Short Story 1

Hanging above them, the clouds looked like the bony carcass of a fish. A spine.
“The sky is making me uncomfortable.” Jessica stated, shifting her back and arcing slightly, adjusting the placement of her head on Allison’s not particularly cushiony, but quite warm and welcoming, lap.
Allison did not look up. She smoothed the wispy hairs curling at the side of Jessica’s face absentmindedly and continued staring across at the wavy water of the fountain beside her. It seemed funny how the square windows of those apartment buildings, once reflected, became little layered tide pools of the sky floating on the surface. She wanted to dip one slender finger into the center of each of them, but they were not stationary.
“Allie,” came Jessica’s voice again from her lap.
The fold of her cream colored peasant top brushed itself up onto Jessica’s face as she bent over to look into her eyes. She tucked it into her tummy with her arm as she tilted her face at an angel.
“Mmmhm?” She responded dreamily, quite content.
“Let’s get out of here. I need to find a new piece of sky. I can’t stay under all this.”
She gestured up with both hands
“Alright.”
She kissed the pale white crown of her forehead beneath her and they slid off the low granite wall of the fountain where they had been lounging all afternoon.
Allison did not look back. She never did. She had vowed to live this last summer solely in the moment. As they glided away, Jessica’s eyes darted to the sky, calculating. She mumbled. Allison did not mind the sudden change, she loved to wander. She imagined the churning noises of the fountain to be propelling them forward. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, holding her chest high she tilted back her head. She was the figurehead of their ship. And Jess was certainly the navigator, shut up inside her head amidst well-worn piles of hand-drawn maps, compasses, and charts. Allison’s only job was to breathe the salty air and feel it softly crystallizing on her face while every so often warning of a problem unseen or predicted by Jess.
The two of them were a pair. Leggy and careless, they strolled through gardens and complexes, past corporate buildings and past drug deals, drawing far more attention to themselves then they were aware of.
High school had ended too abruptly for both of these beauties and they spent the newly freed time meandering carelessly through the city. Sitting in parks. Lingering at harbors. Doing what their mothers called “a whole lotta nothing.”
They had danced across 15 blocks before Jessica had dared to look up again. By that time, the dead fish in the sky had successfully spread itself out into a thin mass of cloud cover, just partially blocking a side of the sun, and so they had stopped. Directly in front of, to Allison’s delight, a tiny little convenience shop equipped with a hard metal square advertisement in the lower right side window offering soft serve.
Alison twirled her tongue around the vanilla soft serve, trying to trace and then recreate the swirl that had been there originally. She could not seem to get it quite right and so she gave up and with one big lick and pushed through the door to go sit alongside Jess at the red plastic table on the sidewalk.
It did not take more than two seconds for Allison’s eyes to adjust to the bright, cloudless, sun-filled sky and to realize that she was alone. But not entirely. There was a man sitting on the curb, his dirty flannel shirt a dark blackish red, the back of his head greasy, his hair long. She wanted to vomit looking at him. Her head slowly turned to the right, every object in her view blurring into a stream of condensed color. The red of his shirt solidly staining the middle portion.
She dropped her ice cream cone. It was more of a release. A reaction to her mind shutting down. The street became narrow, trapped in a cone of silence. Slow motion, elongated, silence. It was gray and dismal. She felt like she was drunk. Or drugged. Something. She kept turning her head from side to side, tracing that flat, ugly rainbow of color back and forth atop itself.
The man unexpectedly turned around and faced her head on. Her eyes zoomed in and focused on the tiny fractures of lines in the palm of his left hand. He was holding his hands up to her. They were open. The centers of a strange world stared back at her. The magnification was too intense. She pulled back and looked into his face. He was pointing up now. Her eyes followed.
Hovering above their heads a helium balloon was slowly spinning, shiny and metallic it reflected the sun into her eyes, blinding her at intervals.
“Congratulations!” it beamed down at her.