Candy Color Blue By Andrew Rhodes

A woman was walking on the side of the road by the hospital while wearing a pink silk tank top with matching shorts. It could have been lingerie or a legitimate outfit, depending. I asked her if she needed a ride. She did. I had many papercuts on my hands from office work, some a day or two old, others fresh and stinging like hellfire.

“Can I touch the silk,” I said.

“Yeah.”

I touched it, rubbed it between my fingers. It healed me.

“Alright,” she said. “We need to move. My ex-husband has kidnapped my child. It’s his child too, but still. It’s kidnapping by the letter of the law.”

I said, “Ex-husband. Okay. Good. I like the sound of that”

“But my new husband is offshore, and when he comes back, everybody is going to be sorry. He’s a war hero.”

“Which war?”

“Kokomo.”

“Kosovo?”

“No. There’s a place called Kokomo. A secret war has been going on there for years. Tyrants, communists, drug traders, liars, underground tunnels. A secret war. But Billy was the hero.”

She told me which way to go and I drove until the road was no longer paved and we were riding on grass. Finally, she told me to stop. I thought she wanted to stop so we could be intimate. I told her I was an old-fashioned lover in the tradition of a Mitchum or an Iglesius.

“No,” she said, pointing. “We are here. He’s at the blueberry farm up there.”

I looked ahead, but all I saw was a cloud of candy-colored blue. “That’s not a blueberry farm; it’s just a blue cloud.”

She slapped me.

© 2015 Andrew Rhodes

Andrew Rhodes is a fiction writer from Mississippi. His stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in publications such as Gravel, upstreet, The Laurel Review, Star 82 Review, Crack the Spine, Punchnel’s, New World Writing, and Crime Factory.

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