Sunshine-Yellow

Sunshine Yellow

Isaac Murphy

This day had passed by like any other day. The only factor distinguishing that Thursday from the Wednesday before it, or the Tuesday before that, was something Taylor Alexi-Walker had yet to realize. To her, it was just a Thursday.

Taylor’s untied sneakers snapped twigs beneath her feet on her walk home from school. She was hunched beneath the weight of her backpack, as seventh grade teachers assigned an excess of homework nowadays, and her dark, curly hair was tied atop her head. She earned good grades at school. She was sharp.

Taylor dug her house key, which was decorated a sunshine yellow with nail polish, from the frontmost pocket of her backpack and opened the front door. She waited for the family dog to run to her feet, yipping, rolling onto his back for a belly rub, but no such greeting came. She made sure to lock the door behind her as she called the pet’s name.

“Harry!” Taylor’s voice rang throughout the house.

No response.

“Harry?” She called, crawling under the table where the dog sometimes slept. There was no dog beneath the table, but there were a pair of tall, blue high-heeled boots, the kind Taylor had only seen in movies, holding up a pair of thin legs. Taylor slid out from beneath the table to meet the eyes of the intruder. She was a tall woman with brown, curly hair that danced across her shoulders. She wore a long dress and wide brimmed hat that shared the hue of her fantastical shoes. Her unfamiliar face was framed by pink studded glasses and she wore a smile that shone brighter than the dazzling jewelry hanging around her neck. In her arms was Harry, the family’s beagle.

“Taylor!” The woman exclaimed, a sense of cheer at home in her voice.

Like any child would if they saw a stranger in their home, Taylor screamed and stumbled in her crawl, falling on her side and clutching her knees to her chest.

“Tayor, step out from beneath the table, darling,” her voice was coated in rich honey. “I don’t believe we’ve properly met.”

Already in prime position, Taylor rolled away from the mysterious woman and stood up at the other side of the table. Instinctively, she grabbed the closest object at hand to aid in her defense.

“Oh, would you put the pepper shaker down dearest! I do wish your mother would have told you I was coming.”

Pepper in hand, Taylor pointed the shaker at the intruder.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Delilah, darling.” She was beautiful. To Taylor, she looked like she’d jumped through television screen, she was that bright and vibrant. She laughed, and her laughter rang out like a bell, clear and light, filling the space containing the two of them with joy.

“I’ve never met anyone named Delilah before,” Taylor said, swift and determined. She narrowed her eyes. “Delilah who?”

“Delilah Mask—” she put Harry on the ground and reached into the pocket of her long, blue gown and slid an worn leather wallet across the table to the seventh-grader. Taylor looked the woman in the eyes, drawing out the woman’s curious nature like a spider picks its prey from its web, and reached out for the object. She opened it, and to her surprise is was empty, save for two items within. Most noticeably was a large key, fit for a lock somewhere lost to the past; silver, but varnished with sunshine-yellow paint on its bow. Secondly, was an old photograph, but a familiar one nonetheless. Taylor looked up at the woman, then past her, and gasped, flooded with crashing tides of recognition and oblivion. Behind the woman was the same photo, framed and hung on the wall, an old family portrait of her mother and all of her sisters, none of which Taylor had ever met. In the photo, Taylor saw her mother, about her age, the eldest in the bunch, holding the same key in front of her face. A young Delilah stood at her side.

“—Formerly Delilah Alexi.”

Taylor lowered the pepper shaker. Delilah Alexi. She hadn’t heard the first name before, but she knew her mother’s side of the family was elusive. Her mother always said that her family lived far away, on the other side of the world, and Taylor couldn’t go visit them because she couldn’t miss that many days of school. Her mother never spoke of them and she always met Taylor’s questions with a smile and a change of topic, but she kept the photograph of her and her ten sisters hanging in the dining room. At least the family could be together at dinner.

“You’re my aunt?”

