Something Deeply Wrong in Him (in Sound and Color)

Shirley considered the crumpled form at the bottom of the stairs, the streak of red decorating the linoleum floor next to it, then Winston’s frozen pose at the top of the stairs. 

She sighed, eyebrows crinkling.

“I suppose you have an explanation for this?” Her tone was the color neon green, acrid and sarcastic and in your face. 

Immediately, his hands whipped back to his sides, and he swallowed against the wall of flowery perfume choking the space between them. 

“He...Uh…” A jumble of words chugged along his brain matter, but they dived into oblivion before making it to his lips. Her twitching eyebrow and hypnotizing scent rendered him incomprehensible. 

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. Like I even…” 

She didn’t finish the sentence before yanking off the sweater he had given her- the massive dark blue one that she had eyed hungrily the second they wandered off alone. The fabric was now thrown back towards him, the chipped zipper nearly whacking his eye.

“I didn’t mean to!” The bundle in his arms quaked as his nerves shot around like a taser. 

“You’re always saying that!” Her volume matched his instantly- she could always out-yell him. A swift swipe down the front of her dress made her regain her composure. “But it’s the same thing, Winston. Another of my exes meets his end, you’re standing there, red-handed, with that stupid look on your face-” 

Now he knew she was mad. She was tense and upset a lot of the time, but when she cut off her own words like that it meant the venom was true and hurtful, trying to burst from her. He glanced around, hoping an imaginary exit from this conversation, this situation, would appear and he could jump through it. But it was just her tired, confrontational form in her pink, layered dress with the sweetheart neckline (she had described it in detail so he could match), facing him. 

“Y-You know how I get,” was his defense. The words tasted like old, soft butter, tasteless, like the absence of something better. He didn’t even have to look to know her eyes rolled again. 

He would make a joke about the danger in tossing your eyes like that, but he’d probably get slapped. 

Oh, he knew her like the back of his hand. He would definitely get slapped. 

“All good things must come to an end,” she whispered, soft as a spring breeze with her eyes as hard as a boulder under snow. 

The gray bored into him, tunneling. He ignored it. He didn’t want to think about what that look meant. He didn’t want to acknowledge some howling truth written in those eyes. 

Something like: what is it even a good thing to begin with? 

“Never say die.” He wasn’t sure why those were the words he wanted her to know. They had this thing about idioms, though. Maybe she’d appreciate it. 

The sweater almost slipped from his grip with the desperation racing along his veins. 

A lock of brown hair blew away from her face, cheeks that were once soft but now seemed sharp as granite. Her eyes were stuck on his crumbling expression, avoiding the still figure weeping cherry blood at the bottom of the flight. 

“Who was it this time?” Bags suddenly appeared under Shirley’s eyes, purple and dark brown complimenting deep gray. It could have been smudged eyeliner. She had perfected her makeup for the evening, but a lot of things had happened since then.

Truthfully, he didn’t even know. The events and details were a blur. There was a forbidden cigarette, a smirking, tan face, cheap words dancing back and forth, chapped lips mentioning her name, then a rush of red taking over before a series of thuds and yelps ended with this figure at the bottom of the stairs. 

Her ex. That makes sense. 

He shrugged, knowing in a moment he should have offered more. 

A shallow breath dipped into her frame, pink rising and descending, before she glanced down the stairs. She peered for a few seconds, calculating, until her mouth tightened and she straightened. 

“Brody. He was actually nice, you know. He got me that job at the publishing house.” A black cloud passed over her face, hail, rain, lightning- all of His wrath, it seemed -condensing there. She spit her next words. “God, why do you have to do this?! I don’t care how many times it’s been, I don’t care that you-you-! Why did this happen in the first place?! Why’d you start?” 

It was a whirlwind of words that he didn’t like. She was attacking him like a lion tearing ivory teeth into a meaty, helpless gazelle. He tried to put up a fight. 

“You know how I get, Shirley. I-It’s like that scene in Thelma and Louise when they shoot that guy’s truck and get that feeling y’know-” He didn’t mention that it started with a gray bunny behind his house, a thing that hopped up to him, unknowingly coming within range of the hefty rock he had picked up with small, chubby hands. He didn’t mention the idiom- two heads are better than one -bouncing around his brain, or the red creeping into his eyesight, the prone image of the body just 14 steps below him. 

“It’s not like that movie! It’s just you being a psycho or whatever it is- !” Her chest began to heave, moving rhythmically with the swaying trees outside, silhouetted starkly in white, glaring moonlight. 

“Just don’t worry about it!” he cried. He squeezed the blue mass in his hands, crushing it to his chest. “You know nobody will do anything! Nobody cares over here!” 

An aching hand rubbed her forehead, exasperation filling her every pore. The pink shifted once more, blending into her pale wash. Winston hated the finality in her form- as dead and terminal as the figure at the bottom of the stairs. She wasn’t listening to him, or she was but the words meant nothing. He tried again. 

“What we have is good, Shirley…You can’t...I haven’t got anything without you.” She hadn’t mentioned anything except the body, but he knew she was arguing the bigger problem. 

The biggest problem, he thought. 

Her arms crossed over her chest, like two white swords linked from ancient knights. A bitter chuckle, tired like tree bark in the fall, came out of her red, smirking mouth. 

“Well, you’ve got your bodies, Winston.” 

A mean glare danced into his own eyes from hers. 

“But don’t even think about adding me to the pile.” The black trees shook against the white glare, and gray eyes flashed. 

Winston was moving without realizing, letting the soft, blue fabric slip from his fingers and be crushed under his advancing heel. He imagined red flowing everywhere, some kind of green screaming from her throat and dotting along her pink dress with the sweetheart neckline. 

In hindsight, she knew him better than anyone. She knew how this would end. He should have known it from the way she was standing, the exhaustion hanging from her white limbs and the gray-rock eyes. She was mad. 

He stumbled forward, hooking onto her pink dress, gray eyes watching him as big as the moon. 

Her slap landed on the left side of his face, sounding and feeling like a freight train. The emotional force of it had him wheeling back from her one rosy hand, her pale white figure. 

It was a simple thing from there for Shirley to push out, sending all 199 pounds of him down 14 steps, until he landed as a crushed form at the bottom of the stairs. 

“Bow to fate,” she whispered, taking in the two broken images. Her breathing settled to the beat of the trees outside, moonlight soft and neutral. 

The words were a green-tea green, tranquil and placating.

“This was a mistake in the first place.”