Hex Color

This is an experiment with queer time and color. There are a few glitch-GIFs scattered throughout, so folks who are sensitive to flashing light might wanna be gentle with themselves.

They handed her to Pink the moment she slid out into the world, her newly-minted father cradling her head like a Christmas ornament made of white skin cells. As the woman, the mother, looked on, exhausted, happy, delirious, drugged, she asked Pink for his opinion on the matter. Pushing sounds together until they sounded like flowers, Pink gave the baby a name, and the name became prophecy. The mother and father prayed for it to come true. She could be a doctor, thought Mother, while the father saw it stamped on business cards, all stacked up neatly in the office of a hotshot attorney.

They became parents.

Pink selected fabric samples and toys to decorate their Los Angeles apartment. He pretended to have an accent and a degree in Interior Design so the parents would find him intelligent, exotic, and unique, one of their crowd. He would help the mother pack up the baby in her stroller and saunter with the two of them down Rodeo Drive, all of them sunbaked, happy, gleaming seashells tickled by the Pacific coast. They preached to a choir of believers, and everyone sang their stucco hallelujahs as they held their brown paper bags up to the sky.

***

I am holding Pink up against a brick wall by his neck. Water rises to his eyes—not from sadness but from pressure of my dry hands. His eyes puff from their sockets, swollen and gummy. Pink didn’t see this coming. I usually identify as a pacifist or a vegan or something overtly political, but here is my everclear of anger.

“Where’s your cape and mask?” he sputters like a radiator. His Botox stopped having an effect years ago, and now he is only a pincushion for all kinds of needles, his face showing the ends of an ecstatic, wild youth.

I drop him. He slouches on the rain-soaked cement, laughing as gravity reaches up to grab him again.

I stand tall in a pair of boots purchased with every intention of kicking the shit out of something, but, but, but, but,

I have no idea what I should do next.

I can’t kill him and I don’t want to.

***

She learns to crawl and likes that so much that she learns to walk. As she walks, she starts to talk and then cries and laughs and writes her name in the sand somewhere in the mess of umbrellas and towels sprawled out like seaweed on Laguna Beach. Pink dots the “I” and tells her how beautiful her handwriting could be.

***

Here is the body, not his but hers, broken and crumbled for family portraits and football games, church functions and school dances.

Smile for the camera. Eat yourself up. Take two before bed with a glass of water. Take a deep breath. Stay positive. Get rid of that sinful haircut.

Wear Pink.

Wear Pink.

Where Pink.