All the Cerulean in the World

As for her Tuesday, her back is tired. She feels calluses on his fingers as he traces her naked spine, but she ignores the pool of oily sweat she soaks up from his generous heart. It, his heart, is the color purple because of indirect injury, her fault, the oil an Indian yellow. They lie together under the staticky eiderdown across from the cooing blues from her monitor. V is for Vendetta, because she burns hours in that cool blue light, and sometimes he wonders if blue is all she sees. It is work, home, dinner, work. No mention of The Vendetta, the hours she keeps. None from him, because he is a gentleman. 

And because she might break. Her doctor calls her Glass. 

Through sobs each night she sticks the pills in her mouth, his insistence, and he strokes her throat to wish them well. Sometimes they work, and off she jogs to critique calligraphy in the clouds. Sometimes they make life worse, and then the cheesy needles in the alley behind that LA motel beckon with ballads of “Buy Me" and “I Told You So”. Here she withers under the whispers, the demand to refuse the easy walk to haven and its grand appeal. Sedatives, sings that LA alley, buy me, try me, didn’t I tell you? But here too is the gentleman to soothe her, tighten the orchid stitches in her brain, there because of injury. Here he is to trace her body that smells of jasmine and chamomile, to remind her of the word morality.

Some days she forgets her name, and some nights her pupils melt into the blues until the afternoons bring her all the cerulean in the world. But under the pale linen, locked around her waist, he knows she will sleep tonight.