Eloise Vaughan Williams
October 10, 2024

Harbour Colours

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The boy in blue and the boy in red walk down the alley. Blue feels unsure of the word boy, itching against it like sun-pink skin peeling back to reveal new and fresh forearms. They can smoke right there, just out back behind the bar. The first time they did this, Red was the one to say, no, this way, further down. The pair keep walking, they go around the corner, into a second alley. Here it is wider, more street space, more light. Here it is larger, more intimate in revealing the choice to brush shoulders, to let intent lay face up on the table.

They’ve done this twice before. They have closed the bar and Red has offered Blue a smoke, and Blue has said yes. They stop half-way down, dropping their bags on the ground. They are close enough to the bay, and the alley faces the right way, so that the smell is there. Salted and thick, the air a taste felt in eyes. It is all backs of storefronts here. They sit in the deadness of it, the drenched heat, the bricks themselves sweating, exhausted.

Everytime, Red has watched Blue hesitate to sit on the ground of the alley. One of the other cooks, there are three including Red for the small kitchen of the bar, once said Blue must be from money with the way he moved. Then the other cook said no, said he’d heard Blue say something about his home before, about it being swampy and cramped, with sisters that braided his hair when he let it grow too long in high school. Or maybe Red had the sisters part wrong, maybe it had been cousins backing up his mother’s house, always feeding scrawny river dogs in the evenings. He couldn’t quite remember because he’d kept quiet, had been so suddenly contented thinking through Blue’s coming from low down on the map, from wetlands just like him. Or maybe he just felt eased knowing others had been watching Blue too, that there was an objective interest in someone so large that their walk is lopsided from a determination to lay lower, to hit the sky where lines of heads usually do, to be bunched up in a crowd, and to be blind from it. Red was confused when he watched him work, shy and steady. It didn’t click for him how he was a bartender, how he wasn’t back with them, the chefs, with concentrated knife work and an artless laugh. Then he watched everyone clamouring to open him up, searching for that same gratification found in the severed muscles of a clam, tough and cool flesh split and pink before you.

Red stayed a while in the back office the next week, pretending his order forms for the coming week’s meat had gotten turned around. He waited until Blue and the other bartender had closed the wells, until Blue was alone and putting the final fruit syrups used for closing shots away in the walk-in. Red stood in the middle of the doorway of the office, before the hallway where the servers and bartenders dropped their home shoes and bags. Blue was switching to a pair of orange sneakers. When Red asked if he wanted a smoke, Blue said yeah, said sure, and when he stood up, he ran both hands down the length of his thighs like he was ironing something out.

I heard it was slow again? Red asks. They have both sat now and he is watching Blue light up, the flame weak, tired against harbour wind. His legs are drawn up and close, Blue’s are stretched out long.

When Red had closed the kitchen, he had seen the still empty seats and booths. He had heard the bar music playing clear, undistorted by the absence of its common noise. The clamour of people naming one another, calling familiar bodies over, smacking hands on stained, wet wood, trying to fit in last words.

Yeah, he nods, eyes on his first real drag. Yeah it was.

Sometimes I like that in this heat, Red shrugs. Even if it means less money, it means less time over an open flame.

I don’t know, Blue pauses. Yeah, I guess.

No, Red smiles, head angling closer, go on. Sometimes Blue thinks Red can be a bit like a needle without thread, aimlessly sharp. Maybe it’s like this: Red is always moving through things, his narrowness a trick, you’re alone in the funhouse and then you see that clipped and rough blonde hair.

I guess I actually like working through it. He keeps his eyes down. I like working through my body like that, until it gets to a point where I am so overheated and exhausted that it isn’t mine anymore, its movements or anything. I’m just kind of gone.

Yeah, Red exhales, nodding.

There’s a satisfaction to it.

Yeah, I follow.

No, Blue suddenly laughs, turning to him. No, you go now. You follow how?

I get it, Red is grinning, because Blue isn’t just standing at the entrance anymore. I mean, he stretches his arms in front of him in midair, short grey t-shirt revealing delicate, sharp limbs. It’s the same reason I never really put on the right bandages or creams or whatever when I get burns and slices taken out of me. There’s something about the proof of it all, marked up on your body.

