- Midnight
Blue
- By Lisa Anne Sutter
- __________
Alice stood behind the screen door and looked out of the top of her pop-bottle
glasses. Even with these, she could see little. Barely colors. What do blue lips
mean? Alice called from the screen door.
Shut that, Marcy replied. Moths get in that way.
Something brushed her temple and she jumped back from the door.
Your lips turn blue when your body is deprived of oxygen, or when you are cold.
Peter drowned, Marcy said. He breathed in the water.
Alice pushed her plate of macaroni and cheese with hot dog pieces, typical
Thursday night fare, to the center of the table, upsetting a vase of flowers.
Marcy didn’t scold her as she usually would have done. She wasn’t her real
mother: a temporary one, a foster mom. Show you what? What did you say?
Show me the colors again, Alice said.
Marcy brought out Alice’s color chart. It was the size of a steering wheel,
so that Alice could hold the card up to her face. This one is orange. And this
is red. She dipped Alice’s fingers into a bowl of hot water along with her own.
These are warm colors; you learn this in painting, Marcy explained. And these
are cool, she said, placing Alice’s fingers in cold water. But sometimes, she
said, when the colors are too strong, cold can seem hot, and hot can feel cold,
as with water. They can trick your fingers, like when water feels cold on your
skin a moment before it scalds you.
Alice held each crayon from the terraced box and dragged them under her nose
like cigars. They each seemed to smell different, though faintly. The wax sticks
made a light snapping noise when they changed direction on her page. Alice learned
colors as best as she could with crayons. Later, her favorites were watercolors.
She learned that thicker paint made the color stand on its own two feet, or by
adding water and testing the consistency between her fingers she could make them
shy, shadows of what they could be, when pink was shy of red. She relied on the
emotions of the colors when she painted, but her eyesight was so poor all of the
colors in her palette had black puddles sitting on them from the attacks of her
greedy brush.
Marcy dabbed each section of the palette with a tissue. You need to rinse out
your brush more often, she said. Otherwise they’ll all run together and you’ll
have black blobs of color all over.
Marcy stopped her hands. Black is the color of the sky without the sun, she
said, but that doesn’t mean that no warmth is there. It is a greedy color, absorbing
all the others, obliterating everything. She leaned closer and brushed Alice’s
hair from her shoulder. Don’t let them fool you about black and white.
Alice brought her hands close to her face, until they were so close they touched
her eyelashes. I’m black. Alice drew the same thing again and again in her notebook,
a little boy in Midnight Blue. She held up her hands to her face, straining to
see them. My fingers are blue, aren’t they? So everyone will know I am a killer?
Crayons don’t stain your hands. And you didn’t kill anyone. You just need a
bath. Up the stairs.
