There's something about the color yellow that never fails to drive me crazy. I explained the sensation many times to my brothers, yet I had never been able to move them the way she moved me every time I saw her. In retrospect, I find hard to not imagine a world in which I was more able to voice my thoughts. If only I were more a man, my thoughts would be enough to change everything that happened to her.
I remember seeing her for the time in the courtyard. She was by herself, knee deep in the snow. She was young by the standards of my brothers, but by her people she was a grown woman. There was nothing remarkable about her face, or her anything; she looked like any of her kind. Except that she was wearing a rain jacket instead of a winter coat like any sensible person should be wearing that day. I recall thinking that she must have been freezing, but she didn't seem to mind the cold. And her jacket was yellow.
I didn't understand why she wore that jacket in place of something warmer, only that there was no sun shining and in that moment she alone illuminated me. I wanted to ask her name, and her story, and why she had such poor choice in weather appropriate clothing, but I could only observe her in her yellow rain jacket from my pulpit in the snow covered square.
Because she was woman, and to her I was but a statue.
It's difficult to explain the hunger to those who aren't my kind. It's not really hunger as in withering away from lack of sustenance. It's more like sleep deprivation; withdraw doesn't make you emaciated, it makes you insane. Typically, I don't have an issue with going mildly psychotic. Paired with the proper precautions to insure I don't do anything too ethical taboo, I find relinquishing self-control quite liberating.
I wasn't the only one of my brothers to feel apathetic about the hunger. If we ever got too close to going hollow, we'd zap a couple rodents and try to get back on the straight and narrow. Sure, there were a few slip-ups here and there, but nothing so bad that we'd start a food-farm like some of our brothers up North. And none of us are interested in attracting the Englishman to town.
The woman in the yellow jacket didn't return the next day. Part of me knew she wouldn't come back my courtyard. A woman like her had places to be, and the freedom to walk around in the daylight with her friends and family. She could be countries away and I would never know.
There are no trees in my courtyard. It's old and made of stone and a mix of moss and ivy cover the faults in the masonry. In the spring there are song birds and bees that come to pollinate the honeysuckle bush. In the winter there is nothing but snow and the insects that retreat far beneath it. I don't get many humans coming my way; it's a bit of a hike to get to if you aren't accustomed to it.
That's what made the woman in the yellow jacket special.
I wouldn't call my existence lonely. My brothers and I are solitary by nature: we can't speak orally without assistance, we seldom express emotion, and we don't look at each other on fear of death. What we are, though, are the world's best listeners. One of my brothers, he would stand day and night in a cemetery to relieve what grief he could. Another traveled to the coast after a tsunami, trying to ease the sadness of the world. They sympathize with the trees and with the creatures. All of my brothers are telepathic to varying degrees; we pick up simple thoughts from crushed plants and tell them not to fear their rebirth. Humans and other intelligent beings take more concentration and practice, but I know a handful of us can do it, and even a few who can manage a conversation. Mostly though, the ones who can communicate, only practice so they would be able to get out of a jam, should they encounter the Englishman and his companions.
The Englishman was somewhat of a legend among my brothers. He's known by many names, but our word for him is descriptive of his speech, not his origin. Not much is known about him, other than that he hunts my brothers periodically and has left many of us frozen on meeting us. Once in a while, one of us would claim to have spotted him and we would make ourselves inconspicuous and pray that we'd be overlooked. Mostly though, we regarded him as a pest and not a threat. The police box though, that's a different matter. To me and my brothers, the police box was the holly grail: the end to the hunger, no need to fear going hollow. Of course, none of us were bold enough to try to snag it from him. Why pick a war with a legend?
If she saw my face behind my hands when she returned two days later, she would probably would laugh at my ghost of a smile. I bet looked ridiculous, but I was genuinely glad that she came back. She was mysterious and I was curious; those two go hand and hand, don't they?
I peered at her though my finger as she stood in the snow in her yellow jacket, her hands in her pockets. She was so still, if anyone else were there, they might have wondered which of us were made of stone. She left after an hour of doing nothing; only her boots leaving any trace of her. I knelt and touched the outline of her foot prints, missing her already. That's when it hit me, mind flooding with a realization that should have occurred to me a long while ago.
The woman in the yellow jacket had been crying tears into the snow the entire time and I had been too struck by her to notice.
For my brothers and me, there isn't an equivalent reaction we experience to crying. It's not uncommon for us to keep our eyes open for extend periods of time, especially when we are being watched, which of course renders us motionless. We do experience sadness, as well as pain, and anger, and fear. We are afraid of the Englishman, and of his wrath should he want revenge for what some of our brothers from the North did to his friends. We are afraid of being locked into our own bodies, unable to move for eternity should we look another brother in the eyes. And above all, we are afraid of going hollow.
One of my brothers came to visit me that night. Word had gotten around that there was a human in my part of the woods that I hadn't zapped back, and he was there to lay dibs on her. He was one of the older ones, brothers my age and younger weren't that big on messing with humans. But my brother explained that the woman in the yellow jacket was a loner and didn't have any friends or family. He said that nobody would miss her and we wouldn't have to worry about the Englishman hunting us down because the the woman herself was a nobody.
I have three personal rules that I live by. I don't zap back more things than I need to, I never zap back things that I don't think can fend for themselves, and I never ask where my brothers send their food. I always send my animals back to the mid-twenties, back when my courtyard was a just a bunch of trees in the woods. I'd like to think that they like it better there, but I try not to kid myself too much.
I don't know why I pushed him down, or why it didn't occur to me that he was hyped up on several humans while I was clinging to sanity with my measly diet of two zapped cardinals and whatever insects had scuttled by. One moment he was on the ground and the next he was up and pinning me against the stone wall. Both his hands were on me and I knew even with my eyes pressed shut that his where wide open, daring me to look at him. I couldn't.
He struck me twice, and the weight fell from my back.
Had I been able, I would have wept.
