Blue Smoke

By Erica Ward

“People needed to know!” The unapologetic woman stands in the doorway of her perfect suburban home. It’s a sunny day, but a thick orange haze has blotted out the blue of the sky.

The long summer had left the landscape a tinderbox of brown scrub and dying grass. Some residents had grumbled about the campfire ban, but most complied, didn’t even flick their cigarettes out on the ground.

The reporter finds a firefighter taking a break, his face sooty, shoulders sagging, “Please, people, don’t mess with explosives; find a better way to tell everyone you’re having a boy!” 

Colors to Forget

By Megan Geiger

Blue is the wrong color for lips. For skin.

When I walked in, she was blue. 

He was also the wrong color. White, blanched in panic. Slamming frantic compressions on her chest.  

Sirens and lights appeared, loud and red and white. So many bodies, too many bodies for our small house. 

Chaos. The calm kind that doesn’t come with shouting; instead, a terrible, palpable urgency that lengthens time in silver slow motion.

The helicopter landed in an empty field next to our house, blowing hot white sand into our eyes. 

It was too late, but for a child you try.

Lasagne

By Sarah Kelleher

Flick flick flick. He scratched his belly. He walked a carpet strewn with clammy socks – a week’s worth – and kicked another pair in the kitchen. The orange linoleum was terracotta, the curtains still shut.

‘Kathy?’ he shouted.

The air in the flat had changed. It was still. Thickened somehow. The round table, legs pointed like a UFO, was clean, missing her night school textbooks. Pans towered beside the sink with meat-stink from her lasagne.

‘She just left me, out of the blue,’ he would say later, and shake his big-eared head. ‘Didn’t say why. Didn’t even do the dishes!’

The Cornflower

By Kate Aranda Nye

And as I lay upon my breast

Loves indigo display,

Of bobbing azure sentinels

‘Twixt fields of golden hay.

And as I walk the dappled paths

With cobalt bells laid by,

I glimpse with hope meanderings

Unto bright Aegean skies.

And as I sit and watch and wait

With beating heart prostate,

These sapphire fronds of loyalty

The litmus of my fate.

So, look upon my cornflower

A button for thine eyes,

For with it lies my hope in you

Treasured lapis lazuli.

Blue Cross

By Charlene M. Boyce

His tongue was dyed by the freezie they shared. Hers too, probably. The taste of blue sugar water filled her senses as he kissed her. A high school boy. Her best friend watched them walk away. 

She knew that testicles didn’t really turn blue. (A blue-pen 99% on her Science test.) Still he pushed, held her down. Blue-purple fingerprint bruises on her thighs. 

Now, a thin blue crosshair, thin as the probability of pregnancy when a girl has only had one period. A cross, like her First Communion necklace.

Babies are all born with blue eyes, said the doctor.

Family Secrets

By Kim Dickinson

Ben examined himself critically in the bathroom mirror, gingerly prodding the purplish-blue skin puffed up around his bloodshot eye. It looked like a bloated over-ripe plum.

What are you going to tell everyone?

He met his sister’s eyes in the mirror. She affected nonchalance, but for the nervous snapping of chewing gum. “Want to try my concealer?”

Ben waved the offer aside. “It’ll only make it worse.” A half-beat pause, “I’ll say you should see the other guy.”

 Alice snorted derisively. It was true, their deadbeat father did look worse. “Don’t tell Mom.” She cautioned, pushing away from the door.

What Kind of Blue Is It?

By Fhi Love

The two young men sighed and walked on noticing only a pretty girl in a deep cerulean raincoat in an otherwise empty street. They thought about the blue as they walked. But where should they go? They had to deliver it—passing it to one another to free their hands of a heavy numbness—so they turned on their heels and retraced their steps. The clouds continued a cool wandering above their heads with a sort of low hum, a kind of vibration in their wooliness, a stark contrast to the indigo of the sky. Perhaps the colour was important.

Ante-Partum Depression

By Caroline Jenner

“Children are the anchor that hold a mother’s heart,” said one of those annoying yummy mummies, who effortlessly pop babies out of a body that somehow retains its pelvic floor.  No glowing maternity bloom for me.  A spot filled visage appears in the mirror, as I push swollen feet into well-worn moccasins.  Then I start leaking - I am horrified.

“Your milk’s arrived,” a helpful colleague announces. 

I consider the bump stretching my skin into a tight drum.  I feel like a cow, lactiferous.  I imagine going back to that lazy Sunday morning seven months ago and pleading a headache.

Anchor

By Miruna Marin

What started like foamy ripples playing on the threshold of the sea soon turned into stormy waves, sweeping and slamming me against the bed. A nurse came to hold my hand. Her eyes so blue were my anchor. In them, I saw it all. I saw all the mothers before me, dragged to breathless depths by the fury of ultramarine waves. I saw the babies who’d come out of the deep, their cerulean serenity as they lay their cheek on mother’s breast, their lips on nipple tips, sweet like a breeze. Soon after, my dear, you shone on my chest.

The Man Who Married the Sea 

By Manuela Stoicescu

He wore his white shirt and his hair down the day he said “I do”. She laid gifts of shell and pearl at his feet and washed them with her cold veil. After the ceremony, he kissed her lips and she kissed his lungs and spilled into him, until she made him blue, just like her. They made love under the sun and then she took his hand and showed him shapeshifting whales and glass jellyfish, carnivorous stars and phantom coral and glowing anemones sprouting from the bones of her many grooms.