Smoke over the ocean.
About Zoetica Ebb
Artist, photographer and writer, dedicated to proving that life is as beautiful as we make it.
Smoke over the ocean.
Artist, photographer and writer, dedicated to proving that life is as beautiful as we make it.
When the crowd parted for the paramedics, we already knew it wasn’t necessary. The street was painted a purple-red with that boy’s blood. On impact, his body had folded on itself; he looked like he was praying to the mailbox. The air was turning the blood on the sidewalk rust brown, but in his hair it stayed a dark red. It seemed to get redder with every flash of the newspaperman’s camera. I took the train back to New Jersey where my girlfriend and I were going to a New Year’s Eve party.
“I’m having the worst day, what a way to end the year,” she shouted in my ear as the faces flashed by in the strobe light and the floorboards shook with music. “I lost my purse and someone spilled red wine all over me.” The sight of the wine in the dark made my mouth water and every pulse of the strobe was the eye of the photographer’s camera.
“At least I’ve got you,” she winked. I bit down on my lip and the afternoon flooded into my blood like an IV drip: the crowd’s bland faces; reporters searching for the parents; the steam drifting from the young boy’s broken mouth; the pair of sneakers tangled in the power lines hanging like a forgotten mistletoe.
“Hey, where are you?” She pleaded. But I was right there. The blood was soaking into my untied shoelace as we watched the ambulance pull up. I was right there: The calm voices of the paramedics made the temperature drop twenty degrees. I was right there: They zipped up the black bag and I couldn’t breathe.
“You better not be in another one of your moods. Not tonight.”
I tried to listen, but I couldn’t resist the pull of the breathing open window. I saw myself running to it and lunging straight through it. I felt like I was suffocating in a zipped-up black bag.
“I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to deal with you ignoring me this year. That’s my resolution! Good bye.”
I had to lock myself in the bathroom to stop myself from jumping out the window. In the mirror, my dirty blond hair was tinged red. I tried closing my eyes but when I looked in the mirror my hair was saturated, a thick crimson. The New Year cheers sounded like screams through the door and I swore that I’d never let myself care about anything else ever again. The next morning the paper said that a boy had falled out of an unlocked window in his parent’s apartment in New York. I dyed my hair the darkest black I could find. A black so dark it could cover the deepest blood red and suffocate the brighest halo.
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Rickly