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In the Blue Country, when you say you love someone it means you want to eat them. I knew that because when I thought about Orchid Harm on the edge of the oasis with water like labradorite all I could think of was how good his skin tasted when I kissed it; how sweet and savory his mouth had always been, how even his bones would probably taste like sugar, how even his blood would taste like hot cocoa. I didn’t like those thoughts but they were in my head and I couldn’t not have them. That was what happened to my desire in the Blue Country. The blue leaked out all over it and I wanted to swallow Orchid. He would be okay inside me. He could live in my liver. I would take care of him. I would always be full.
But Orchid wasn’t with me which is probably good for him as I have never been good at controlling myself when I have an ardor. My belly growled but I didn’t bring anything to eat on account of not wanting an Emperor-steak, medium-rare, so it was coconut delight on a starlit night with the bubbles coming in. In the Blue Country, the bubbles gleam almost black. They roll in like dark dust, an iridescent wall of go-fuck-yourself, a soft, ticklish tsunami of heart-killing gases. I didn’t know that then but I know it now. The bubble-storm covered the blue plains and wherever a bubble popped something invisible leaked out, something to do with memory and the organs that make you feel things even when you would rather play croquet with a plutonium mallet than feel one more drop of anything at all. The blue-bruise-black-bloody bubbles tumbled and popped and burst and glittered under the ultramarine stars and I felt my sorrow’s trunk around my ankle which was good because otherwise I think I would probably have floated off or disappeared.
People came out of the houses shaped like sailboats and the houses shaped like parrot eggs. They held up their hands like little kids in the bubble-monsoon. Bubbles got stuck in their hair like flowers, on their fingers like rings. I’d never seen a person who looked like those people. They had hair the color of tropical fish and skin the color of a spring sky and the ladies wore cerulean dresses with blue butterflies all over them and the boys wore midnight waistcoats and my heart turned blue just looking at them.
“Heyo, girlie!” the blue people called, waggling their blue fingers in the bubbly night. “Heyo, elephant and mask! Come dance with us! Cornflower Leap and Pavonine Up are getting married! You don’t even have any blueberry schnapps!”
Because of the bubbles popping all over me I stopped being sure who I was. The bubbles smelled like a skull covered in moss and tourmalines. Their gases tasted like coffee with too much milk and sugar left by an Emperor on a kitchen counter inside a wine bottle.
“Cornflower Leap and Pavonine Up are dead, dummies,” I said, but I said it wrong somehow because I wasn’t Violet Wild anymore but rather a bubble and inside the bubble of me I was turning into a box of matchsticks. Or Orchid Harm. Or Mummery. I heard clarinets playing the blues. I heard my bones getting older. “They got dead two hundred years ago, you’re just too drunk to remember when their wedding grew traffic laws and sporting teams and turned into a city.”
One of the blue ladies opened her mouth right up and ate a bubble out of the air on purpose and I decided she was the worst because who would do that? “So what?” she giggled. “They’re still getting married! Don’t be such a drip. How did a girlie as young as you get to be a drip as droopy as you?”
People who are not purple are baffling.
You better not laugh but I danced with the blue people. Their butterflies landed on me. When they landed on me they turned violet like my body and my name but they didn’t seem upset about it. The whole world looked like a black rainbow bubble. It was the opposite of drinking the sun that Orchid’s family brewed down in their slipstills. When I drink the sun, I feel soft and edgeless. When the bubbles rained down on me I felt like I was made of edges all slicing themselves up and the lights of Lizard Tongue burned up my whole brain and while I was burning I was dancing and while I was dancing I was the Queen of the Six-Legged Squirrels. They climbed up over me in between the black bubbles. Some of them touched the turquoise butterflies and when they did that they turned blue and after I could always tell which of the squirrels had been with me that night because their fur never got purple again, not even a little.
I fell down dancing and burning. I fell down on the cracked cobalt desert. A blue lady in a periwinkle flapper dress whose hair was the color of the whole damn ocean tried to get me to sit up like I was some sad sack of nothing at Mummery’s parties who couldn’t hold her schnapps.
“Have you ever met anyone who stopped being dead?” I asked her.
“Nobody blue,” she said.
I felt something underneath me. A mushy, creamy, silky something. A something like custard with a crystal heart. I rolled over and my face m
ade a purple print in the blue earth and when I rolled over I saw Jellyfish looking shamefaced, which she should have done because stowaways should not look proudfaced, ever.
“I ate a bunch of bleu cheese at the wedding buffet in the town square and now my tummy hates me,” the watercolor unicorn mourned.
One time Orchid Harm told me a story about getting married and having kids and getting a job somewhere with no squirrels or prohibited substances. It seemed pretty unrealistic to me. Jellyfish and I breathed in so much blackish-brackish bubble-smoke that we threw up together, behind a little royal blue dune full of night-blooming lobelia flowers. When we threw up, that story came out and soaked into the ground. My sorrow picked us both up in her trunk and carried us back to the fire.
