All the Colours of the Dark

by Chris Whitaker

the flair of fiction dulled a reality too severe.

She’d fixed eggs, and he wondered just how tough it was to be a parent, and if at times all poor kids were some kind of well-intentioned regret.

Up the wind of a steep driveway toward the spread of stucco and leaded glass; turreted rooflines of blue slate above a porch of natural stone topped with reclaimed wood gnarled just deep enough to tell it had travelled to adorn something so beautiful.

Deep lines channeled from the corners of her eyes like rivulets forged from the hot tears spilled the day Saint’s mother passed.

There was a steady drip from a leaking faucet, like a metronome that scaled up the tension.

‘You think I’m beautiful?’ He nodded. ‘Entirely and absolutely.’

She did not know that he worried they would not afford to heat their home that winter. That the refrigerator would remain bare. She did not know that kids worried about such things.

caught her stealing smokes from my truck. And sneaking booze at Thanksgiving. It’s the spirit, right. That’s what we miss. It’s the rough edges. The parts you know she’ll grow out of.’

She read of a team in New Jersey that could lift fingerprints from tree bark, even leaves. She took it to Nix, who looked at her with such sadness she almost broke in two.

just wanted to show you that sometimes things survive despite the harshest of odds.’

Though Saint knew that purpose in its many forms was what kept the living just so.

Norma followed her granddaughter up the path; both stopped still when they saw through the window Patch cleaning the vomit from the floor beside his mother, who lolled back on the sofa. Patch laid her down, fetched a shawl and covered her over, then got back to work with his bucket and sponge.

‘Best education you can get,’ he said. ‘See through someone else’s eyes and you understand more of everything.’

At ten years old he realized that people were born whole, and that the bad things peeled layers from the person you once were, thinning compassion and empathy and the ability to construct a future.

Patch knew dreams were experience and anticipation, the trace of memories and proportioned acts.

It was a slide toward poverty that he had not anticipated, that no kid ever does. Meals grew smaller and hunger larger till he noticed his jeans hanging loose from his waist as he notched new holes in his belt. His mother rose and fell like the seasons, sometimes warm as she hugged him and told him things would get better, and then sparse and bare as he asked what they could fix with stale bread, a bag of oats, and a couple of cans of tomatoes. She gained and lost employment so frequently he did not know if he would return to the smell of her Irish stew or to find the electricity cut or Dr Tooms waiting at his kitchen table like he knew Patch needed so much.

She’s being kind because she loves you.’ He shook his head. ‘She’ll see it now I’m gone.’ ‘See what?’ she said. He spoke without intent, just a brutal and complete honesty. ‘How little I left behind.’

‘Okay is the preserve of the uninspired, Patchwork. I’d rather live and die at the extremes than exist in the middle.’

Misty did not belong in that waiting room at that hour. It was reserved for the strugglers, for the uncertain and for the desperate.

the parents who could not stay together in their shared agony, and so carried their infections and poisoned new partners but drank from their comfort, the only pain they had known so paling it did not count at all.

The linoleum torn at each corner, rutted around the stove and curling like butter. A stopped clock hung beside a calendar from a year past as if his mother had simply pressed pause.

He found himself at St Raphael’s and stopped by the narthex.

‘A cad is a gentleman cunt.’

The moon was too bright. There were too many stars above. Sometimes he wanted to blot them all.

‘My wife still jumps out of bed when we hear a car slow at night. Like she expects her to roll in, maybe a little drunk, rattle the cabinets as she fixes a sandwich like she used to. Play my Johnny Cash records and start wailing.’

‘We need another showing. We need people to see these girls,’ Sammy said, as he cussed out the chef for leaning too heavy on the vadouvan.

He was the kind of boy who would become the kind of man that needed tending.

‘Joseph is different because he did not have a woman to do things for him,’ Norma said, reading her mind as she dabbed at her shirt with a napkin. ‘Just like he does not know how to care. How to conduct a friendship. How to be a man.’

‘When it comes to marriage, love is merely a visitor over a lifetime. Respect and kindness, they are the true foundations.

‘I don’t know how to forget you,’ she whispered it, right into his ear, her words tunneling into his brain and forging their own place in him, to call on in case there were moments of doubt, moments of weakness that told him he might be good, beneath it all, what he had done and what he would do, he might just be good enough.

She did her best to smile, to speak her vows, to make far-reaching promises from a limited vantage point.

He wondered how it would end. What would be his last roll, when the curtain would fall, the interested long since departed.

‘You’re bringing shit to a pissing contest?’

Where she had once jarred her honey and completed her schoolwork and dreamed of other kids coming over so she might dazzle them with her facts.

also know that a group of ladybirds is called a loveliness. I like how some things are just perfect, you know.’

‘You remember Summer Reynolds?’ she said. ‘Fort Worth. Her hair is cadmium and ochre and violet. Viridian eyes that told her parents she was one step ahead. I remember her mother said she was trouble, but said it with a smile, you know.’ She told him.

‘You’re friends with my mom,’ she said, holding his gaze so intently he knew then that she was blessed with her mother’s confidence. That way of looking at the world like your place was warranted. Deserved. He felt the relief acutely.

The days since had robbed her of something vital. Thoroughly beaten, she looked a woman who had outlived her child.

‘Hey. We don’t do that.’ He sat in silence awhile. ‘How come … how come you never painted me?’ Saint said, quiet. ‘Because you never needed me to.’ He listened to Saint breathe. And after a long time asked if she was sleeping, and she did not reply.

She knew that koala fingerprints are so close to ours they could contaminate a crime scene.’

Marty laughed. ‘I guess maybe someone all wrong for me in the ways that counted least. We fell in love and it was like … you know when all of a sudden there’s meaning. Actual true meaning and purpose.’ ‘Like color in the dark,’ Patch said. ‘Yes. Exactly yes. Nothing is so dark with them in the world.’

gave Joseph an out. I was being put to death anyway. Grief is a part of life. It’s the unknown that truly ruins us.’

To love and be loved was more than could ever be expected, more than enough for a thousand ordinary lifetimes.

‘I’m a collector, Marty. And this collection is sewn into the fabric of Monta Clare like folklore. Like a reminder that sometimes, against the longest of odds, hope wins out.’

They stood, and Candice followed her to the car, but not before Saint heard it as the wind finally died. ‘You keep bees?’ Saint said. Candice smiled. ‘Theodore does. He found an old hive buried in the woodland. Sweetest honey I ever tasted.’ Saint waited till she was free of their land, till Candice and the farm faded in the mirror, and only then did she pull to the side of the road and cry. For the girl she once was. For the man he would become.

Saint smiled as she looked at the two figures, lying beneath the stars, their heads side by side, their feet the north and south of a compass. The thirteen-year-old pirate. And the beekeeper that saved his life.