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