The Color of Dreams

Intended to function as a groundskeeper’s shed in 1796, the building was erected upon the furthest edge of the Durand property with four measly walls and a wood shingled roof. Its first inhabitant, James Moreau, was an architect of flowers. He weaved floral marvels between the Durand's decaying three story home and the foggy basil green scenery. In the small village of Lourmarin, France, the shed and Mr. Moreau dutifully matched their humble surroundings.

As the centuries passed, the groundskeeper’s home was inhabited and abandoned, built upon and torn down, cared for and despised. Little of the original structure remains to date, but history fused into each slab and uneven nook until the makeshift structure swelled like a broken heart.

Emma Roberts found the shed in the summer of 1992. An American girl who dipped her dreams in the golden hue of Paris; a dream so bright with a dizzy yellow orange that it could warm the tip of your nose. Emma fantasized of a little apartment, bare and white, full of old novels and crumpled pages and bundled walks on empty streets. It was a quiet dream of a life unrestricted by nine to fives, illicit affairs, and prescription pads scrawled over leather sofas.

What Emma’s realtor found was the creaky shed and both forgot of outside-your-budget dreams.

Over time, the shed had grown into a studio flat immersed in the haze of the countryside. If you were to look inside, you would find unfinished wooden floors that run across three levels: one for a bed, one for a bath, and one for a narrow living space. Each wall tucking in the levels sighed with every gust of wind. Then, with Emma’s twin bed delivered, the bedroom barely had room for your feet to tiptoe. But it did have a wonderful window from almost ceiling to floor that faced the outer woods of untamed trees, red-white tulips, and unknown to Emma, the nest of a snow kissed barn owl.

Altogether, this home faced towards the estate some forty acres away and held only a single exposed lightbulb above the front door. Nevertheless, every night Emma turned off her lightbulb, signaling to the world that the shed now belonged with her.

If you truly were there, in the Moreau shed, Emma would offer you coffee in a broken mug and welcome you not to her small grey couch, but to her room to look through the window, crossed legged on her bed. But Emma rarely hosted guests. In fact, since she arrived in Lourmarin, no one but Emma had entered the home. It merely sat there, waiting for her.

Since first renting her home some months ago, Emma had mostly followed the two rules provided by her realtor. The first being, do not, under any circumstances, cross the estate to the main home and bother the inhabitant. Mr. Boucher did not, under any circumstances, like to be disturbed. Emma often wondered about the isolated man set aside in a massive, crumbling home. She imagined a well assembled French man of nobility and class, too important to be bothered with her and her little shed. Or perhaps a tall thin man with a wobbly form, too pale and frail to meet the world outside.

For the second rule, “faire ce que vous voulez”, to do whatever she liked with the property. But what did Emma like? The question had skipped over her like pebbles on a creek for so long, she had forgotten her answer. In America, Emma had only wanted to exhale fully and deeply. So, she purchased a grey couch and books to place here and there, a coffee maker with chipped mugs, and she lived quietly.

Yet, inevitably, some breath of her old self remained in Emma, like stones tied to her ankles, dragging silence into suffering. Most nights, unable to sleep, Emma watched the spindly trees shake in the moonlight, where, unknown to her, a nearly luminous owl hid amongst the forest, watching.

Painfully awake, Emma considered the colors of her other dreams beneath the owl’s gaze. Not the bright gold of Paris, but one of perfect blues and grays. The sea, pulling her away and away. Or another dream of red. A dark crimson that turned pale in clean bath water. Or a third, glowing black like the sky she watched far above the spindly trees. Jumping into it. A rush of cold air. All the same dream perhaps, only dipped in a different shade.

In these restless moments, Emma went to work, as many others before her had, on her home. She painted the front of the shed the lightest of pinks to match the scent of tulips in the air. She patched cracks in the bathtub and replaced the yellowed mirror. She hung shelves for her books; though they rarely remained un-scattered on the floor, or couch, or bed for long.

But tonight, a winter night that nipped at your cheeks, persisted with a moment worse than all moments before it. Emma could not be still for a single breath for fear that she would be pulled into the colors of her dreams. Pulled off a cliff, in a bathtub, or into the sea, she did not know. But she knew too well the pressure that shook in her joints, vibrating fiercely, painfully aching across her wrists while promising peace, if all she did was take one,

little

leap.

Could she take the leap?

Tonight, Emma sat on the floor of the living space, violently scrubbing the shed’s unfinished floor with a three inch square of sandpaper. Outside her bedroom window, the barn owl softly hooed, calling her name.

Should she take it?

Colors leaked into Emma, swirling and swirling, but she scrubbed harder, faster, because bien sûr, she could scrub away all the shades in her mind back and forth, over and over, swirling and swirling she pushed sandpaper harder into the floor/ but too soon, too many tears became dark splotches, too much swirled from Emma’s chest,

and too much was needed to live.

