The Cedarville Review 2018

PROSE 43 Yet, sitting here on my sheet-less bed, surrounded by Alice Cooper music folios, organic bananas, dried carnations, and an old pot from my ex roommate’s historical ceramics class, I’m reminded of how yellow should do the same as orange. How Christmas lights should dance on the walls, not remind me of the butterflies pinned to the corkboard of a sociopathic middle schooler’s science project. No. Orange wouldn’t dazzle in this room. I would paint Mango and the walls would give me off-pitch cars’ horns in Chicago. The kind when coffee has run cold, and secondhand smoke pairs with hoarse swearing voices to pollute the air. Tangerine would be dirty traffic cones, stagnant and filthy. Orange, on these walls, would be realizing Monarch butterflies are poisonous, not just pretty. And I sit here and wish I knew where I’m supposed to scrub.