We walk into bookstores that look like cathedrals. The books are organized by color, with the blues closest to the floor and the pinks closest to the ceiling. They sit on shelves under iridescent stained glass windows, rainbows reflecting onto customers and the pews, dancing across skin and wood. Our faces touch as I lean in and rest my head on her shoulder, my dirty-blonde hair cascading down both of our backs.
I watch her as she thumbs through the yellows and oranges with one hand while holding my hand with the other. This proves to be a difficult task because most of the books are water damaged. Pages wrinkle and stick together, yellowed paper bubbling and waving due to water residue. She holds the books tightly, close to her chest, her forearm folded across her body.
She sets a stack down on the pulpit, the books making a definite thump. Red indentations from the books line her forearm as she turns to gather more. While she browses the greens, I sit in the pews and fold paper cranes out of bright colors. They pile up on the oak benches, slowly swallowing my feet, my ankles, my kneecaps. I fold so many that they almost swallow me whole. She’s still looking at the greens, nearing the olive-colored spines. The pulpit is almost full. I’m still folding, until the paper cranes aren’t paper cranes anymore. Until they’re real cranes, carrying away armfuls of books, the greens, the yellows, the oranges.
In a bedroom somewhere far away, my uncle kneels beside his bed each night praying for my salvation. He prays so hard and for so long that his throat is raw by morning. The sun slowly paints the Earth golden, the orange closest to the ground and the pink highest in the sky.
Her and I lay beneath bed frames, the hardwood presses against our spines like sinew uniting bone to bone. Wooden boards rest inches above our noses, and our bodies rest next to one another, goosebumps risen on bare arms. She holds my hand and rubs her index finger against my thumb. Outside the door to my room, we can hear echoes from the television in my living room where a news anchor speaks about how the gays are menaces to society. We laugh as we pull each other closer, the smell of strawberries lingering on our breath from breakfast.
Her and I walk into aquariums. Iridescent reflections of water dance across our elbows, our chests, our kneecaps, poorly constructed veins on the outside of our skin. We walk to a tank that contains pink jellyfish. They float lazily through the deep water, sometimes colliding with one another. I sit on the concrete bench staring, mesmerized by them. The chill of the stone on the back of my thighs, echoes of laughing children occasionally fill the room as time passes, as the jellyfish keep bumping into each other.
The jellyfish are my favorite. She doesn’t have a favorite because she’s a vegan and she fundamentally disagrees with the concept of aquariums. I wish I could be good like her, but those damn jellyfish get me every time. She sits next to me, looking at me. I turn toward her, blue light catching my face and hers, and our faces, together. It filters through the tanks and illuminates her short curly hair, catching her blonde eyelashes and accentuating the freckles on her cheeks. I almost say, “don’t love me so much that it becomes all I know”, but instead I swallow the words whole.
She unzips her backpack and pulls out orange after orange. They sit on the bench beside us, and some roll on to the floor. She doesn’t pick them up. She starts peeling them, the pith tangling and creating ruffles under her fingernails. The juice from the oranges stains her gray crop top and I watch the jellyfish, reflections of water still dancing across our skin. I move from her side and sit on the floor, directly in front of the tank. My nose pressed against the warm glass, my breath fogging up the tank with every exhale.
The peels begin to pile up on the concrete floor, the echoes of laughing children still come and go as the orange peels swallow her feet, her ankles, her kneecaps.
Somewhere far away, in a church basement with no windows, my uncle dunks children in a hot tub, cleansing them of their sins. He holds their small faces underwater for just a little too long and no one seems to notice.
Her and I walk through forests, ivy and ferns choking sequoias so large that when we wrap our arms around them, our fingers don’t even touch. Pockets of golden sunlight shine through the branches, illuminating the brown dirt. We sit on the forest floor and draw spirals with our fingers in the soft earth, and we draw so many that we lose track of where each one starts and ends. Dirt cakes our fingertips and the palms of our hands, and we return home smelling like earth and pine and dust.
We go to bed holding each other. Fingers still dirty and sheets tangled around our messy bodies, we drift in and out of dreams.
Somewhere, in a room far away, my uncle sleeps soundly. There are no prayers tonight. He will be asleep in the morning as the aching sun rises, the bottom of the sky orange, and the top of the sky pink. His breath even, he does not dream.
We wake in the middle of the night to water pooling around our feet, our ankles, our kneecaps. Broken stained-glass lies shattered on the carpet, and the water begins to swallow our bodies whole. Orange peels float beside us, gently bumping into our bodies. The paper cranes hanging above our bed try to pull us from the water by their strings. They wrap tangled yarn around our wrists and elbows as they try to carry us away. They remain stationary, floating above our heads. As we move our arms while trying to stay afloat, we inadvertently pull them down and they begin unfolding themselves, the colorful paper bleeding into the blue water.
The water rises, kissing our necks. Slowly but all too quickly, our faces fall beneath the flood line for just a little too long. No one seems to notice.