The
rain fell like an avalanche of stone, a mass of brown-gray beating down the
occupants underneath with a fury. My grandmother used to tell me the old
stories, which were old even when she was a little girl. They were the stories
of a bygone era when scientific explanation were wanting, and we turned to our
imagination over experiments. She told me of a woman with long, white curls who
rested in a bed of blue. She said her son was the sun. When the sun would hide,
the white woman would cry and cry, with big tears of grief thundering on the
ground like the daggers through her heart. Sometimes she would scream and shake
the world with her flashes of anger at how her son was taken from her.
It
was a much more romantic story than gaseous water condensing on soot particles.
Perhaps those times were more romantic. Perhaps ignorance is inherently
romantic, and in this era where all our answers came readily to our fingertips,
ignorance and its romance had been lost.
The
puddles were slick with oil, refracting the bright, piercing glow of a thousand
LED lamps into a dirty rainbow across the brown surface. I had heard that the
upper levels of the city were much cleaner, but passes into them were
expensive, and I was only to stay here a night, my last night of freedom and
perhaps my last night alive. Dirt didn’t bother me.
I
sometimes traced the path that led me here as I stared up into the starless sky
while a background concert of grumbling voices, mechanical whirring of vehicles,
and gasping generators streamed noiselessly across my ears. It was simple
really. There was a war far away, across the expanse of space. The distance
could not eclipse its importance. The nobility of the crusade was poured
through every media, only matched in quantity by the pressed gray uniforms
returned to families instead of the person inside.
It
had happened to the family next door of grandmother and I last week. In another
war (or perhaps the same war a decade previous; it was difficult to demarcate
the passing of one war to the next) it had happened to my parents. Now, it was
my turn to take the gray uniform so it might be returned to my grandmother one
day, politely folded.
It
was a warm night. The teardrops of the white woman traced the curvatures of my
face tenderly, as if my own mother could see me now and bemoaned by end. It
trickled pass the collar of my jacket. It was probably too warm for a jacket,
but I kept it on anyway. It marked my fate, but it still smelt of home where I
had unpacked it the week before with a note of my calling. My grandmother had
taken to washing it carefully, fixing a loose seam at the cuff. It was as if
she wished it to be in perfect condition when it returned home without me. Now,
it would smell of pollution, with dingy stains across the shoulder from
whatever this rain carried with it.
I
should turn myself into the barracks, out of the rain and out of this phantasm
of reality, for this moment could not last. It would melt away with the hours,
and leave me back toward the specter of death with all my gray-clad comrades.
It meant nothing.
I could write a
note to my grandmother, although I did not know what I could say. We had spent
the last week in silence, for words no longer held any power to my fate. What
would happen would happen.
I
did not turn back however, as logic dictated. Instead, a low building with a
red, glowing sign and a large corrugated awning welcomed me. The structure was
nigh empty and quiet. Although I had never had one before, I suppose now I
could use a drink.
The
inside was dimly lit, and the few occupants seemed likewise dim. There seemed a
heavy film over everyone and everything, as if some cosmic maid forgot to dust
this corner of the universe and had left it to accumulate the grime of life.
That is, everyone except one.
A
young woman sat on a barstool. Her hair was an electric blue, her skin a burnt
umber. A tribal tattoo wound it’s way around her bicep and another at her
thigh, which her short skirt and holey tights allowed vision of, but was almost
obscured by her thigh high boots. She had a bright smile, that seemed to light
the place more than its faded lamps.
She
did not look up from chatting with the bartender, all smiles and jokes. I went
around her to the right, well within the shadows to which I now belonged. My
separation from them was temporary, my rejoining impending.
“At
ease, soldier.” I turned. She stood behind me, saluting with a facsimile of a
hard frown. She broke into a laugh. “Are you one of the recruits?”
I
nodded. She sat beside me. Her eyes matched her hair. The antihelical fold of
her ear had a trio of stars carved out of it so that I could see the blue locks
tucked behind it. A silver wire twisted across the rim of her ear.
“How come you guys
are always so grim?” she asked.
“I
suppose we know our fate,” I returned quietly.
