The Colors of Odds and Ends

Of course Carl was out the door first. The summer shower passed in the night but left the dew heavy on the grass. The morning sun sparkled with the possibilities of the day to the point of blinding Carl as he walked to the train station. The conversation he shared last night with Charlie and Rudy was short and the more he remembered it, the fact kept playing in his head that he was so tired at the end of the day, he couldn’t put his head around what the two of them needed. Instead he talked of his wants for them.

A butterfly landed on the orange and yellow flowers growing chest high along the wall. In a few minutes the train Carl needed to get on would pull onto the platform held up by this long reddish-brown brick wall. The gradation in color is what caught his eye. The earth and red clay colors rose above as a monolith of dark embers. Black etched wings quick flapped and cascaded open in a dramatic though unassuming unfolding of origami papers blown alit to coax a flame. The orange color inside the black border hit the sunlight in a blaze - the Monarch orange in this multi-hued fire.The Tithonia flowers burned their own tint of orange along with the center yellow. Red bricks in the tall monolith wall turned their crevasse of mortars into shadows cast from sunshine, and the firewall loomed large above Carl as he stopped - not to smell the flowers - but to ponder how the flap of a butterfly's wings can burn down what stood before him. The day is bright and sunny; the temperature, warm and comfortable in the early June morning, and Carl saw how the forecast for his normal day to day encroached the untenable.

He saw the signs when he was younger of the magic in moments - the places in the day where beauty fleeted with reality. Those moments pass away now, as the focus sets on the efficiency of tasks and working this job. The moments when the stars were the only thing he looked at in winter during high school, waiting for a ride home after practice - those now rarely touch his purview. He could remember looking to the south and seeing the light from Chicago reflect against the clouds. The orange-peach overhead street lamps reached to turn the clouds into an endless form of pastel shade as they made the slow walk across the sky.

He took to Orion as the constellation was the most prevalent in the late fall and early winter. His coach had called him a head hunter early that year, playing safety and roaming the field looking to pop a wide receiver running across the middle. Carl had never seen himself as anything but a smaller football player, but he knew angles and speeds with each new step. The coach put this idea in his head and Carl never thought twice about it. The game later on that week secured it in Carl’s mind forever after as a self trait. He hit a receiver a half second after the receiver caught the ball and punched the ball free, saving a touchdown. From then on he was a hunter.

The idea expanded and contracted as college came and went. He never had the talent as a footballer to start in college but the love for sport was firm in his identity at that point. Some years later as Carl became the sole supporter of this family, the idea expanded again. More at this point a memory he could fall back on, the idea that he was a hunter as a provider took hold. He would go out and kill things to feed himself and his two children. These companies he helped along as they died, they paid him a fee for watching what they built fall apart and disperse the assets to their creditors. Because they fell and Carl watched them and guided them to the best way to die, he felt at times to be doing the best thing possible for the people involved. They had made the difficult decision to dissolve. It was up to him to help them leave and with as much dignity as possible. Then hopefully the people left would remember the good times when potential was their currency.

The bell peeled out as the train pulled in above the wall and blew across the top of the butterfly’s fire, erasing any presupposed image on the red brick wall. Carl took off almost at a run to the concrete and almost crumbling stairs of the station. He noted to himself that the repairs to this could happen now, but really the station operators would start in on the project at some future date due to the yester year's pressing matters already planned. The stairs would fall into a heavier state of disrepair during the process of securing funding and claims of responsibility between the city government, the train authority, local residents and their private push, or whether they would need subsidized funding from some other source, during which the climb becoming more of an obstacle and more difficult as the years went on waiting for the care to ascend properly. Carl wondered as the doors opened and the conductor stepped out to let the passengers in, how long the people going through their daily lives would have this difficulty. How many more times he would climb those steps; telling himself that he had done it once and can do it again. Each time the obstacle becoming more of an issue. and the everyday walk up becomes just dealing with this less than ideal situation. Before the end of the summer this would become the routine. Carl would lean heavy on the railing where the gray concrete flaked off. By August he would not even notice how much he contorted himself to go through his day.

The doors closed behind him and the train took him towards the city.

Charlie was the next one up. Her alarm rang and quickly silenced by her hand slapping the top of the snooze button. She looked with her one eye above the pillow to the clock and decided she was awake enough to not stay in bed. Charlie closed her eyes, exhaled and threw off the bedsheets revealing the teal and oversized ‘Sir George Solti’ shirt from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She fully turned off the alarm and stood up, the shirt falling just above her knees, then walked to the bathroom. Rudy’s room was just across the hall, the bathroom, which they all shared, was one door further down, on the same side as Rudy’s room.

She opened the medicine cabinet, took out the toothpaste and began the circular chore of brushing her teeth. The sun was well up at this point and the light came in from all the windows in the house. She always felt like she overslept on these days when the sun rose before her and brightened everything. Even though she knew the summer sun rose two hours earlier than she did, on some level it still felt wasteful. This summer she was determined to dedicate her free time to memories and not the padding of a college application or creditable experience. This was her summer to create something undocumented, no school newspaper, no essays, nothing typed and no photography. She would read though. You can’t go to Stanford’s Comparative Literature program minoring in German and not have a reading list. She would read even without a formal list, gathering up the titles of paperback sci-fi along with non-fiction books reviewing the mythology of crows and ravens in different cultures, or picking up something on the history of salt. Whatever looked interesting to her resting on the shelf in the one story brown brick shop tucked away from the main strip of the suburban downtown, that is what she picked up. She treated that place more as a library than a store, paying four dollars for a paperback just to turn it into a deposit in a week. There was a copy of “Briefe an einen jungen Dichter” - Letters to a young Poet written by Rilke but published by Kappus in the original German which she looked at last time she was in the shop. Looking over the future course load, an elective on ‘Rilke and the meaning of life’ was offered in sophomore year. The idea that because it was for school, she should deny reading it, took hold of her while she turned the dirty blue and white striped canvas bound cover over in her hand. This was a summer of social connection and not of formal learning. The few days since, an idea that this book of letters was specifically for her gathered in more of her interest with each sober moment.