Blue stares at Red’s outstretched arms. There’s something about him like a sparrow with wrong-angled wings. In his thinness, in his smallness, there is something disjointed grounding him. Blue pretends he is noting Red’s hands for the first time, as if this consideration of their deftness is novel. Technically, it was in the kitchen he first saw it, but really it was the second time they smoked, sitting just like this in the alley, that he really thought about it. No more than six minutes, they talked about how one of the owners had come in and gotten too drunk, had said awful things to all the female workers on shift, but the worst of it to the underage hostess. Red was telling Blue some story about another time this had happened, was gesticulating wildly and laughing, there had been broken glasses and an unthawed Halibut involved. Blue was smiling, watching him throw his slim hands in the air, but in it too he was noting that where he had thought Red was barbed, he was disarmingly open. In this comedy of errors Red was performing for Blue, his hiccuping laughter was warm, round, almost soft, he thought. Is this familiarity? Blue toyed with the idea, with Red being made new in evening light. Another’s body ceasing to be about its lines.

You would be good with an instrument I bet. Blue nods his head toward Red’s hands.

Red thinks despite Blue’s usually clamped tongue, he still manages to come out with strange things and make them seem normal, seem obvious. His delivery, Red thinks, his evenness of tone flat like still laying water can render a person dumb.

I know, everyone always says that, Red flips his hands so they are staring at his palms, the insides of his skinny fingers. A pianist’s hands, not made for cutting and searing meat.

Everyone? Blue wants to see it, to see every person who has said that to Red. He wants to see who they were to him, how they refused to hold on their tongue this desire to tell him he looks degrees gentler than he is, how Red’s face might change as someone told him that.

My little brother, it’s like Red hears the question aloud, he’s got really good at the cello. He’s always telling me he wishes someone had set me up with something with strings or keys when I was younger.

Blue sits with that, the idea of an expression of Red that could be felt through pulses in the air, vibrations through earth. It is too easy to want to observe what Red could become once freed to be an idea, a cluster of notes, a quick rhythm. He wants a means of seeing him through cracks and distortions, through new and changed bodies. Blue believing, perhaps naively, that harmony or a scale is truer than a chef’s knife through skin and fat, creation truer than destruction.

Who did it for him?

His dad, I guess he’s my half-brother, actually.

Oh, got it. Blue pauses. That’s good for him though. Gifts like that give you options.

Yeah, yeah I think he’s got a couple schools and programmes already looking at him. Red stops, scratches at the tip of his nose. He turned thirteen last year. Blue’s heard one of the other bartenders, a girl from the college nearby, say his nose makes him look ruddy and awful, but ruddy and awful like a Flemish portrait.

I don’t get down to see him a lot you know, Red makes a sound with his tongue, and his dad isn’t a huge fan of me. I once spent days workshopping this maple-yuzu take on a tarte-tatin – and I thought I finally got it, so I went over to his to drop it after his private tutoring ended. My old place was a little far, but it was whatever. Red takes a short deep drag, and he’s in the living room and he’s excited, and he’s getting a plate, and he’s tasting it, and then his dad’s at the counter and he’s asking what’s in it, and I’m like listing the ingredients and I say bourbon – because there’s just a little bit in there to play with the maple you know – and he flips out. Like, he really, really flips. It’s suddenly like I’m this weird stranger who’s been let in and is fucking with his kid. But, he’s my brother, you know. He’s acting like being a cook isn’t a real job and that I’m some bum, and I guess he knew somehow about my old addiction stuff and in his head thought I’d come like cracked out into his house trying to turn this kid, my brother, into a child alcoholic or something.

Fuck, I’m sorry.

Like, tell me that’s not an insane reaction to have? It was fucking bourbon in a tart.

No, yeah that’s ridiculous. He shakes his head again. I’m sorry, that’s really out of line. He’s unsure of how to behave when people do that, call something up with dank, chewy roots like he can put hands on it, make it gentle, make it sweet. He feels he’s always getting the response wrong, and people are always letting him do it for some reason, still and always coming around with more. It agitates him now, because here he wants Red to know that he appreciates this small offering. Even if he can only say something bland and dumb, he is quietly pleased that Red told him that story, that he likes the jut of his laugh too, that his jeans are always skinny like a girls, that his face is always moving faster than the rest of him.

I mean, yeah, it’s whatever. It’s ridiculous looking back on it. It was just one of the last couple months I was living down there. Red stubs out his cigarette, anyway now I’m up here so.

