder. He topples backward and laughs.

“Just stay,” she kisses his face. “Please, just stay. Stay. Stay. Stay.”

He tastes her tears, laughing, “Come. Come. Come.”

Whispers in between words.

“Stay.”

A brush of her cheek.

“Come.”

Her eyes, fierce and angry and swollen and liquid-colored, filled with her trembling. Watering down, drowning the both of them. A sometimes Baptism. Lost and swollen and tired and desperate and frightened.

Rummaging for light.

“Stay.”

He gathers loose strands of her auburn hair. Peers into her forehead, follows the lines there. The furrows and the microscopic hairs. Freckles that pop from the summer tan.

“It’s still early,” he says, his head in her lap.

Sight and dawn and the smells of her morning smells. Honeysuckle, faint rainbows, earth. Her smoky-sweet breath.

A tear falls into his mouth.

“For someone who doesn’t know music,” he laughs, “you know enough from instinct – you’ve been breathing and crying in 3/4 time.”

“What’s that?”

“A waltz.”

“See?” she says.

“What?”

“See?” she screams.

“What?”

“See?” she howls.

Pounds his chest. No thought for balance. No need for control. No explanation needed.

“What?”

“Don’t leave me.”

The seam of her soul ruptures in splinters of broken flesh. She bites his neck.

“I hate you.”

“I know,” he says.

He squeezes his eyes, precluding the sight of her. Drinking and savoring her lingering scents. She smells like sleeping.

He feels juicy euphoria and leans into its frenzy of lightheadedness. Strength and baskets filled with weak knees. Remembering. The sudden yesterday kind. In this moment, the hallucinogenic replay is a flash point in his mind. A moment extended and stretched across the breath of temporal absence. Somewhere in hazy sexfog, he feels her hands move away from his neck to other regions of his geography.

He is aware again.

“Oh, baby,” she sighs through cries.

For a moment she thinks he might be crying. For a moment, she thinks, he just might be. Just her own tears. Weeping enough for both. As she’s done since crawling into and out of each other’s windows. All of their lives.

“I’ll cry for you,” she says.

“I am crying.”

“I know your kind of weeping,” she smiles, still over him. “It doesn’t exist.”

Her hairs trickle down.

Annoyance now. He pulls away. Too quickly. Too into his own sunlight. Too transfixed into his own morning. Standing, he watches her sit Indian-style. He lights another cigarette.

“I must make this first step for both of us,” he says it.

“Into the unknown boundaries of life?” she asks, spitting.

“For once, without each other.”

“It doesn’t make it easier,” she says. “My home is here. Your home is here.”

“My home is here,” he nods.

Shipwrecked. Storm and wind and an island. Unfamiliar, dangerous, impetuous. Come unto these yellow sands. Take hands, children. Curtsy and take hands. Kiss the wild waves wist. Full-fathom five.

Foot it featly.

“Somewhere else in the world,” she whispers, “someone else is leaving. You know that? Someone else is leaving somewhere else, too.”

“Come with me.”

“Stay with me.”

They stare, one to the other.

Ages pass in these brief, fiery seconds.

She adjusts the angle of her face, a solar sail to catch the encroaching light peeking through the window panes.

“I thought you didn’t want light,” he says.

“I don’t know you,” she sighs. “Funny, a person can be so young and so old at the same time. I feel it. Inside me. Festering. The soup of life.”

Billie crashes into herself.

Guilt.

Fear.

Fury.

Despair.

Early memories of nameless past things. Haunted things. Un-named and never-named things. And the ticking away of your everythings. An antique clock slowing after ticking and tocking. Floating numbers without a face. Nameless hands without direction. Ticking, those soft scratches grasping for sound with questions. Tocking, those hollow beats of staccato keening cleaving sound with answers.

Tick-tock.

An airplane engine shatters the silent sky overhead.

Tick-tock.

A steel pipe smashes into a windshield.

Tick-tock.

A swing-set creaks.

Tick-tock.

A dog barks.

Tick-tock.

She slaps him.

“Come,” he says again, pulling her as she shakes and mumbles mad. “Please.”

“No. Don’t stay,” she grins. “Sometimes I’m Cathy, you know, and I can never truly be separated from you. I am you. I’ll haunt you. You’ll haunt me. The thousand-billion memories in all of me. That’s what’s breaking.”

“You’re not breaking.”

Stepping backward, watching in wild, manic clarity, she recoils.

“No,” she repeats. “I can taste the time when we first held hands. First kissed. First Fucked. First made love. When you held me to you as if I were dying. And we were floating. Together.”

He beams as sunlight now.

“Remember when we were eight years old?” he asks. “And we played around our peach tree after supper, pretending to make movies?”

“I always remember that.”

“You fell on your head and blacked out.”

“And when I woke, you were crying.”

“I was crying.”

