Blue Sky

Blue Sky

The sunrise makes black outlines of the trees and I imagine they are
the skeletons of dinosaurs, looming over everything. Just bones because
their flesh died out when they did. They move so slowly they're almost
still, their black shapes against the sun. Like a time when they used
to be. I drag them back into life, my feet tapping on the concrete
outside my house, my breath dragging clouds. Pretend I'm smoking.

There was blood in my toothpaste this morning.

In the car on the way to work Derek is driving. He says that he used to
sit on that bridge over the road and watch the cars flow underneath him
like a river, with his legs hanging through the bars to stop him from
falling in. He says that he used to close his eyes to pretend he was
somewhere else, and pretend like it really was a river, or water, or
the sea, and the cars would flow as he dreamt of being far off. Derek
says this as we pour onto the freeway, like everyone else. By now he
realises I'm not listening, and he second guesses himself, moves his
lips when he thinks.

'Goin' to work today?' Derek asks, one of those things we do. I tell
him yes but imagine not going, imagine crunching my feet along the
sand, feeling it between my toes. Finding a shell by the paw print of a
dog that has been and gone, a shell like the one my mother had from her
first trip to the beach. Derek smiles and looks ahead, humming to
himself quietly.

Over the buzz of the tyres along the road, he presses at the radio and
looks to me again, checks if I'm listening.
'When I was younger,' he says, the cars moving by his window like
leaves in the wind. 'I had a sister. But I was an only child. I had a
dream once and she was in it, my sister, and her name was Stephanie. I
liked her so much that I kept her, and I told everyone that she was my
older sister.' The sunlight shadows a bridge across the car, like a
huge plane overhead. 'But I got in trouble for lying though, you know?
When they found out one day. I haven't seen her since then.'

The dormant street lights guide our way towards buildings, like the
city has its eyes closed in the day. Derek glints in the sun like a
movie star and I tell him I don't want to go to work today. I tell him
that we know what will happen, we've done it all already. I tell him
someone needs to drag us back into life. Kicking and screaming. I tell
him I've seen her too, his sister.
'Really?' Derek asks, I nod, and we miss the exit, drifting against the
tide of traffic.

My eyes close and open, like snap shots, but I try to stay awake
against the rocking of the car, the lullaby of the engine. It fades out
like a film. Derek tells me how he used to go fishing with his dad
early in the morning and I fall into a dream where I can see the orange
glow of the city at night and the bright spark of a tram cable above,
but the tram is so much bigger than it should be, like a building
rumbling along the tracks.

I wake up and see dry grass that I've never seen before, drought
soaked, and I fade out again. I wake up and ask Derek something that he
doesn't answer. I wake up and Derek is gone, but then we are driving
again.

My finger slides along the road on the map, and I hum a car noise to
show where we are going. You can't really hear it over the engine
though. Derek is tearing his tie away from his neck as if it's a
tentacle strangling him and he releases it, flapping like a bird, out
the window and onto the light coloured highway. That was his blue tie.
He liked that one because he bought it from a tie shop, a shop that
sold only ties. And socks as well, Derek told me. There was one time
when Derek told me he doesn't put the sun visor across, even when he
can't see. Blinds himself from what's ahead.

I tell him how sometimes I like to go into people's houses, when I
stayed over, and I put spoons back in the cupboard the wrong way and
use their shampoo to see how it made my hair feel and deliberately
forget people's names who I'd been introduced to before. He shakes his
head from side to side with his teeth forced together, like he can't
stand it, but he laughs anyway.

I tell him how there was blood in my toothpaste today. He says don't
worry about it. So I don't.

The sand is all along the beaches now, and I want to run towards the
waves and leave my footprints in the afternoon shine.

We stop when it's dark and the moon is doubled across the water. I tell
him one day I'll bring my wife here, and Derek says no you won't. He
says I don't watch the kind of television shows girls like, straightens
his shirt in the rear view mirror, his knees and elbows finding every
surface. Sometimes I see her though. Laughing beside me or wiping my
tears with a finger. Her head on my pillow, her hand on my
stomach.
'No,' I say to Derek as he holds the dor open to the noisy bar. 'No, I
guess not.'

What happens next I honestly cannot say. What happens is we talk until
we get louder and yell our conversation to these people we don't know.
What happens is Derek smiles and laughs at me as he grabs a man's
jacket and my panicked hands make fists. And what happens, though I
can't honestly say, is Derek feels the blood rush to his head and yells
with his fist, just once, and we are back into the night with fear on
our breaths, like it has a life of its own. And maybe it does.

Derek drives us through black figures that I can't make out against the
car lights, spitting dust from underneath the wheels. Headlights follow
us onto roads we don't know.

'Turn the lights off,' Derek yells, waving his hands at me, the
headlights behind making shadows across the dashboard.
'Turn them off, go down a side street.' Derek tries to reach across and
do it himself, me pushing my foot down harder. The cars shake in the
mirror through dust and stones along the dirt road.
'They're following the tail lights, just turn them off.' So I do, and
we are accelerating into pure darkness. Night coming at us faster and
faster, we turn down a barely marked street. Any moment we could slam
into a tree. Send our bodies through the windshield. Drive off a cliff.
And we wouldn't know.

The shadowing lights don't follow, get further away. Derek tells me to
keep driving through the black, towards the moon. The car rattles and
shakes, the wheels tumbling off the sides of the road. Derek clutches
at his seat like a safety blanket. We stop, the wheels getting to heavy
to continue. Derek sits in the night breeze, his loose hair blowing up
towards the stars. My heart still catching up. He smiles, lies back
onto the long grass. Leaves applaud us in the distance.
'Hey,' Derek says 'I think we're alive.' The stars move slowly across.
I hold one between my fingers.

I wake up and the blue sky is broken by clouds that shift in movements
bigger than me. I wake up and the grass is flicking at my cheek, a
seagull floating over, his feathers blowing, and I hear the sea washing
away the sand, like it's done forever. Waves carrying life. I wake up
and know that today is not like yesterday.