Of course that book was for her. In her random, non-East Coast American used bookstore shop, how else would a German translation of anything be available for three fifty let alone letters of encouragement and aspiration. She loved speaking German… and dabbled in the idea like most teenagers who liked words, that she could be a poet. She definitely appreciated them. After finishing her Junior year in highschool, she decided a trip to Germany imperative and planned one throughout this past year. But somehow the trip never materialized. This summer would have been the ideal time to go, but with the opportunity unavailable, the more she thought about her goals for the summer, and her goals beyond it, she should not just make social connection, but engage with the emotions that came with connection. Concentrating on school - and tasks for the last four years, left her a fierce independent; for better or for worse she did not know.

She spit and was done with this task of brushing her teeth. Rudy needed to wake up if he was going to make camp. His eyes were already open when she walked into his room.

“You should knock.” he said, looking at her from across the room.

“You stayed up late. I’m surprised you’re awake.”

“I heard your alarm.”

They stared at each other from across the scattered clothes and half finished penciled drawings that flirted with the boundary of comic book and graffiti art. The twisted eraser rubbings were on every page and Charlie was sure they were in the rug.

“Are you rolling over or can I leave?”

“I’m up.” he said and rolled away from his sister wrapping the blanket across his back.

“Whatever.”

Rudy lay looking at the wall, the sky blue he painted with the help of his dad last summer when they could open the windows and air out the fumes.

“Why don’t you want to go on Saturday?” he said to the wall.

But Charlie had already left. This was a new feeling for him watching his family move on while he decided to hold on to what was there. Though the more he thought about it, it was unfair to say ‘what was there,’ as the memory for Rudy was never really formed. There were sensations and blurred images from the ether that came through at random points in the day. No vision or feeling ever solidified, and the lines that should create the edges of definition and shadow, ended before they could form. The light from these memories instead of hitting on something solid creating a firm image in his mind, passed on by as a ricochet without a true receiver. That light left unable to brighten and show the whole of the memories that Rudy only partly held. He felt childish. He was grasping and trying to hold on to this memory that he only knew in part, like an infant unable to focus their eyes just after birth.

The drawings scattered across the floor was what he used. Rudy documented his memories for fear of losing them, but also they were a way to figure out the fogged up likenesses that came to him without warning.

“This is a perfect sky blue.” he said to the wall six inches from his face. He could feel himself dozing back into sleep. With the late night and this feeling of sudden discouragement, it would be easy to roll into a ball and not wake up today. He sighed and savored the comfort of his bed.

The dress, though, the clouds, stuck in his mind. Purple as they gathered their gowns last night and the golden threads spooled out until faded. He would have to draw that.

He rubbed his face and slid his hands down to the blanket pushing it off and down the length of his bed. Rudy yawned and stretched, arms reaching to the sky, flexing and drawing his legs apart then finally swinging them over the side of his bed. Wearing the same red shirt he had on last night he noted his sunburnt had faded in his sleep. He looked for the spiral notebook filled with heavy sheets of blank paper, filled with doodles and characters and scribbles and yes, heavy amounts of eraser rubbings.

He lay down on the rug and flipped open to a blank page. He took the lavender pencil from its place and recreated the gossamer of imaginary lines between two points of light. It may not always be so, as his confidence ebbed with the wind, but he felt like writing his name in the sky. Not so other people would see, but to be up there and move things, mark on them; to turn around and see the dark towns and cities below him as he drew a cloud that could have been kashmere.

“No time for that.” Charlie said from the door.

“I am awake.”

“You need to go to camp.” she said. “I told dad that you would be out the door before I left. Put on a bathing suit”

“I have an image and would like to remember it”

“Why am I your authority?”

“That’s a good question. Let me finish.”

Charlie walked into the room, stepping on the cast off papers and half done scratch.They crumpled under her weight. She knelt then lay on the floor next to him both facing the page he was working on.

“I understand we are at odds on this, you getting up and moving on with what you need to do, but this is part of the day. Actually participating.” Her breath was minty fresh.

“Your version of participating has no time for, for… for thinking about anything. This is what I saw last night while you walked in on me staring at the sky. I am going to put it on paper before I forget.”

The two of them stared at each other in defiance daring the escalation. Charlie broke first with a sigh. “You have seven minutes.” She looked at the clock on the wall, knowing that he would be late at this point. She looked back at him.

“Go away.” Rudy said.

“No. I want to see what you saw.”

“It’s personal… and unfinished.”

“That’s why I’m staying.” The two again stared at each other, defying the other. And Charlie again changed the argument. “I want to see what you saw.”

Rudy looked to the page scattered with purple lines and the starts of shadings with shadows of cratered light. “You cannot speak.”

“For seven minutes.” she said. Then Rudy bent his head and started in on the page.

The train pulled away. The roar and clatter of the large machine faded to the south and the quiet that remained highlighted every movement. Sole focus was now on the black edged wings opening in the sunlight. The orange flowers now empty of nectar meant the butterfly would take to flight soon. So now is the chance, right when it leaves. With one slow flap to dry the wings just a bit more and it jumped from the flower. The cat sprang a quarter second later, catching it between its teeth and pinning it to the ground with a soft padded foot. It twitched and wriggled. Unable to free itself, the cat looked down at it and cocked its head. The butterfly spasmed in a last attempt to move but the cat bit its head and ate the center. It left the orange and black wings at the bottom of the flowers.