Screaming Subtleties

Posted by Minni

Wishing her hair was shorter and wishing, at the same time, that the wind would stop, Jane Salstow stood at the corner of a Great Lake and a Great City feeling somewhat out of place in her yellow dress and shocking orange pumps with the heels lost in sand and only pointy tips protruding from the surface. The shoes were fabulous, subtle instruments that knocked wind from the beige people of the Midwest. Too bad, she thought, that they did not have a similar effect on the lake. Maybe the wind would blow the scent of smoke away, maybe it would blow away the gut-kicking smell of liquor and new clothes, leather and everything else. Maybe it would blow her away, like a giant yellow leaf in the fall, a leaf with fabulous orange shoes.
There were no more stars, because they ran out of energy from burning all night and there was no sun because it ran out of energy trying to keep things happy all day, there was just the moon that would never burn out because it, in fact, wasn't burning at all; just reflecting on the day like some do before sleep. Jane removed the orange weapons from her feet and walked towards the water slowly, but it was hard because she went straight into the wind, face first, hair blowing into her mouth and it was dark because the moon is only known for it's light in bad poetry, and she walked and stopped, moving in bold increments until her toes met the icy water of the Great Lake. Just across the dark body, lights of a Great City burned fossils, feeding the walls of bright blue as they towered far into the sky, all around her. She, at the bottom, by the lake, looking upward, had a long way to climb. A yellow speck against a blue background she stood at the edge of the water between day and night, in ambigous hours of time when the sun cannot dictate whether it is morning or not and the moon is useless. But then she decided to go away, and leave while no one was watching. The dawn always has a way of converting good friends into good strangers. She concluded in thoughtful retrospect: everything looks different under sunlight than it does in barlight. Drasticly. So she decided to float away, in one of her orange shoes. She climbed into the shoe and though it was a tight fit and the smell of leather made her sick, she sat in there and with her arms pushed the sharp orange vessel onto the water and floated, quite effortlessly, all the way to Canada where she was disgrutled to find that everything there was still blue.