Yellow

He whittled a lavender blue colored pencil to a sharp point and placed it in the holder along with the others: navy, turquoise, azure, sapphire, summer sky. None of the shades worked. They wouldn’t capture her eyes, the ones that haunted him night after night.

The boards shook above his studio apartment. Up there, she’d be balancing on her toes, leaping into the air, and claiming the clouds.

“Where do you perform?” he’d asked before he knew her name.

“In your dreams.” Her reply was impish, not a dismissal. And she had starred in his fantasies from the January day he glimpsed her in the stairway over her bag of groceries as he unlocked his apartment door. Her eyes glowed, suffusing his mind with a light he’d return to again, again, again.

That day he’d found a tidbit of courage. “I’m your downstairs neighbor, P-P-Preston.” The cold winter hall heated with his discomfiture.

“Preston, would you have dinner with me this evening?” The invitation came in a breath.

They’d begun. Chattering all night, she more than him, of course. His art flourished, as time after time he sketched her sculpted body in various poses, nude, clothed and everything in between, among kisses and sips of merlot.

“What color is my music?” she asked.

He laughed. “Silver and sea shell.” The exact hues he painted her frozen en pointe.

On the beach she’d lain, drops glistening against her skin. The crystal caress of the gods sparkled under a vermillion sunset.

The colors came vivid and true in the spring.

Summer flashed by with rooftop suppers under the meteors of Perseid. In charcoal, the lines skimmed over his page. Her music barreled toward its crescendo, overwhelmingly raucous against the midnight. Glimmers of the true her peeked through a vivid kaleidoscope, but the essence evaded him and his talent.

In the autumn sudden brisk breezes caught him off guard. What entranced him all year stifled him, the edge of pigments off by just a shade. The chains she’d used to bind him to her tightened.

The slice of her voice burned. “I can’t go on like this.” Her eyes — that color that eluded any combination he attempted to mix — captured the light, emitted only her pained confusion.

He’d struggled to find words to answer, but fought harder to find the images in an empty apartment. Her music silent.

Gray shadows hovered over his work, a new period the critics called it. The shades only served to block out the gold and amber leaves.

Yellow, that’s what his belly should be painted. Instead, he ran in place unable to face her music, unwilling to share.

He faltered, seeking color in a black and white world. Above him, her music still shimmered. So close, yet beyond his realm.

One evening, he ran into him on the stairs, boots clomping up to her. Scarlet jealousy flamed through him, and frenzied, he filled the canvases, one after the other.

The music stopped.

A knock at the door broke his reverie. Time to move. Yet his feet remained petrified.

Hours later, the moving truck backfired out on the street. Black descended.

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