BOUGAINVILLEA

There was no reason why he was now feeling very incapable of looking anything directly in its substance; the vase was green and darker green, in the spirals of vine that encircled the drop-shaped façade of porcelain, and looked like lime at its edges – the sun was being particularly unfair in it’s portrayal of said green vase, against the blue sky; had one’s view not been blinded by the constant rays attacking in hordes through the glass, one would have chance to notice the Marigold sitting alone and patient in the waterless vase. One wonders why windows look like pictures always: still, permanent, and otherworldly. Never able to offer any answers, only imagination, as if to say ‘all the world can offer is resource, it is up to the mind to mold and form.’ Yet the beauty of resource can be deceiving, distracting even, lost in the Beauty, not beauty of it all, we constantly forget to mold and form.

It was not so much a summer day as a piece of his imagination and as he turned to face the net he was taken back by the tactility of it all; the dark rubber-like rope, twine to be precise, shaped and contorted to keep him within the confines of this life where all the fishes around him were swirling in mass hysteria en masse. He blinked and the television turned off and the lights went dead with the street sounds, which changed into dryness; a sudden bareness that occurred as something stripped New York City of technology, modernity, and newness. The timbre of feet on pavement, the burden of heat on skin and skirts from Ann Taylor swishing in the wind on the Upper East Side were players in this matinee of the unexpected.

She made her way down the street in a very hushed tone of character; one would almost not notice her presence were it not for the prescience of her red pleated skirt (it had been sitting at the bottom of the pile of clothing and as she offered it to the cashier she could not believe her luck that she would soon possess this artifact of the spider woman). The sun opened her brown hair into highlights of blondeness and as her steps fell assuredly on the cement below her red pleated skirt, she fell into a thought that was too deep to swim out of before the van swiped her this way and then that, and ultimately face first into the dirt on the corner of Eight-first and Lexington.

One takes all these things, each for its own value, spins it in the light Virginia so adeptly spoke of and finds that age has presented nothing of that skill one needs to make sense, make understanding, of the randomness. There is no wisdom falling into the eye that observes the phrases and reads the words. And at that thought Andrea jumped to wakefulness to find that she was the only one left in the classroom. The room was exceptionally bright and vibrant in the reds and oranges that flew on the dust speckles making their way on the wave of sunlight that splashed ultimately against the chalk-green blackboard; above the American flag Robert E. Lee seemed to be conversing with Lincoln when suddenly Andrea’s gasp pierced the stillness of their conversation and the American flag wavered for a second and all the empty room and its paraphernalia observed this little girl. Andrea wondered why the teacher had not woken her at the end of the lecture. She realized she’d be late for dinner as she shut the door behind her. Upon her exit Lee began another conversation with Martin Luther King Jr. – the picture of Eldridge Cleaver down the hall smoked a cigarette and kept itself company giving an interview to an invisible television crew.

‘That goes beyond making a mistake,’ she spoke in a louder decibel than her voice was used to ‘you are a mistake.’ Pamela turned the lights out and walked into the hallway standing perfectly still on the crimson carpeting. She wondered why her tears should taste like salt when she did not regret her action, why her knees should knock so as she slid down the wall to sit on the crimson carpet, and her stomach clench against her will as she hoped she made enough dinner and remembered to feed the cat at the same time.

One wonders what all this has to do with the fact of sitting in an office space, watching a green vase on the window, and having nothing original floating within the confines of one’s mind. Nothing but colorless goldfish swimming in blue wallpaper in an empty room; people read white supremacist message boards don’t they? They sit at their desks and they read it, at least they do not write it you say, but supposing they do, then what? Very few people would admit…(His fingertips traversed the keyboard in light activity that produced the sound of rain falling on cement, coolly and naturally on an August day in New York City, perhaps on the Upper East Side. His words traveled the time from each conglomeration of keys struck, to the white screen in front of his dark green eyes and pale skin, which was bath in a white glow.) People read white supremacist message boards, and people write them too. With such a thing it is difficult to discern when the end has come, yet somehow one always knows that it is near, perhaps in this word – Bougainvillea.

THE END