All Green

after Mary Abbott’s painting of the same name

Act I.

At rise, the curtain cries polyester tears, and the actors take their seats among the audience, and everybody waits and waits. In the aisles are femurs, pink tangerines, and plastic eggs, all the ingredients for a stew.

Furniture hangs like chandeliers from the ceiling, wafting with the scent of futility.

The stage is empty.

Act II.

I’ve swallowed, can’t stop swallowing. The dental hygienist says I have more saliva than anyone she’s ever seen, and to top it off, the fire lanes are blocked.

My mother died because she couldn’t swallow. Eventually. We wiped her mouth of all the spit that kept accumulating like fire down her chin and onto her blue-striped shirt, the same one she was cremated in, and in the morning the sky was gray with snow.

I’ve broken the tips off my pencils for less, but right now we may as well throw them in the stew with everything else, and let it simmer while we go get a drink.

Everybody grieves differently.

Act III.

I’m fine. I’m busy. I’m green. A grasshopper with eyes as wide as lies. Crème de menthe, crème de cacao, heavy cream. Guilt like broken glass.

Wake me in the morning. After the sailors have gone home, and after the manatees in my kitchen have finished their breakfast, and after the flight of the blameless bumblebee.

We can’t all have perfect pitch.

Blackout.

Jessica Klimesh (she/her) is a US-based writer and editor whose creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver Magazine, trampset, Brink, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Flash Boulevard, The Woolf, and Whale Road Review, among others. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.

A Song for Jessica