The Stark Gray Consciousnesses So Far Away From Our Sickly Yellow Home

by knospi

You looked toward the sky and asked for the stars and moon to accept you. I, with my rough dirty badger fur, passively hoped for you to succeed. You were ignored, but one star, far far away, already dead but for the tiny stream of light straggling through space at 299,792,458 meters per second just to reach me, heard me. We were connected forever.

1. IT WAS NOVEMBER

INTRODUCTION:

Please pay the utmost attention to the chapter titles, for they may be the only thing holding this story into any form of coherence.

IT WAS NOVEMBER.

And then she slid from the frigid metal encasing the car door into the even more frigid winter air. She saw frost on the kitchen window before she saw the real, dry brick wall before her. The car drove away from her as she shut the door. She saw the kids huddled before her through her breath's fog. She saw her own name in the kid to her left, who came before her in roll call – "Selphie." In future years, it would become that of a joke, her name, but in the now, it was like the name of a naiad laughing as she slips into the clear water, beyond your sight.

And so following, Selphie swept her gaze to the right. The scene was dismal: empty concrete between a school drop-off lane and that dry dry wall. Middle school students trapped outside on a November morning because no one would bother to supervise them inside. The sun rose over the school so Selphie could see only the pale blue sky and no bright white sun, not that she would look at it anyway. All her peers shivered in the shadows – but there! In front of her lay a student casting their own shadow in the 7:15 AM school-shadow, collapsed as they were against the wall. As she approached, she recognized the signature $5.00 purple headphones sold at Shopko to fall apart days later in true eccentric Selphie-detail-observation fashion.

So she approached faster, so she could jumper cable the kid A.S.A.P, while they still had their eyes closed. But then she noticed the grass-dew all over the front of the kid's shoes so she stopped and walked away. Grey eyes watched her walk away, but no one could tell because the eye-whites were also gray in the shadows, and no one was looking anyway. Selphie trapped one of the stupidly late dandelion buds hanging over the edge of the sidewalk from the withering grass beneath her shoe and its little stringy yellow-and-white polleny guts spilled, crushed with waxy green petals, in her path, and she didn't look back as she traveled to the back of the school where the teachers parked and the dumpsters rotted and the asphalt was cracked and she could watch the sun rise over the distant tree-row.

She never came so stupidly-early again.