Promise of Blue
by Elena Prescott
Evening creeps in and the world stays grey, and all is silent, for rain is coming. A small girl stands, unmoving, at a crack in the door, the dusty street outside empty. Her bare feet grow numb from the cold of the smooth cement floor, and her chest hardly moves as she breathes shallow breaths.
A last masked guard passes by and disappears, and she breathes a little more deeply and shuffles her feet. Crouching, she waits, knowing no one else would pass until the rain comes and goes.
Rain. She had heard of it but never seen it.
The old man spoke of it the way he spoke of his daughter, but that didn’t mean much.
Did he miss it? Ayla, young as she is, knows she has nothing to miss. Maybe someday.
The time passes slowly, her eyelids drooping as the street grows dimmer.
Ping. She startles back, wide eyes taking in her sliver of dark street. Plink, tat, ping. Suddenly the quiet is a loud static, louder than she had ever heard. It is cold, and wet, when she opens up her pale palm through the crack, and she claps it to her mouth to stifle the giggles that escape her. The rain is a song, one that breaks through the grey streets and never reaches its citizens, shut up in their towering apartments with no windows. Through the rain the grey seems more silver, as night finally falls. Ayla does not touch the rain again, but she lets its sound fill her until it spills over and through her.
With one last burst of laughter that the rain washes away, she turns and sneaks her way back to her own apartment, where her mother must be sitting absently in the dark. Clambering up the last few stairs, she inches down the hallway and past the heavy door, sweeping up the bag of groceries the old man with his bike had left outside and slapping a hand against the light switch as she does.
Rain, rain. The cold of it stays fresh against her palm, and its song spills from her lips. Plink, tat, ping. The plastic bag crinkles and the lightbulb buzzes amidst the familiar, stagnant silence. Her mother slowly emerges from the shadows that line the room, her vacant expression focussed on the floor as she shuffles over.
Ayla turns. “Ma?”
When she does nothing but stop, Ayla returns to the groceries and the song of the rain, fresh on her teeth and her tongue. Plink, tat—
Her mother’s eyes are on her at once, and in a blink she slaps her, hand against cheek. Her mouth shapes out empty words, lips moving around sounds that will not come for one second, two.
Finally, brittle:
“No singing.”
Her voice is hollow from disuse, a voice that has not spoken in years and years. Ayla nods, awestruck.
Her mother stares at nothing once again and shuffles back to her chair, muttering, “It is forbidden. Forbidden. They’ll take you away, too. Make you disappear, too...”
“Ma?”
No response. Her mother sinks back into
the shadows and falls into silence, unfamiliar now. Too heavy, now. Ayla takes a careful breath and leaves the groceries, slipping back out the door.
The old man’s laughter is so sudden and strong that she startles, and steps backwards.
“Singing? Goodness, everything that goes just finds its way right back. Singing! Singing!” He ruffles her hair and she stumbles again. He looks at her with a rare smile on his face, so big it hides his eyes.
“Keep on singing, little lark.”
Singing, singing.
“Singing,” she echoes, and her laughter spills free, pure and full of song.
The old man’s room is different from her own. It has the same walls, same floor, same naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, but one corner is entirely occupied by paper, spilling out of piles as tall as her and perpetually sliding to the ground. The dust does not lie as thick in this room, nor the silence. The grey seems thinner here, as well.
The old man settles himself back at his desk, which groans under the weight of more papers. He picks one up and buries his nose in it.
“What are you reading?”
He shoots her a look and otherwise ignores her, but Ayla has already slid to the floor and rolled onto her stomach, bare feet painting the air.
She has asked before, every time she comes to visit.
To bother me, the old man would say, but he says it with a wink, and lets her sleep the night away in his chair. The question is always the same, what are you reading? what are you writing? what are you doing?
So lively, he would say instead of answering, his voice laughing but his eyes sad. I’ll show you one day.
When she grows tall enough to see over his shoulder and keep up with his steps, he sits on the floor with her and his creaky bones and a palm-sized box.
“Little lark. You want to know what I do.” He says it matter of factly, as if he has not avoided it for years. The box clinks when he sets it down.
Ayla blinks back from her reverie and stares, baffled.
He waits, eyebrows rising.
“Yes! Of course!”
“With that reaction, I thought you’d forgotten. That, or I’d lost you for good.” He chuckles, tapping a knuckle to her head, and she grins up at him. With a gesture towards the grey wall, she shuffles forward to sit by his side, hands clasped in her lap. He takes one and lifts it, uncurling her fingers and placing in her palm a lump of charcoal.
“You won’t know what art is, ‘course. That complicates things. But I’ll try.”
Small hand in large, he guides the charcoal to the wall and presses it down. With two hands, they draw a line, and another, and a curve and a bend and a shadow. A belly, a wing, a head, an eye.
“You’ve never seen a bird either, have you.” He sighs and stares at the charcoal bird. Ayla watches him.
“You’re too young to understand. Not too young to know, though.”
Her charcoal births another bird, and another, and another, Ayla humming as it goes. While the old man watches, gradually the wall disappears behind outstretched wings. He stretches and draws one of his own in silence, higher, where his arm still reaches far above her head.
“They say no art—it ‘promotes individuality’.”