“Higgs,
get this kid a drink,” she called out, shaking her head. “Where are you from?”
“Does
it matter?” I asked.
“Um,
yeah. You’re not from around here, so that means you’re from somewhere
different. Different is cool,” the woman said.
“Amazonia, you
know, on Earth,” I said.
“This
your first time outside the planet, soldier?” the woman asked with a smile.
“My
family never had much money,” I explained.
“Well
then, merde, I should show you around,” the woman said. The drink the woman had
ordered for me arrived along with another for her. It was colorless and came in
a thin, tall glass.
“Bottoms
up, soldier,” the woman ordered with a smile. I took the glass and she held
hers up at the same time. I do not know why, perhaps the belief that nothing I
did tonight would matter if my end were so close, but I listened to her.
I
sputtered, coughing. She laughed like lightning, bright and electric. She
grabbed my hand, wiping her mouth with the other. “Come on, soldier.” She
pulled me away from the bar with my eyes burning. My brain seemed fuzzy in face
of such untarnished optimism. It could not object.
The
rain met us. She smiled and let go of my hand for a moment. She spun in it,
puddles splashing against her boots and coating them with muck. She seemed
abuzz with a strange joy that seemed to have no origin. She looked at me; with
radiant teeth exposed, she laughed. The laugh hit me like a physical force, as
if her spirit had enraptured my mind.
She
grabbed my hands and spun with me, laughing all the more at my expression.
Then, we ran. She pulled me through the streets, past the huddling crowds and
faded buildings.
“Where
are we going?” I asked her as we ducked around a signpost.
“I
don’t know!” she replied breathlessly. The exertion cleared my brain of
extraneous thoughts.
We
stopped at a fountain, an old fixture from when the city was new. It was no
longer working. There was once a green around it, but all that remained was
rocks and mud. In this dingy part of the city, no one had taken the time to
repair it. I doubted anyone cared when so much of this borough was gray and
dirty.
She
sat against the fountain, panting and radiating. Her blue hair seemed
luminescent, brightening up the area with impossible light. She was a candle in
the dark. She looked at me and laughed.
“Take
off your coat, soldier,” she said. “It’s hot.”
“I’m
not hot,” I lied. Sweat was creeping down my brow, but my earlier assertion to
keep my jacket hung on to me. Perhaps I considered it my grandmother’s last
gift. Perhaps I had an irrational fear of losing it because of its loss was so
closely associated with death. Only death could take it from me. If the woman
could see my grim thoughts, she gave no notice. Instead, she batted her bright
eyes and laughed.
“Of
course, you’re hot, soldier. Anybody with two eyes can see that,” she smiled.
“Hey, what’s that over there?”
She
pointed to an old shop with multicolored lights. She didn’t wait for a
response, not that I could provide one. “Come on, soldier. Let’s go see.”
She
grabbed my hand and pulled me over. Inside was a candy shop and gray-haired man
with a beard like the candy floss that sat to his right. The shop gleamed with
the colors of the rainbow; candies were displayed on archaic wood shelves with
great care. The lower shelves were polished with a thousand, tiny, eager
fingers, but the upper stood untouched, with dust mites dancing above them in
the overhead fluorescent lighting.
There were still
children in this dark, dank level of the city, children who so few people cared
about that they hadn’t taken the time to repair the fountain in which they
could play. But those children had a few that could still care, that would take
them to get candy, a momentary diversion from a dark fate.
“I
love cotton candy,” the woman declared. “My dad used to get it for me when I
was little. You ever had it, soldier?”
I
shook my head, my dark thoughts scattering with her words and smile. She seemed
to flash across the darkness around her like a shooting star. She pulled a cone
of candy floss down, swiping her card across the counter.
“The blue matches
my hair, don’t you think?” the woman said, pulling the confection close to her
head for comparison’s sake. I found words a little awkwardly.
“Almost,” I said.
“But, I think your hair is a little brighter.”
She laughed. “You
should get the pink!”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I said
so, soldier!” she smiled, paying for the second cone of candy floss. She thrust
it into one hand and grabbed the other, pulling me impatiently. “Come on.”
