THE WINDOW
The Window hates to pull the papers. In the morning, The Window
turns over and looks at the white sky and watches a bird draw a thin
line in the clouds. The Window keeps both hands tucked under a pillow
and groans, moans, grumbles, and huffs at pulling a shaking hand into
the cold bedroom air. And reaching for the jar, so cold it’s almost
wet, slippery, sticky. The useless lid barely stays on. And inside is
another cold ocean of blue papers, crumpled like candies in the glass
jar. The Window has to plunge a tiny hand deep underwater (The Window
is very small) and wiggle fingers like divers’ legs until a new paper
catches between them. The Window hopes. The Window hates to hope for
certain outcomes, to wiggle divers’-legs-fingers in the sea of a blue
paper jar and, like everyone, try to catch a new fish, to expect that
the newness of the fish will make it a brighter day and a bluer, always
bluer The Window hopes, sky. The Window grabbed a big piece this time
and wished there was something inside it. Unravelled, the paper was
mostly blue, some gray freckles and a thin black line across the sky
like a bird. On the bedside table, the small paper crumpled itself back
into a ball in slow unnatural cracks and The Window put it back into
its jarred anonymity. On the way to work The Window felt exactly two
drops of thick rain, one on an eyelid and the other on a hand, and The
Window expected more. But then a gray cloud fell over the high rise
office building that The Window was headed toward. A child’s arm, was
it a child’s? stuck out of a high-enough window, charcoal and gray in
the shiny sky, and let a coin drop down in a straight line right into
The Window’s skull. The clouds moved out of the way and the blue sky
seeped back into frame, hiding the arm, the coin, the skull, and the
blood on the gritty pavement.
Jules
Lattimer