Blue

Green how I love you green, green wind, green branches.

The boat on the sea and the horse on the mountain

With a shadow round her waist

She dreams at her railing,

green flesh, hair green

With eyes of cold silver

 

…or was it gold? Gold rhymes with cold, that would make more sense, right? This is poetry, isn’t it supposed to rhyme?

The focused hum of the factory worker tapers off at the confusion. His fingers twitch, long dirty nails scraping against his jeans briefly as he fights the temptation to take his tattered copy of the book out of his inner jacket pocket to check. It would be quick, he reasons as he checks items off his clipboard, the marks barely inside their designated boxes. Into those wrinkled pages, that messy sea of nonsense, then straight back out. The appeal grows gradually as he runs through the words again, skipping over the ones that had been blotched out by his breakfast mishap. Poetry’s adaptable, right?

When eyes, not of cold silver or gold for that matter, but rather of bark brown, meet his own from across the line, he gives a stiff nod, and his intentions unravel, picturing his clumsy attempt to paw through the thing, only to lose it in one of the shipments.

Right, the shipments.

Blinking a few times to center his mind back into reality, he glances back to see the machinery chugging away, pulling at limp fabric until it’s taut, stuffing it, tossing it, stabbing it. Nothing is green here.

He tosses another couple samples into a box, muttering ironic approval. No one will write poetry about this, he thinks. What’s there to be said? Something might look real nice until you see it in pieces, see the insignificant materials lying round, waiting to be mutilated into something else entirely. He decides it’s a lot like people; ya’ don’t wanna know how any of that’s made.

Chuckling lowly, he blindly tosses another batch into the approved box. There aren’t many failures, making his job easier. The bad ones are easy to spot, just look for a kid’s nightmare. Do ‘em a favor and throw it away. Quality control. At least, that’s what it says under his name.

Quality, huh? He wonders about this book’s quality. Sure, it’s coming apart and barely legible, but that’s mostly his own fault. And whoever owned it before him. But this guy, Lorca, is he any good? Compared to all the others? The only stuff he’d found on the guy had been in Spanish, which was about as clear to him as the misty glass of the only window, way across the room. If it provided any light, then it was consumed by the big buzzing behemoths that hung precariously from the high ceilings. He should really tell someone to clean that window.

A sneeze echoes its way into his ears, briefly drowning the tinnitus. Bark brown shifts off him. A layered chorus of bored ‘bless you’s join the sound of the humming machines.

Two seconds, go!

Sweaty palms pulling out the smushed volume from his pocket, he lets the pages flip past, refusing to be distracted by the breeze the action caused, nor little animation formed by whoever owned it last, a not-quite-round ball bouncing up and down in bright red ink, the kind used to mark wrong answers on a test.

Chewing on his cracked lips, he becomes convinced the poem was erased completely. Had he better faith in his own imagination, he’d think it’d all been in his head. Didn’t he mark the page? He’s marked too many pages.

Something small and soft brushes up against his waist.

Jerking back almost painfully at the surprise, his arm instinctively swings, connecting without a sound, and sends the thing skirting along the concrete floor until it slams yieldingly against the wheels of a chair, making the seat move back a couple of inches.

Well, shit.

The product having piled up in his absence of mind and attention, he leans forward and brushing across the table with his arm, pushes it all into the box of approvals. Small body after small body, all identical.

Rushing over to the fallen one, he takes the opportunity to try once more now that he’s out of sight.

Crouched over the blue stuffed bear, he finds the page easily.

Green flesh, hair green

With eyes of cold silver.

A little scoff. He had it right from the start. Pocketing it, he frowns down at the thing. The fur on its left side now blackened by the slide, the head a little deformed, it bends a little too easily. He grabs it, time to fill that other box. But he looks at its sewn eyes. The rest of the fur is fluffed and new, just like the others, but the eyes, he tries not to look at them.

Silver thread hand-sewn by the guys in the back.

He gives a huff.

“Don’t look at me like that.”