Yeah, Blue nods. If he could, he would give him in return what he knows too about having someone small with a wide smile who’s already better than you. What he knows too about not knowing the shape that is best to take for them, what protection and guidance can look like from a person that is more often than not turning up a while too late, with a hand a deal too empty. What he knows about leaving with a bag that should have been too small, and a spoonbill drawing pushed under a little sister’s bedroom door. But, with his memories so often an exercise in commemoration, he can’t go back right here. He can’t go home right here. There is a dingy, cream porch framed by reeds with two figures sat on it that he cannot make himself turn back to just yet. He cannot so simply give over only a little piece of something so colossal, so without edges for a neat tear. He wouldn’t know how.

Yeah. Red is staring at the pack on the ground, he is considering smoking another but is thinking about it being an overstep, that he would be assuming Blue is willing to stay here, damp and tired, to listen to Red.

So down where? Where’d you say you’re from? Blue picks things back up.

Florida – Wellington. Well, Loxahatchee, but almost Wellington.

Oh, no shit.

Yeah?

I’m from Gainesville, or I guess kind of outside it.

I feel like I never meet people from near home up here. Well, near is relative – but you know –

Yeah, no me either.

Well, damn.

Honestly, anytime someone says Florida here it automatically enters my mind as they’re also from the same place as me. It’s just so different to here that it makes the whole state, a huge state, feel small, or like feel cohesive in a way it’s not.

Yeah, Red nods, smiles big with one side of his mouth. He had started drumming his fingers on his knee but stops.

I never know how to talk about missing home to people here without using the same words everyone uses, Blue continues, is encouraged now by Red’s smiling. Like how to get across that when I say I miss home, I don’t miss it in the way they think. Like, yes, of course I miss the warmth. Yes, of course I miss the palm trees. Yes, of course I miss the tax breaks. Like, every conversation I have with a stranger here sounds exactly the same. It genuinely makes me go crazy. Blue does his Blue pause as he thinks about the words he wants to get out, and Red laughs. A bright colour in his cheeks.

As if like – Florida, home, is just some overbaked tourist’s concept of a place not – Blue waves his hand around in a circle again.

Yeah, no I follow. I know what you’re getting at. Red is still smiling. Blue nods, grins, drops his dangling hand, is at ease now his frustration has found a qualified interpreter in Red.

He watches as Blue lowers his head and looks at his own hands now, turning his palms up to rest on his thighs. Yes, there is a likeness that is born only from being small in the same sun, with the same sort of men that like to get eye level with you to tell you what you are. But Red can see, is sure that for Blue, unlike him, it is different. That when he thinks of home, of love, it is not summery and foul but many-handed with working kitchen drains and someone who knows that the year you turned twelve you found a turtle and that it died that first night you slept with it. That you woke up, hot and already crying, hot and already knowing. Red is worried Blue has figured that out, Red’s stumbling shame of searching always to convince people he has something full and kind, something near and breathing.

You were busy though? I feel like since the kitchen bar closes so much earlier than the bar itself you’re always off before me?

Yeah, I just fucked up some order forms and it took me a while to set them right.

Oh, cool.

I mean, I was mostly done a bit ago and all the other cooks had dipped. So, I figured why not chill for a sec, see if anyone of you guys wanted a smoke

Yeah. It was just me for the end. I let what’s her name, that student – the one with the septum, go before me.

Nice of you. Red grins like it is a joke, but Blue doesn’t get what it could be. Instead, he is watching Red use his thumb to wipe at the beads of perspiration by his temple and brow. A Cupid’s bow slick with sweat. Blue thinks Red might be a person who dislikes even the bones of himself. That he also worries he might be missing something, or rather hopes he is, instead of believing he has broken it. That his ability to be good is too bent out of shape to be of any use. Blue thinks they might be alike in that. Is this how honesty becomes material? Quiet, feverish, and wet.

Thanks for this. Blue nods toward where he put the butt of his cigarette out.

Yeah, no problem. You’re welcome whenever, just find me.

I should probably head. I’ve got opening tomorrow. Blue says it quietly. He should stay, probably. He moves his shoulder, turning away from Red as he makes his first moves to get up. Red feels sure then that this is done now. How simple, devastating in its neatness. Volume and a hand not the sole shepherds of cruelty, but the presence of a body you’ve watched and maybe come close to knowing, on its way out and then gone.

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Eloise Vaughan Williams recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Classics. She grew up between Singapore, Oxford, and West Palm Beach, Florida, and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She is working on more short stories.


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