It is raining outside, so they sit inside, as they must. It has been raining for days, so they have not left. The lightbulb flickers, and it makes the birds on the wall appear as if they have moved in flight.
Ayla nods absentmindedly from her spot on the floor, fingers tracing patterns in the dust.
“Bah. Art makes you real. If you’re real, you can’t just disappear.” The old man says all this from his desk, back to the rest of the room. “Having a you’s a good thing. Being real’s a good thing, little lark, you hear me?”
She nods again, and he turns, taking her in.
“You know the sky?” he says.
She shakes her head, sitting up and tucking her legs beneath her.
“When you look up, and it’s all grey. That sky there’s not grey— not grey, no. It’s blue.” He leans his arms on his knees, and he suddenly looks old. “At least, it’s supposed to be. I know you don’t know blue. But you should. One day, I’ll show you. You can’t tell anyone, though. Not about art, or birds, or blue.”
The birds on the wall flicker and grow. The little girl is not so little anymore, but still quiet and starry- eyed as ever. She nods.
He smiles, a careful thing this time, and turns back to his papers. “They think we old ones forget.”
One day, she stops singing. She never sneaks out to see the rain again. Her mother passes away quietly without ever speaking another word, and the young woman down the hall who smiled disappears. Her son takes to wailing at night.
Ayla knows the old man knows all this, and that it makes him sad. There were times when the silence grew thick and stifling, even in his apartment where the grey faded away, and his forehead would crease when no song came.
But she never stops visiting. Rather, she bothers him every day, for longer and longer, and more frequent nights on his chair. She stays with him and the birds after returning home from school and the dusty city streets, or all throughout the long days of rain. Together, they sit in the stillness, soft and warm and waiting.
She watches as he reads, as he writes, as he draws. She watches as grey day bleeds to day bleeds to day. She watches as the lightbulb dies and is replaced. She watches with wide
eyes, captivated, terrified.
Evening creeps in as Ayla pushes through the door she once sat by for rain, passing through the grey hallways, grocery bags for her and the old man crinkling by her side. The light from outside pools weak and watery around her feet, the silence cloying in the humid air. She climbs the stairs and pushes past his heavy door, greeted by the naked lightbulb and the old man’s back.
When he doesn’t move, she sets down the bags and checks the door. “Old man?”
He turns at her voice, eyes wide and grieving. The papers in the corner have toppled and cover the floor, penned with a thousand tales of another world, a thousand wishes, a thousand memories immor-talized. A thousand condemnations. They spill out around him like pooling blood, if blood were grey, and so infinitely familiar. He stands among them, his back proud, always so proud.
The birds on the wall are still.
“Is there anything that keeps you here?” he asks.
Ayla’s breath stutters in her throat. “Well, not really, but− I don’t know?” She swallows, silence deafening, and the lightbulb flickers. “You?”
It is still, too still.
“Good. I’ll be gone soon,” he says, stepping towards her over the papers and the dust. “If you listen to anything I say, listen to this: go and do not stop until you see the sky. Not until it’s blue. You hear me?”
He takes her hand in his, old and shaking. She wants to step away, wants to lie down on the floor on her stomach again.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t.”
“You can,” he says, eyes trained on hers. “They’re coming for me now, you understand? They will not get you, too. I will not let them.”
His pulse flits in his wrist under her fingers, like the pumping of frail wings. Everything else is too still.
“You’re more real than anything here. The one thing I can’t teach you is freedom, little lark; you’ve got to learn that yourself. You’ve learnt so much, but of this I can only make you go. Go, now. Take my bike.”
He squeezes, and lets go.
“Please, go learn of the sky and be free.”
She does not speak, just reaches out and pulls him into a hug, standing now as tall as him. The silence holds them for a moment. Then the door closes on his grey figure as she slips back past it, striding down the hallway once more.
At the end of the hall, she passes a masked guard whose invisible gaze bores through her, his passing footsteps the last ticking of a dying watch. She reaches the top of the stairs as the door clicks open, keeps her head forward as bile rises in her throat and breaks into a run, stumbling down the stairs and out the door. The bike clatters as she mounts it and flies through the streets, pale skin flashing, a beacon in the dust, the silence, the grey.
Keep going, little lark, she can hear the old man say.
She does not look back.
Fly.
She pedals on, and on, until the breath tears from her lungs and her body burns, and even then, on. She pedals until the wind blows and the grass grows long and limber. The silence gets quieter and quieter the farther she goes, the heaviness that always lingered slipping behind her.
Before the little lark, the world wakes from slumber, stretches itself bare and yawns so wide it splits in her path. The ground parts from the sky and the horizon creases the world, grey to grey to something more. It draws breath and blinks awake, light seeping over everything, casting shadow and drawing colour. The grass turns golden, the dirt a warm red. The odd leafy figures that rise in clusters and disappear behind her are green, the girl feels, and then the underside of the sky, purple.
And yet, and yet, amidst all of this she keeps her face turned upwards, these other things passing her by in hazy impressions that slip past as she pedals. She keeps on, and on, as time keeps at her back. She refuses herself thought of the grey world and the old man.
Before her eyes, the grey falls behind her and above, it parts, so that when the sky becomes blue, the tears in her eyes turn the whole world blue, too.