Taylor looked up at the woman. She didn’t look like her mother. Sure, they had the same dark skin and curly hair, but there was something missing from her mother that Delilah possessed with an unyielding ease. She had a light in her eyes and an eagerness in her grin. An air of adventure embodied her and she let it. Her mother was the kindest woman Taylor had ever known, but she lacked whatever drew her to this familiar stranger. Any curiosity she once had had long since developed into a habit, a routine by now. There was no room for adventure in what was now her normal. There was no need for adventure, as she’d already explored.

“And you’re my niece. You’re certainly an Alexi.” The woman gestured to the impromptu self defense weapon in the form of a pepper shaker in Taylor’s hand. “Ready for anything.”

“Okay,” the girl stammered. “So if you’re my aunt, why didn’t my mom tell me about you? And why did you just show up here?”

Delilah smiled, pleased with Taylor’s curiosity.

“Because you and I have some family business to attend to.”

Taylor tried to respond, but she was cut off by Harry’s barking as he ran off towards the front door, alerting the family that someone was near. Still, she tried to yell over the dog.

“I think that’s my mom, she comes home a little while after I do.”

Delilah looked at the door, a question crossing her mind, then an answer following just after. She nodded decisively and bent down to Taylor’s height.

“Taylor, I’ve given you no reason to trust me, but I need you to listen to your intuition. We have work to do. You’re an Alexi, right?”

Taylor clenched her jaw and turned towards the door. She heard her mother slide the key into the lock on the other side of the door. Harry barked. The door opened.

“Sorry, Aunt Delilah.”

Taylor shook the pepper shaker in from of the woman’s face and as a sneeze caught deep in her nose, Taylor ran to her mother.

Alice Alexi-Walker stepped through the front door, her hair pulled back into a tight bun, her eyes wide open and her jaw halfway to the perfectly-swept floor. She threw her purse onto the floor, spilling its contents around her feet. She stepped in between the woman in her dining room and her daughter.

“You weren’t supposed to come back, Delilah.”

“You left the family. We needed another Alexi—”

Alice balled her hand into a fist, and felt Taylor cling onto her forearm. She’d gotten so tall. She felt something cold in Taylor’s hand and as she came to the realization of what it was, she watched as Delilah’s eyes widened in horror as she lunged forward.

“You were going to give her the key?” Alice’s anger seized her voice and forged it into a beast. Her family was here. The family she had chosen. Her daughter.

“We’re so close, but we’re fizzling out, Alice. We have the key, the blueprint to the house,” she paused. “But we need one more person for the plan to work. One more Alexi. The vault, Alice, everything we’ll ever need is inside.”

Taylor’s fingers dug into her mother’s arm. Alice looked down to meet her Taylor’s eyes, and saw her own looking back up at her—brown, quick and clever.

“If you want to risk your lives for something you’ll never understand,” Alice spoke, her voice stabilized by her determination to protect her family. “You don’t need a child, something you’ll never be able to truly account for.” She drew a breath. “All of you, go. I’m sure you can do it.”

Delilah reached for her other hand.

“Alice, we want you to be there. We’re a family.”

The three women held onto each other, the same blood coursing through three different bodies.

“I need to keep my family safe, Delilah. Go.”

Regret in her eyes, Delilah held her older sister for a moment before nodding at Taylor, taking back the key and walking out the door. Taylor let go of her mother’s arm and rushed to lock the door behind her aunt.

“Mom, who’s that?”

Silence coursed through the air. Taylor turned around to face her mother, but she wasn’t there. She walked into the dining room and watched as her mother took the framed photograph off of the wall.

“Don’t worry, Taylor. They’re not going to bother us anymore.”

Before her daughter could ask another question, Alice walked downstairs, portrait in hand. She unlocked the door to her office with a key varnished with sunshine-yellow paint, walked in and pulled her bookcase away from the wall to reveal a silver vault. It was unscathed, painted the same bright sunshine-yellow that once haunted her. She pulled a large key from her jacket pocket, opened the lock, and placed the portrait alongside the blueprints she’d found, forged and faked and left for her family. She hated to disappoint, but they’d never know she’d found the vault first.