“Hello.” said the boy with the blue eyes. It was raining and his brown hair ran down his face with the rainwater.
“Hi.” said the girl with the summer smile. Her hair was not running anywhere. She held a polka dot umbrella over her head and stood in its spotlight.
The boy with the blue eyes smiled, but it was a sad, February smile. “We don’t know each other, do we?” The smile turned to frost, and the summer girl watched, perplexed and teary-eyed as he turned into an ice ghost before her.
The summer girl had seen a ghost before. That’s how she knew the boy with the blue eyes was one.
She lived in an industrial-strength box in the middle of a petulant city. The sky was a perplexing shade of brown and the people there were all little silent-movie black-and-white executives. They wore combed hair, conservative ties and carried briefcases with locks on them. The reason they had locks on the their briefcases was that they carried weeks of July and August, packaged in dandelion fluff and wishes, in them.
Summer is very heavy.
Every evening at the very same time, in the very same way, the executives would sit down at their mouldering kitchen tables with a glass of strong autumn in one hand and their briefcase in the other and they would open them and smell their summer weeks and look at the yellow sun in a briefcase where it doesn’t need to shine except to keep awake.
The girl with the summer smile had always been told she was born at that time of day and when she had made her first sound – a self-conscious hiccup – she had accidentally swallowed a sunbeam and that it was always trying to run away when she smiled.
In reality, the reason she smiled like summer is that when she had first got her briefcase full of July and August, she had looked at the sun so often she had begun to turn into summer itself. When the others found out, they put her in a very industrial little box house and told her about the ritual of seeing summer only once a night.
So she listened and met the ghost boy in the wallpaper.
He was translucent with tiny teeth and a mass of hair. “Hello.” he said as he rose from the oily industrial wallpaper.
She was still too young to run away from either ghosts or strange boys.
She was not afraid of him.
So they became friends until he left her to go to the capacious attic where he turned into a pile of bones with a heartbeat.
She cried.
When she could come to her senses and abandon the drudgery of walking under a brown sky with a briefcase, she climbed the cobwebs to the attic, and, stifling the Niagara Falls inside her lungs, she found the bones and embraced them for she embraced the ghost boy’s memory. She tripped on a wooden puppet on the way down.
She grew to despise both attics and puppets.
Standing here in the rain looking at the blue-eyed boy made of ice, she was reminded unpleasantly of the ghost boy’s heap of bones in the attic.
She lowered her eyebrows. “I defy you, Death.” she said to the February clouds. “I know you mean harm only and I see where caring got me last time.”
She turned from the boy with blue eyes and the sound of her shoes was like rain. And rain was raining. And the boy was making noises silently, and his eyes were blue, and his cheeks were running blue and his chin was raining blue and he was crying and there was rain. He was unmoved still – she knew because she heard no footsteps behind her – but he was blue with ice and blue with rain and blue with crying.
She looked down at the crackling sidewalk and observed her feet, made of smoke and coffee stains. She observed her transparent hands and her tears fell through her – his tears too. All of a sudden, things were plain and sunflowers grew – she was a ghost. Even less than a mouldering heap of bones piled up without a soul in an attic, she was a ghost.
Both. No wonder she had not run from the wallpaper boy. Ghosts. How could she remember the wallpaper boy, if she and the blue-eyed boy are so of smoke and ice. There is no marriage of fire and water. There is no love in ghosts.
And the blue-eyed boy’s tears met hers and they turned to blood and the blood ran off them. She turned around as he turns toward her and their blood vapor hands meet.
Blood turns to water and they fall into stars. They are alive and summer meets blue and we call it Love.
