Chartreuse Satin

It was a grey morning. That's so typical, isn't it? My father's funeral was on a grey morning. Everything was in shades of grey, even the freshly cut grass looked devoid of colour.  And it was raining. A cool, calming drizzle. This was probably my dad's message.

"It'll be alright Katy, everything will be alright." Then he'd pull me into his arms, and stroke my forehead softly with his cool, soothing fingers.

But today he was wrong. Nothing was going to be alright. He was gone, my father, my daddy, the only person in my life that really ever loved me was dead in the ground. Those cool and gentle fingers now icy, and stiff with rigor mortis, forever resting on chartreuse satin. What the hell kind of name for a colour is chartreuse, anyway? My aunt picked it out, she said he would have liked it. She was wrong. He would've liked to be on the beach, writing cryptic messages in the sand, or reading in a cafe, a black coffee sitting half-empty on the table in front of him, an expression on his face that practically screamed troubled artist. He would've rather been anywhere but in a box, cold and dark, the joy of life no longer his.

This was what brought the tears. Not that he was dead, so much as that the world had been robbed of his magic, his energy, his voracious appetite for happiness. I had a feeling that everything would look grey to me from now on.

It had actually been sunny that day. It was beautiful, I don't remember a better day. We'd gone for ice cream, and we laid on the shore, with I watching the clouds and him reciting poetry while we enjoyed the warmth from the sun. It was only a week ago, and already it feels like 10 years have passed.

Polaroid

A child laughing, a boy with tousled chestnut curls, topped by a pointed party hat. The number 9 is everywhere, from the candles on the cake to the banner strung between two trees. The park was teeming with energetic kids, playing tag, red rover, pin-the-tail. The boy with the curls leans over the cake, purses his lips, ready to extinguish the candles and make a wish. A girl no one noticed, and none would recognize, walks behing him. She turns, just as the flash of the camera immortalizes the moment, changing and entwining their two lives forever.

Cameron woke with a start, sitting straight up in bed. He looked around, and seeing that he was awake, he groaned exasperatedly, burying his face in his hands. Everything was laid out so clearly in the dream, like in a movie. Yet the question remained unanswered, as it had since the picture was first developed the day after his party. Who was she? Where could he find her? People always laughed at him when he mentioned the girl he'd been searching for. He couldn't blame them. 10 years of sitting in dark coffee shops meeting with private investigators or the occasional informative junkie, of crawling bars, eating in backwater diners, all in search of an image from a polaroid. A girl he'd never even met. If he could at least explain why he was so obsessed with finding her. But he couldn't. He felt a strange compulsion to know her every time he looked at her. But what he never told any of the people he still kept in contact with, was the feeling he'd get. Whenever he'd look at that faded figure, his skin felt electrified, and his heart sped up a bit. There was no in way in hell he'd tell anyone that. People don't fall in love with a photograph.
No way in hell.