The last thing I said before I fell asleep was: “What’s inside your cabinet?”
The only answer I got was the sound of a lock latching itself and a squirrel screeching because sorrow stepped on it.
When I woke up the Blue Country had run off. The beautiful baffling blue buffoons and the black bubbles and the pompous stories had legged it, too.
Green snow fell on my hair. It sparkled in my lap and there was a poisonous barb from the tail of a story stuck to the bottom of my shoe. I pulled it off very carefully and hung it from my belt. My hand turned blue where I’d held it and it was always blue forever and so I never again really thought of it as my hand.
4. Yellow
Sometimes I get so mad at Mummery. She never told me anything important. Oh, sure, she taught me how to fly a clarinet and how much a lie weighs and how to shoot her stained-glass Nonegun like a champ. Of course, you can plot any course you like on a clarinet, darlingest, but the swiftest and most fuel efficient is Premiére Rhapsodie by Debussy in A Major. Ugh! Who needs to know the fuel efficiency of Debussy? Mummery toot-tooted her long glass horn all over the world and she never fed me one little spoonful of it when I was starving to death for anything other than our old awful wine bottle in Plum Pudding. What did Mummery have to share about the Green Country? I enjoyed the saunas in Verdigris, but Absinthe is simply lousy with loyalty. It’s a serious problem. That’s nothing! That’s rubbish, is what. Especially if you know that in the Green Country, loyalty is a type of street mime.
The Green Country is frozen solid. Mummery, if only you’d said one useful thing, I’d have brought a thicker coat. Hill after hill of green snow under a chartreuse sky. But trees still grew and they still gave fruit—apples and almonds and mangoes and limes and avocados shut up in crystal ice pods, hanging from branches like party lanterns. People with eyes the color of mint jelly and hair the color of unripe bananas, wearing knit olive caps with sage poms on the ends zoomed on jade toboggans, up and down and everywhere, or else they skate on green glass rivers, ever so many more than in the Blue Country. Green people never stop moving or shivering. My sorrow slipped and slid and stumbled on the lime-green ice. Jellyfish and I held on for dear life. The Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen clung to my face, which I was happy about because otherwise I’d have had green frost growing on my teeth.
One time Orchid Harm and I went up to the skull socket of the opera house and read out loud to each other from a book about how to play the guitar. It never mattered what we read about really, when we read out loud to each other. We just liked to hear our voices go back and forth like a seesaw. Most popular songs are made up of three or four or even two simple chords, whispered Orchid seductively. Let us begin with the D chord, which is produced by holding the fingers thusly. And he put his fingers on my throat like mine was the neck of a guitar. And suddenly a terror happened inside me, a terror that Orchid must be so cold, so cold in my memory of the skull socket and the D chord and cold wherever he might be and nothing mattered at all but that I had to warm him up, wrap him in fur or wool or lay next to him skin to skin, build a fire, the biggest fire that ever wrecked a hearth, anything if it would get him warm again. Hot. Panic went zigzagging through all my veins. We had to go faster.
“We’ll go to Absinthe,” I said shakily, even though I didn’t know where Absinthe was because I had a useless Mummery. I told the panic to sit down and shut up. “We need food and camping will be a stupid experience here.”
“I love you,” said my sorrow, and her legs grew like the legs of a telescope, longer even than they had already. The bottoms of her fuzzy hippo-feet flattened out like pancakes frying in butter until they got as wide as snowshoes. A sorrow is a resourceful beast. Nothing stops sorrow, not really. She took the snowy glittering emerald hills two at a stride. Behind us the army of squirrels flowed like the train of a long violet gown. Before us, toboggan-commuters ran and hid.
“In the Green Country, when you say you love somebody, it means you will keep them warm even if you have to bathe them in your own blood,” Jellyfish purred. Watercolor unicorns can purr, even though real unicorns can’t. Jellyfish rubbed her velvety peach and puce horn against my sorrow’s spine.
“How do you know that?”
“Ocherous Wince, the drunken dog-lover who painted me, also painted a picture more famous than me. Even your Mummery couldn’t afford it. It’s called When I Am In Love My Heart Turns Green. A watercolor lady with watercolor wings washes a watercolor salamander with the blood pouring out of her wrists and her elbows. The salamander lies in a bathtub that is a sawn-open lightbulb with icicles instead of clawfeet. It’s the most romantic thing I ever saw. I know a lot of things because of Ocherous Wince, but I never like to say because I don’t want you to think I’m a know-it-all even though I really want to say because knowing things is nicer when somebody else knows you know them.”
Absinthe sits so close to the border of the Yellow Country that half the day is gold and half the day is green. Three brothers sculpted the whole city—houses, pubs, war monuments—out of jellybean-colored ice with only a little bit of wormwood for stability and character. I didn’t learn that from Jellyfish or Mummery, but from a malachite sign on the highway leading into the city. The brothers were named Peapod. They were each missing their pinky fingers but not for the same reason.
