Creative Writing Project: A New Shade of Blue

A New Shade of Blue

By Gabriellle Korrow

1

Henrietta’s body drained of blood on a Wednesday.

It pooled out around her like a personal sea, catching ants and maple mulch up in its tide. A large tragedy for small organisms beneath her. She was thirty-two years old, when she stopped growing older. She owned one high brass zippo lighter, twenty-three cookbooks, and a sparrow named Owl (Owl was later to be taken into the foster care of an elder gentleman who was looking for reasons to re-main alive. He found Owl in his neighborhood Petco, while shopping for rodenticide). Henrietta’s memories evacuated themselves out of her left ear and into the fresh air. She had loosely followed the rules without ever scuffing her shoes, to say she was normal is impossible (Such cultural constructs should be abolished and re-homed in a derelict burn-barrel.) This girl’s life had been a fall, from sky to murky bottom where she finally settled. Her death was a great misunderstanding, even so, much of the world went on like it does, with only minimal holes where Henrietta, now, was not. Letters were dropped through mail slots. The sky gathered its fill of water and purged. People drove around and said, “Fucking moron!” to other people driving around.

Those who knew her found out later that same Wednesday. The person who knew her best didn’t find out till later.

2

Reno found out his lover was dead on a Friday.

He stoically finished his decaf, black; it had gone frigid. After he’d hung up the receiver, Reno became stricken with the wretchedness that life had amounted to (Which is a real feeling that I too have). He thought it plausible that his life too, was scrawling out its final page; his own per- sonal sea was ready to spill. His face sagged under gravity. “If smiles were frowns,” he thought, “we wouldn't have to work to be happy, to lift our faces, gravity would naturalize our joy.” But that wasn’t the way of the world. Reno met Henrietta when he was eight and she was ten. They met in a St. Wesley’s group home for troubled youngsters. They didn’t fall in love till eighteen years later, after they realized that smiling took effort and they both had taken up the habit of smoking Pall Malls. They became encapsulated in the working of each others minds, in a smokey upstairs apartment. They would lay for hours, on the floor, and talk about the types of conditions that can riddle a mind, and how eyes interpret the world, and change it all up, and there was NO WAY TO EVER BE SURE OF ABSOLUTE TRUTHS! This delighted Henrietta, while it crippled Reno’s logical mind with hopelessness. He would stand up from the ashy floor and peer into Owl’s cage, despising the little fowl for its unconscious mind and simple life. 

3

Reno woke up on a Saturday thinking only of her face.

Henrietta’s memories had made their way across the city, and crawled into Reno’s mind. He recalled the time when her long red hair got tangled in the box fan. She handed him the shears and he cut it off in chunks. Her cheeks were all tear-lined when he collected what was left in his arms.

There’s a fascinating frailty to the human mind; he under- stood he knew nothing about this magic and how it was run. He later vowed to never do further research towards uncovering the mystery, when the only subject of any sig- nificance had up and turned cold.

When Saturday died it’s half death at noon, Reno boxed Owl up and left his cage on the doorstep of Onslow County Animal Services. (Owl lacked the consciousness and men- tal function to show his grief of Henrietta’s death. Reno took his absence of emotion as indifference.)

4

Henrietta had become obsessed with collecting butterflies.

Three weeks before her death, it became the only reason she left the house. Reno would watch in fascination at how she would put out their lights. She traced every word of Victorian Butterflies and How to Collect Them (Which is a real book, I too have read.) “Ethel Acetate is a chemical I prefer over nail polish remover since it kills much more quickly.” She followed the professional’s advice, closing the lid of a mason jar as the fumes played havoc on the little creature’s insides, and outsides, and evaporated their life. She would stack their stilled bodies in a shoebox, separated

by wax-paper. On her face, Reno read a lack of empathy. There was an impassive logic to her work; it was the neces- sary thing to be done. She carried on until her thirty- second birthday. Late in the day, she woke up overcome with sorrow of the life she’d taken. It had slowly piled up, like little bodies in an old boot-box.

