Topic One :: Purple Prose

(January 21, 2008 – January 28, 2008)

====================

Written by: Purple Cloud (aka Shawnee)

“What’s it like?”

I stop tapping my fingers on the damp, slightly oily wood of the porch railing, surprised. It’s not the first time the question’s been asked of me, but I hadn’t ever really expected Tony to ask it. Even before he knew about me and my peculiar senses, he’d never asked such things. But time had changed us both.

Still, it’s not a topic I like to discuss at length. “What’s what like?” I say, knowing full well what he means.

He knows I know, too, and laughs. If there’s anything I’ve ever appreciated about him more than his voice, in my ears rich with melody matching to his mood, it’s his laugh. A laugh is an extension of the voice, after all. His harmonizes with the world around him. Tonight that means the soft whirring of crickets, the low hum of cars in the distance as their tires spin through black puddles on I-95, the rustling of leaves and the occasional patter as the rain collected there slides and drips, drips, drips…

But of course only I hear it that way.

“What’s it like being Hayden Melbourne?” he asks, amusement lacing his low voice in a pleasant string of notes.
I turn around in time to catch the crooked little half-smile I knew would be there. In the past it would have been partially hidden by a curtain of black hair, but now he keeps it shorter and out of his face, which at nineteen is only vaguely reminiscent of the shy thirteen-year-old engraved in my memory. There is a soft, calm sort of acceptance in his almond-shaped eyes that I don’t remember seeing before. In the dusty blue twilight and soft glow of the citronella lantern on the table beside him, their brown color turns near to black, but the look is there all the same. It’s not quite so dark yet that I can’t see the pinkish blush spreading across his straight American nose and cheeks; he knows how personal a question he’s asking.

“Shitty,” I say shortly, but really–

“That’s only half of the truth. Less. Isn’t it?”

As much as has changed, he can still read my mind better than anyone. Perhaps only Thalia bests him in understanding what he reads there. I take a deep breath and inhale all sorts of things no proper human being should, noticing things others would only pick up if they searched for it intentionally. The May air is unseasonably humid and cloying with the scent of the honeysuckle bushes that crowd along the edges of Tony’s back yard, a slice of saccharine, cream-colored taste underscored by a bitter black crust of city. There’s no getting away from it, even on evenings like this one.

Oh, but he deserves some kind of answer after everything I’ve put him through. Coming up with one isn’t so much thinking of what to say, it’s choosing what not to. I could rattle off everything I’m feeling right now in this moment, just like I did for Jason a few months ago when he asked The Question. I could tell him that the few stars that have begun appearing in the dusk above are singing; I could tell him that his movements at the moment are in subdued, antique silver and that mine are sharp in a shade of rust; I could tell him about any one of the memories ingrained in the wood beneath my hands (mostly his, some his parents, a few from frequent friends like myself and Tuesday); I could tell him about his laugh–he knows about his voice.

Instead I just say, “It’s great when the world is. Which is, you know, hardly ever,” and laugh a little myself. Speaking after him I sound so harsh. While he melds with the world around him, my sounds come off brilliant and commanding, golds tinged with turquoise that take a while to fade from my hearing. Hence why I don’t speak unless I have something worth saying.

Tony isn’t deterred in the least. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, and says, “What about right now?”

I told you he could read my mind.

Thunder grumbles in the distance as the last of the day’s storms roll away on the horizon. The clouds and the dying sun give the light a strange filtered look, a darkness underlit by tarnished gold. Birdsong lilts on the heavy air, high and celebratory after the rains. Summer is coming, yes, summer, and with it the end of the singing in my own veins. The oak-leaf burn on my left palm and the “stem” which wraps several times up to my elbow is quiet now, void of pain and irritation the city’s iron-dusted air usually causes it. That will change soon, but not just yet. Just yet I stand and watch my best friend, once my lover of a strange sort, as he watches me. He is more at ease in that small, slight frame of his than I’ll ever be in my average one. He is content in his own pale skin and content to wait, patiently, for me to answer.
But now I have a question.

“How do you see me, Tony? What do you think it’s like?”
He smiles in an almost mischievous sort of way. “I couldn’t say. You’re a complete mystery, and that’s why I’m asking,” he says, and pauses. When he speaks again it’s in darker tones and his melody skips with hesitation. “Except–”

“Except what?”

“That one New Year’s at Morgan’s. What was it, 2005 on to 2006? And right after Midwinter last year, after that whole ordeal was over. You were different. You were you,” he says, and the sky seems to darken suddenly into night. The little flame in the lamp is reflected in his eyes. I don’t know what’s in mine, but a lot of the pleasant quiescence the evening had offered drops along with the light.

I know the moments he’s talking about. Those moments when I felt at peace and in tune with myself and with my surroundings for once–when I was the world and the world was me–and he had noticed. Of course he had. While Tony wasn’t entrapped by scents or sounds with colors or air with flavor or music in a breeze (in a touch, in a voice), he was far from ordinary himself. I knew his story now, knew the lines behind the dormant sense of destiny resting just behind his eyes.
I think I can answer his question now.

“I was me how?”

He flounders for a moment, brow furrowing as he fiddles with the lantern in thought. “I don’t know, I don’t think I could…”

“You mean like this?”

And I pull together all the feelings from that evening. I listen to the last high, white notes of the birds as they settle down for the night. I feel the moisture in the air like navy silk, taste it heavy and bittersweet. The memories in the wood bubble up one by one, popping with the sounds of conversation and the scent of love. Cars and bugs and frogs and all the things that go bump in the night, the softly falling night, spin a chorus dark and grotesque almost in the tale it tells. Innocence glows and fades after the rains, light upon everything like the dew that has already begun to form on the undersides of the leaves. I take a few steps across the deck that echo with the decades of the trees that make up its boards and lean on the arms of his chair so that our faces are close.

I know how I look; I saw it once. I can see something of a reflection in Tony’s wondering eyes. The light that gathers under my skin, the gold in my blonde hair and the clarity in my own eyes, blue now like sapphires rather than their usual dull shade. It’s all there now. I’m all there now, really.

“Yeah, like that,” says Tony softly. The breeze takes his warm words and cools them. “But you’re still a mystery, even now.” I smile myself before dropping the feelings and withdrawing back into what I can afford to show the world.

“And I always will be.”

====================

Written by: Hitaru Higakura (aka Ariel)

She came out of her modest palace.

A rose blooming in the afternoon sun, gleaming in the orange glow.

She bathed in it, claimed it as her own.

Pearls blinking up at me; every blink of those lashes captured another bit of my soul.

She was as elusive as a blue butterfly.

So beautiful, yet so horribly hard to catch.

And even if one was to capture her, would he really keep her captive?

Wonderful silken wings fluttering in the wind.

I couldn’t believe my ears when she spoke that simple song.

“Your name reminds me of my brother…”

A quiet, nostalgic song, coming from lips only meant for an angel such as she.

A simple hut would never suffice for such a queen.

My palace would be too small to contain her ethereal beauty.

As she stares at the moon hanging in the iridescent sky,

I wonder…

Would she, perhaps, be considering joining her fallen sister?

Would she consider herself as such an esoteric being?

I wish to understand this mystical creature.

I shall unhook her from her sky and bring her home.

At least then, my heart will be closer to me than it is, hanging there, alongside the stars.

====================