BANG BANG BANG

The pounding on her front door shocked Emma. She sprung from the floor and fell on the couch, crumpled and cowering. Her voice seemed to have dripped out with her tears and would not answer.

“Qu'est-ce que tu fous fille?” a large demanding voice boomed from the door.

Still, Emma’s voice was impossibly stuck to her throat and all that came as a response, hardly more than a whisper, “Qui?”

“J'ai dit what are you doing girl?” the voice restated in English, but with the long drawn vowels of a French speaker. “Eh - je m’appelle Thomas Boucher, now open this door!”

BANG BANG BANG

Emma’s head, so soaked in colors, was not there as Emma wiped snot onto her sleeve and walked to the door.

In the light of her single bulb, Emma saw a character she had never been creative enough to imagine. The abruptly short man looked like a wrinkled cherub with round speckled cheeks and watery blue eyes. Mr. Boucher was dressed in lavender pajama bottoms and an ermine fur robe tied round the middle by a red ribbon. He wore a seemingly average nightcap, but Emma could see a concoction of herbs sticking from its brim like a sort of flower crown. The man smelt, Emma thought, of waxy Christmas candles shaped like glittering trees that were never burnt but only pulled and packed away year after year.

“Eh - bonjour, Monsieur Boucher, de quoi avez-vous besoin?”

His cherub face immediately looked offended. “Non, non, pas de français!” He stilled to look at Emma but lost no momentum to the red puffs beneath her eyes or the snot crusted on her sleeve, “I want to know what you are doing! C’est three in the morning!”

Acidic anxiety rose in Emma’s throat. “What do you mean what am I doing?” she whispered, her body simply too empty to be loud.

“Let me in, I want to see what you are doing on my property,” Thomas Boucher pushed Emma aside, wafting warm Christmas scents to her nose, and stepped into the home.

“You can’t -- Monsieur what are you doing?”

“What are you doing? Three in the morning with your light on. Je cannot sleep, it shines right to my house and you sit here at three in the morning sanding the floor, no cares!” He waved his arms causing ermine sleeves to fly in circles around the home.

Emma’s every muscle, every atom of her body, sought to sleep in a sea of colors. “I am sorry Monsieur I will turn off the lights.”

“You will! And do not forget the porch! That one is the worst!”

“Of course, Monsieur.”

Thomas Boucher stopped his assessment of the room and looked at the girl. In her face, he saw the face of men returning from too many wars. Creux, he called them.

“O non, look at this! You are sanding all wrong!” he said, waving to the floor.

Emma began to plead, but was cut off as the man removed his coat and struggled down, one knee at a time, to the floor.

“I will show you how it is done!”

“Monsie--”

“Non! You start something wrong, you finish it right!” He began picking up squares of sandpaper.

“No, it is okay Monsieur. I will turn off the lights, please go!” Emma said, halfway lifting her arm to the door.

Again, he looked at her, empty, he thought.

“Non.” He shook his head. “Get down here!”

Emma could not argue. She had nothing left to argue with. So, she fell to the floor.

“You move like this yes?” Boucher began neat motions in straight short scrapes, nothing like Emma’s previous technique.

She did not voice a reply, but took a square and mirrored his movements. For a long while they said nothing. Only the sound of sandpaper kept them company.

Mr. Boucher could have said during this time that Emma’s home was once a groundskeeper's shed. He could have told her how that groundskeeper named Moreau dreamed of the world’s most beautiful flowers but hung himself before being made a slave. He might have told Emma of the war, how he saw empty men waltz in her face. He might have warned her of the great barn owl that lurked in the forest. He might, in fact, have even told Emma how the rosemary in his hat kept him safe from the omens of the oiseau de malheur, bird of doom.

Maybe, she would have listened.

But with each silent slide of sandpaper and each breath of Christmas scented candles, Emma’s heart began to pump, slowly one, then two. Only after reaching the floor beneath the sink did Mr. Boucher rise to leave. He said nothing. He pulled on the white mass of ermine, tied its ribbon, and turned to leave.

Only at the door did he look back to Emma and say, “Do not forget the porch light. That one is the worst.”

“Of course, Monsieur. I will not forget.”

With those words, Mr. Boucher plucked a stem of rosemary from his cap, handed it to Emma and left. Emma, heart beating slowly with one, then two, leaned from the front porch, watching the old man walk across the land. “Merci, Monsieur Boucher.”

And so was the first and last guest of Emma’s home. While Mr. Boucher never returned, each night he watched the single lightbulb in the distance. He watched for it to click off and submerge the small home into the blackness of his countryside. But much more importantly, each morning, he waited for it to turn on.