He had fourteen hours of flight
to learn how to color in the lines.
He stepped off the plane and there were real lines
that made cars go straight
but no colors to brighten the roads with,
no paisley scarves or motorbikes or honking or dust clouds
or women selling bags of oranges on the street
and he heard ……………… the whole bus ride
to the apartment to join her.
The first thing she did with her new hands
was she made a clay plate and glazed it gold.
She’d grown up in a drafty stone house
windowsill piled with books, rolling hills
sunflowers setting over bristled fields
the yellow captured in her morning yolk
wobbling, watery
leaking onto the plate, now scratched with years
tally marks for each westcoast winter
etched onto its face.
He enters, sees her cradle the fractured plate
tracing back the crack he heard, looked up
from lacing his work boots. What happened?
Nothing, sometimes pottery breaks on its own, after a while
he fit the thin rift together
noting the edges, jagged like the Himalayas
dry clay snow-capped at the peaks.
Who would he have been if he let the mountains live under his palms?
Would she still paint?
They chose a place that was too quiet.
Two people stand in the kitchen holding halves of a sun
hunched over the sink, they say love words
in a language as owned as the frayed red couch
as the ceiling cracked lightning
as the silverfish crawling up their drain
and just let their tongues run over syllables
the way cars run over cardboard boxes on the highway
like that is enough
Anna Adhikary is a writer in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). She is currently studying creative writing at Concordia University. She enjoys writing about magic and in the first person.