“It’s the last time I ever saw you cry.”

“I did cry,” he says. “I thought you were dead.”

“It was so quiet, that sound you made,” she smiles. “It’s my most vivid memory.”

Silence.

“What?” she asks.

Silence.

He lunges for her.

She brings him to his knees.

Their hands and fingers knead each other’s bodies, pulling skin, ripping off buttons and snaps. Their breathing is heavy as they eat one another. Teeth meet hair and flesh and lips over and over again like water. They laugh, ravenous and starving. Furious. Wild. Blindly chewing. Hands and body. All at once. Skin like a thousand greedy, hungry mouths. Skin and bone and muscle, sun-dried tears, salt tracks to taste and savor. Goose fleshing bodies. Freedom.

Yes.

Free.

And entered.

And filled.

Bury.

Fury.

Fire.

Life.

They hold echoes and shades of graying color. Neither speak. They know what silence looks and feels like.

How it tastes and smells.

How it moves and creeps.

He tickles her arm.

“It’s time,” he says.

She feels the clanging tone change and moves away to dress apart. He mirrors her movements. The sky blackens.

“Goddamn you,” she whispers.

“Please, come.”

“Please, go.”

Her real tears are slow in coming. She watches him pack light things. Small things. Taking bags outside. A few more to add to what is already there. In that pregnant, evil car.

The thing to take him away.

Finished with pre-flight, they stare again. Waiting for the first of the final moves. They try not to weep. They embrace their melancholy and terror with smiles. Their fates begin to mingle with the flavors of others. They do not hug. They do not linger.

When she nods, he finally does leave.

Alone at the window, she watches him go. He opens his car and climbs inside, closes the door, and starts the engine. For a while, he sits. Staring at the wheel. Minutes pass.

Or days.

She’s not that certain.

Frozen, she searches the déjà vu memory. The gray sky, the shadows inside her breathing. All of it familiar.

“How old was I, eleven?” she says aloud, her breath fogging the glass. “When your parents took you to camp? I ran after you and yelled for your father to stop until you were out of sight, over the horizon, and I was screaming no and don’t and please until I felt the sting of stitches in my side. We didn’t say good-bye.”

Tick-tock.

“I would have chased you forever, once upon a time.”

Tick-tock.

“Somewhere else, someone is leaving.”

Tick-tock.

“Someone in a car is backing down a driveway. Right now. At this moment someone else is watching that going.”

Tick-tock.

Tick-tock.

Tick-tock.

Impulse.

She bolts outside and runs toward the moving vehicle. He doesn’t see her as he lurches forward, the car heavy with too many things. He cannot see behind him through the thick of all that weight.

All that baggage.

The car speeds forward, sputtering and grinding. She screams for him, but her voice cuts to rattles and hoarse soundless shouting. It’s been how many nights awake? She can’t remember.

She doesn’t care about things not working or things breaking.

The only thing she knows is the impulse to run. To chase him. She’s eleven again. They didn’t say goodbye. And that same little girl is now breathless. And she screams her silent shouts. All in vain. Her bare feet running on asphalt. She prays for a flat tire before he reaches the top of the hill.

A stitch in her side and she stands frozen, armed against the morning sun. Facing the ass-end of an empty street. Listening to the birds and smelling the intermittent breezes of scuppernongs along the trees just beyond the stop sign. Her feet burn.

They bleed.

Silence.

Tick-tock.

She shambles in crashing, spastic motion to the curb. Collapsing, she scrapes her knees. She looks at her hands. And the curb beneath her legs. She hears the tick-tocking and the sound of the clocking as she sits and howls her weeping. Now, finally crying without fear. Looking up at the cruelty of angels. Remembering the peach tree. And the growing up.

And the days and nights and always were theirs.

And the suddennesses of all the nows as they morph into pasts and futures as the nameless emotions have faces of strange synchronicity and five billion parallel universes.

And now the oozing, wetness pouring from between her legs.

And the nervous laughter. Her running has loosened the liquid of his seed.

And presages the end of her weeping.

And the exhaustion of a strange near-to-fainting dizziness.

And her head falls like stretching taffy onto her folded arms. For an instant she can’t breathe. Her air slips away from her. She can’t breathe. She can’t breathe. But she can see. Looking down, between her numb-burned feet, the wetness between her pools in thick, viscous red.

The congeal of echoes.

Cascading down from deep inside.

Where some cruel god has taken a crowbar to her womb.

And she laughs again, in her airless vacuum of knowing. Seeing only drowsy black as the sun explodes from the behind the canopy of gray.

Author’s Bio: While pursuing post-graduate studies, D. Byron Patterson began a professional stage career with the Atlanta Shakespeare Company. He’s since been a webmaster, musician, teacher, and songwriter. And now, with a little less hubris and a bit more wisdom, he’s embraced his inner poet to permanently delve the waters of the written word.