The Constituents of Light.
James Morris

In my mind’s eye, Monday is indigo. Tuesday is checkered black and white. Wednesday is the pale-washed green of autumnal grass, and Thursday a shaded gray quite dark at the top and nearly see-through at the bottom. Friday is—of course—tomato-red, as everyone knows. Saturday is clear edged and Sunday boldface. Numbers and letters, days and dates, float before me in an eternal two-week loop curved like a football.

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Feelings and sounds are also made of color. When I was a kid I didn’t know enough to keep my mouth shut about it, unable to imagine the pallid, uncolored lives most people lead. A doctor my mother dragged me to informed her I was a “divergent thinker,” a label I frankly could have done without.

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I am required to mow grass on clear edged and boldfaced days. The Streets Department of our city sends me to weedy abandoned lots the city owns but also to properties occupied by elderly or infirm people who can’t manage to mow their yards themselves or afford to have it done. I don’t mind; I kind of like it. But don’t tell the city that. The mowing is court-ordered community service for refusing to shut up in traffic court. The number of mandated hours was doubled when I pointedly declined a judge’s suggestion to publicly apologize to the state trooper who had written the ticket.

I’d rather mow.

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The lawnmower the city provided me emits a fuzzy eggplant tone. Rather soothing, really. I wish it were a riding mower like actual city employees get to use but instead it’s a leftover push-it type. The work allows for a Zen-like state of non-thought but is quite physically taxing sometimes. Often the grass is two or three feet tall and gone to seed and I have to chop it down to size first with a brush-clearing tool so it’s mowable. If that’s a word.

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The brush-clearing tool has an invigorating bronze sound. It makes my forearms shiver.

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Kiddie pools. Those are the items I find most often left behind—cracked, sun-blanched turquoise kiddie pools half-hidden in the overspreading weedy twists of buggy tall grass at abandoned properties. Sometimes I wonder: where are all those kiddies now? Do they miss their homes, splashing and squealing in their shallow plastic oases?

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But it’s not just pools and other playthings left behind, of course. I find all sorts of stuff. You have to be slow and cautious when mowing; you never know when your spinning blade might strike splintered pieces of an obscured fence that fell over and was never restored, a toppled barbeque that had seen better days, or one of many shrouded plastic bags of mish-mashed garbage strewn with seeming randomness throughout the yard.

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My God. What a junked-up place this world is.

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Yesterday I was working up quite a sweat, laboriously clearing and mowing a wildly-overgrown property located at the far end of Devon Street. It was a really humid day, if you remember, and I had to take several breaks, chugging up all the water I’d brought with me. Later, I got light-headed and sat in the shade for a while.

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Shortly after I resumed mowing, I spied a white sock a few yards ahead of me in the dense greenery not far from the base of a tilted pine. This was not at all unusual; for some reason, there are almost always scatterations of clothes to be found in the thick brush of the yards I mow, as if people abandoning properties purposely drop a trail of them while hurrying off.

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Then I noticed the sock had a foot in it.

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I got a bright tangerine feeling.

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I cut power to the puttering mower and approached. The foot was attached to a leg and next to that leg was another leg and those legs were attached to a body and the body was that of an old man lying on his back. Wearing pink pajamas.

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I stood over the corpse, pondering. As I did, he raised his head a bit, shaded his eyes from the brilliantly white sun, and said, “Hey there.”

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I was surprised but not afraid—his voice was a pleasant shimmering silver.

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“Sorry mister,” I said. “Assumed you were dead.”

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“Huh, yeah,” the old man replied. He laughed a little in a pained way. “I guess that’s understandable.”

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I asked him a lot of questions then: Do you need some help? Should you be outside in this heat? Is this your house? Why are you lying here? I’m going to call 911, okay? You know this grass is probably full of bugs and vermin, right? Can I assist you in standing up?

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The old man ignored all the questions and asked me one of his own instead: “What color do you call this sky?”

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“Cerulean,” I said, without looking. I crouched down near to him and wiped my brow with the hem of my T-shirt, which was already transparent with sweat. Glancing over my shoulder, I noticed that the modest house at the center of the property—a square wreck with peeling paint—had its back door standing wide open.

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“Cerulean,” he repeated. “Yeah. Good word, I like it. Cerulean.”

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I surreptitiously pulled out my phone and dialed 911.

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“Mister, why the hell are you here?” I asked.

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He frowned a little. “Got tired of hanging around the house. Thought I’d contemplate the sky a while.”

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When the emergency operator answered, I rose with a grunt and wandered away from the old man, explaining the situation as I went. They asked me to stay on the line until help arrived.

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I stood at the front of the property. It wasn’t long before I spied an ambulance down the street, bullying its way through traffic, blaring little blasts from its ugly puce-sounding siren. I was glad when they finally came near and shut the damn thing off. A police car followed behind.

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The cop and one of the EMTs went to assess the old man. The other EMT looked me over for a moment, then frowned.

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“You think you might be dehydrated?” she asked.

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“I’m fine,” I said. “Absolutely okay.” My words might have carried more weight, however, if my brain hadn’t chosen that moment to turn the entire world a radiant prismatic violet and pitch me forward into an untended azalea.

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A few minutes later, I found myself perched on the wide shaded bumper of the ambulance with an icepack on the back of my neck and an IV stuck in my hand. I felt well restored.

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The cop clanked over and sat next to me.

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“Sir, did you go inside the building?”

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“Me? No.”

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“Well,” he said, “the thing is—we were unable to find anyone in the grass where you said.”

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I shook my head, puzzled. The old man seemed much too frail to have jumped up and retreated to the house while my back was turned.

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“So we entered the property,” the cop said. “Since the door was open. And we did find an old gentleman wearing pink pajamas.”

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I shrugged. “Okay. I guess he managed to go back inside, after all.”

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“No sir, I don’t think so. See, the man we found is dead. The EMT thinks he’s been dead at least three weeks.”

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Well.

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I got a lovely, luminescent, rapturous feeling then—the deeply-saturated welcoming blue of the old man’s cerulean sky.

Interview with the Author.

The narrator’s synesthesia is obviously a very important factor in the way he experiences his life. How did you go about deciding on the colors and patterns he associates with everyday things like the days of the week?

I read an article about synesthesia somewhere and realized I had a touch of it, like many people. When writing the story, it seemed not only sensible, but mandatory to use my own experience. The first paragraph describes how days and weeks appear in my mind’s eye.

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When the narrator draws joy from the old man’s cerulean sky, the color takes on an almost magical feeling. Is this something you imagine he’s experienced before? If so, how or when?

I think it’s fair to infer that the narrator is a socially isolated person who has had limited happiness thus far in life. His kindness to the old man earns him more cerulean joy.

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The old man’s demise is ambiguous, and their conversation certainly carried that spiritual vibe. Do you imagine the narrator was speaking with his ghost, or was it a construction to cope with the discovery of a corpse, or something else?

The reason it’s ambiguous is that I can’t definitively answer that question myself, and I prefer the reader decide. If you twist my arm, I’ll say the narrator probably encountered the old man’s spirit, which got bored “hanging around the house,” waiting for his body to be discovered.

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If you had to pick any single thing that your readers would take from this story, what would it be?

Some stories are a slog to write (and probably to read), but this one came together with a weird, mysterious ease that I hope comes across to the reader on some level.

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What is something about this story that your readers might not pick up on the first read? Or, what do you as the author want your readers to know about this story?

Well, it’s not important, but I finally found an appropriate story in which to use the charming word “scatterations,” which I’ve been carrying around in my head since encountering it in Mark Twain.