It's Goldenrod Inside
by
Dylan Davis
Pete inched closer to the ambulance at a red light.
He realized that there was life and movement inside.
The EMT’s cargo pants at the precise hue between black and navy blue were foreboding as a clipboard bobbed in and out of windowed view.
A bald girl in a white gown with paisley print and the pale, hyperpigmented under-eyes and the minor translucence.
Helpless shoulders and exaggerated ears and sniffling nose. Head pressed back into the pillow and the thousand-mile stare at the goldenrod illumination overhead. A memory, an album cover, a mosaic.
Snow-cone-blue cleaning solution squirted onto his windshield, optioned a cleaner view. The light turned green and, though Pete ought to have gone right to home, he followed.
This ambulance didn’t have its lights on. No siren, either, just a pantomime about the last flicks of a tendrilous corona over the horizon for one happenstance viewer--or voyeur, depending on how you spell it. He wondered if his wife had endured a similarly placed tile in her life mosaic.
He wanted to put the yellow girl’s feet atop his and dance with her and do his best to let her lead—stop the airplane from crashing or the ocean from rising. He wanted to introduce her to the tattoo on the inside of his wife’s forearm that read CCSI, standing for Cancer Can Suck It. The girl should have looked at him through one of those windows, to see that he saw, and make discomforting eye contact with him through the panes of separation, and mouth, “I forgive you,” or “I’m sorry,” or “Mono No Aware.”
But she didn’t. The eleven-well-twelve-in-May in the ambulance window leaned forward from the pillow, looked up at the EMT, her face rebellious, hurt, and tired. Pete tried to read her speech, but the life around the diorama made it futile. She would only be his thought of choice on a melancholy Friday commute home once or twice a year. An askew tile placed next to the half-marathon once run in a daze of desire to be healthy, again.
To her mother, though—who sat out of view on the day Pete got a peek inside the rolling hospice—she was the pupil tessera of a portrait titled Carpenter, which depicted a woman, tears streaming, putting the finishing touches on a bust of a beaming, depilated girl; she was “Untitled 18, 1963”; she was tendrils, corona, and was set and became the natural form of goldenrod light that once shone on her. But the light was inside. Imbued within the ceramic teacup that the sweet thing made at the hospital crafts day before her entity gave out at the finale, fin, no encore. Pete didn’t know any of this, and the matrilineal pair didn’t know he followed, but the mother did pass his wife once, though, years later, at a car wash.
He realized that there was life and movement inside.
The EMT’s cargo pants at the precise hue between black and navy blue were foreboding as a clipboard bobbed in and out of windowed view.
A bald girl in a white gown with paisley print and the pale, hyperpigmented under-eyes and the minor translucence.
Helpless shoulders and exaggerated ears and sniffling nose. Head pressed back into the pillow and the thousand-mile stare at the goldenrod illumination overhead. A memory, an album cover, a mosaic.
Snow-cone-blue cleaning solution squirted onto his windshield, optioned a cleaner view. The light turned green and, though Pete ought to have gone right to home, he followed.
This ambulance didn’t have its lights on. No siren, either, just a pantomime about the last flicks of a tendrilous corona over the horizon for one happenstance viewer--or voyeur, depending on how you spell it. He wondered if his wife had endured a similarly placed tile in her life mosaic.
He wanted to put the yellow girl’s feet atop his and dance with her and do his best to let her lead—stop the airplane from crashing or the ocean from rising. He wanted to introduce her to the tattoo on the inside of his wife’s forearm that read CCSI, standing for Cancer Can Suck It. The girl should have looked at him through one of those windows, to see that he saw, and make discomforting eye contact with him through the panes of separation, and mouth, “I forgive you,” or “I’m sorry,” or “Mono No Aware.”
But she didn’t. The eleven-well-twelve-in-May in the ambulance window leaned forward from the pillow, looked up at the EMT, her face rebellious, hurt, and tired. Pete tried to read her speech, but the life around the diorama made it futile. She would only be his thought of choice on a melancholy Friday commute home once or twice a year. An askew tile placed next to the half-marathon once run in a daze of desire to be healthy, again.
To her mother, though—who sat out of view on the day Pete got a peek inside the rolling hospice—she was the pupil tessera of a portrait titled Carpenter, which depicted a woman, tears streaming, putting the finishing touches on a bust of a beaming, depilated girl; she was “Untitled 18, 1963”; she was tendrils, corona, and was set and became the natural form of goldenrod light that once shone on her. But the light was inside. Imbued within the ceramic teacup that the sweet thing made at the hospital crafts day before her entity gave out at the finale, fin, no encore. Pete didn’t know any of this, and the matrilineal pair didn’t know he followed, but the mother did pass his wife once, though, years later, at a car wash.