Renée Elizabeth Clarke
Blue
“Gave in to blue a while back you know, don’t even question it anymore,” Juso said from the roof.
“So what now?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
Didn’t bother to glare up at him just walked away. We are brothers and that meant the conversation was over. The sun was just fucking off over the tree line. Walked further into our green. Wasn’t much to it, a bunch of trees, cicadas noising from somewhere.
Juso had never minded when the blue dye got on his skin or his clothes or the floor. He anticipated skin and ink touching, and I had to convince him every time to wash it off. I knew that as a fact because I could read his mind, just as I knew he wished he was an indigo critter and fantasized about indigo men and women running in from the forest to disarm him and touch their blueberry lips to his, to him. I accepted this about my brother because these visions made him so happy he would work through the day, drunk as exterminator fog, silent. When I noticed his mind drifting I’d shut up, focus on the dye work, let him continue. Days go better in quiet.
I walked further into the yard. We run a goat hair racket because we cannot think of any other way to make money. The goats we use to make the coats out of didn’t notice me as I walked through their cliques. I glanced back at Juso. He continued content to fiddle with some wires on the roof to find reception again. Satellite signals and bandwidths and interceptions are a regular preoccupation out here.
The dye mixed with dirt to look like bruises under my nails. No matter how hard I cleaned, mine were a diseased pair of hands. I found it difficult to touch myself with these hands. My hands repulsed my brain and my body so much that most of the money I made I spent to buy the goat hair back from the family to make pairs of gloves. I slipped on a pair and got to fiddling.
Juso was dead by the time the sun fully fucked down and I’d returned to the house but you knew that. He didn’t fall off the roof or have a freak accident or anything stupid. I knew it was happening, his death, as I petted myself with goat hair, and I didn’t stop. We were accepting death through our goats with only the sun to take interest.
I let my mind bleed into his erotic blue vision as he drank the chemicals. He’d swallowed the dye. My hand felt through the glove how saturated the dye made him feel. That’s how he died, joyous and complete. He’d given over to the blue and now so was I.
About the writer:
Renée Elizabeth Clarke was working as a translator in Taipei until she moved outside London to write, design and illustrate. She is charmed by letterforms, from shape to ambiguity.
Image: Blue Angel by Zoran Tairovic. Painting (no medium specified). 100 x 200 cm. 1998. By free license.