5

Henrietta’s stilled body was packaged up on a Sunday.

With his pockets empty, Reno let her body be claimed by the state. Henrietta was buried at a minimal expense to the tax payers. Her lover went to the chapel in a tee-shirt, black. The service was stark. Henrietta had smoked, cursed, fucked men, and taken the lights out of bugs, but she had been insistent about believing in God. She called it her “backup plan.” And they had packaged her up like a good Christian. The fake flowers were scented of seven other unclaimed bodies buried in the last twenty-four hours. Henrietta’s skin, that had smelled so exceedingly like the earth, it made nature seem chemically-composed, had been overtaken. Four sides of plywood kept her col- lected. The imitation finish of Cherry-wood was a cruel next to her authentic form. Reno held his breath. There she lay, a motor the size of a real human that had kept a small will to live, churning inside him. 

6

Reno woke in a hospital bed on a Monday.

His mind was a blank page. The day before, he had filled his body up with pills, gone out, and set fire to a golf cart (With the power of stereotyping and the lack of good judgment, Reno had deduced that people who owned golf carts were rich assholes who deserved the torch.) The law-force that was assigned to keep people from setting fire to inappropriate objects placed Reno in St. Joseph's Hospi- tal for the Mentally Deranged. After Reno’s second week living in a bathrobe, he took to sneaking out after curfew and painting a phrase with a can red Liquitex. He tagged dumpsters and bar backdoors, train boards and even the centerpiece of the traffic circle, downtown:

“I found a new shade of blue.”

Because he truly believed that as individual as each love was, the sorrow of their absence must be just a unique.

7

Reno met his untried confidant on a Thursday.

Well acquainted with his paper-blue pajamas, and his wheelchair fetter, Todd became a canister full of Reno’s words. Todd was seventy-three years old and had wrinkles that collapsed multifold across his face. Twelve months ago he had stopped subscribing to reality; partly because his brain began forgetting appropriate conducts of its mouth and appendages, partly to see if anyone noticed. Appar- ently, everyone had noticed. His landlord had packed him up, deemed him a loony, and St. Joseph’s became Todd’s new physical address. Often Reno and Todd spent whole

mornings that splayed into afternoons watching the coffee pot, emptied half way, and go stale, lyrically speaking in hush-tone of Henrietta’s movements.

“She was a fully functioning ecosystem inside skin.”

“I can only imagine.”

“She would twirl round the room when she got a package from her aunt in Vegas. It was the only family who’d kept her.”

“Ah, her red hair must have flared out around her.”

“Mmm and I tried to understand her; tried to calculate the form of her breathing, but I never got passed her lips; got tangled up in how, out of the colliding nature of the uni- verse, she was formed. I never called her mine. She would have suffocated in my grip.”

“Ah, let the creature think she was free?”

“Because she was my window. The last fragment of life that wasn’t flavored bitter. We were not happy though; we found ways to hold each other together that made the pain ebb for moments on end.”

“ Ah-ha! And the girl? The kitchen? Was there mold grow- ing on the butcher’s block? Everything in moldy pieces! Everyone denies it, tries to hide it! But there it is! There it is!...ah, I am sorry, Reno. Reality, it’s begun to fall away from me.” 

8

Henrietta’s body was conceived in the summer.

Her parents separated sixteen minutes after. They dis- solved what her ten year old mind would later think of as a momentary marriage. When her mother got out of bed and drove back home and Henrietta’s father fell asleep, that was the divorce.

“They must have been in love. I was created because two people were devilishly in love!”

“It’s called fucking.” Reno blurted.

He was a schoolboy, holding the sneaking suspicion that life was wildly unfair. Henrietta plugged her ears and spun ‘way from him. She knew it was true, because she couldn't even picture two people in love. Her idea existed without context. A singular object in space, one word in well de- fined darkness. She closed her eyes and held her ears tighter. She spun and spun round.

And ah, how her red hair flared out around her.

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