Trying to save our
confections from the pouring rain, as impossible a task as trying to save the
lives of soldiers in war, we ran forward into the night. She laughed as the
candy stuck to her fingertips, as brilliant as blood but of an opposite color.
Likewise, her expression betrayed the opposite emotion.
She brought us to
a stop, as she held her ribs aching with laughter. “You have cotton candy on
your face,” she said.
“Where?” I asked.
The candy floss had melted in the rain, like I feared my life would soon. I
felt upward at my face, trying to find the location of the misplaced
sugar.
“There,” she said,
leaning in next to me. She licked my cheek. My brain went numb. I stood
stock-still, unsure of how to respond.
“Now, you match
your cotton candy,” she laughed. “It’s all wet now though. Come on, soldier!”
She threw our
candy flosses away, and pulled me forward into the dank, dark cave of a mall
half way through closing down. We ran up the stairs until we reached the
atrium. A glass ceiling stood above us, and through it, you could see the
glimmering buildings of more prosperous people. It was like the film that
dissociated condemned soldiers from reality. It was for those people above that
I gave my life.
Absent-mindedly, I
took off my soaked jacket and folded it under my arm.
“Did you see the
stars back on Earth, soldier?” she asked.
“I did when I was
little. I lived way away from the city with my parents. They died though, so my
grandma and I had to move back into the city so she could work,” I said. I
could picture our perfect little house so clearly in my mind before death had
taken its hold over my life. Yet, death was still not done with me.
“Did they sparkle
like everyone said? Were they really so bright that they looked like milk spilt
across the heavens?” she asked, forgoing the normal apologies people usually
offered when hearing the passing of my parents.
“Not quite like
milk, but there were a lot of them on clear nights,” I said. Sweet memories
made bitter by the fate of their occupants danced across my cerebrum. “My
mother knew their names.”
“Names don’t mean
squat, do they, soldier?” the woman said. Her eyes sparkled with the
understanding she had no desire for my name, and I should expect none from her.
She laughed, and stole my jacket from underneath my arm. She placed it over her
own shoulders and grabbed my hand. “Come on. There’s more to see.”
We ran out of the
building and into the rain once more. She smiled and laughed, as if the rain
were a glad song only she could hear. We stopped at a toy cart, and she bought
bubbles and a red balloon with a swipe of her card.
She handed me the
balloon and spread a ring of bubbles around us as she laughed. The punctuated
quickly with the oncoming rain, but it didn’t seem to matter for the woman. She
smiled and laughed with the mirth of child a third her age. It was as if the
bubbles were filled with hopes and dreams. “Come on, soldier!”
We left a trail of
bubbles as we ran, and as the night passed, the rain lessened then dispersed.
The bubbles lasted longer, iridescently refracting light into a thousand tiny
rainbows as beautiful and poignant as any artistic masterpiece. They were like
will-o-wisps that guided its followers toward dreams. Perhaps they were crafted
from the fabric of dreams themselves, like this mysteriously mirthful woman
with blue hair.
We found ourselves
back in front of the low building with the glowing red sign. She grabbed the
balloon from my hand, kissed it once, and then thrust it into the air where we
watched its ascent through the high reaching towers into the upper echelons of
society. It was like watching a representation of the dream we all dreamed come
into reality.
She swept her arms
around me and kissed my cheek.
I was smiling. I
did not know when it had happened, but there was a smile I found somewhere in
the last few hours that I had thought I lost many years ago.
“This is where I
leave you, soldier,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
The world closed and narrowed. The possibilities drew back darkly toward the sucking
black void of reality. “I thought-.”
She smiled.
“You’re beautiful, soldier, and so am I. Sometimes, the most beautiful things
are temporary, like bubbles.”
She turned to
leave.
“Wait!” I said,
running to catch her.
She smiled. “What
is it, soldier?”
“My jacket,” I
said. She took it off and placed it around my shoulder. With her hands behind
my neck, she pressed her lips to mine. They tasted of sugar.
She laughed. She
placed her lips to my ear. “Bubbles, soldier,” she whispered. She ran off into
the night, still leaving bubbles behind her.
