Sold through ARTSHARKS ARTHouse
By Taha Eshmawe

Lea felt the vibrations shimmy along her spine as her feet pounded the gravel-flanked sidewalk. She opened her mouth to expel air, and her long ponytail slapped her back in a comforting tattoo to the beat of her run. Beneath her feet, the leaves crackled like brittle animal bones, and left behind a broken path of brown and gold.

Hearing a familiar gloop overhead, Lea sidestepped just in time as a thick blob of color splattered onto her cheekbone, beside the corner of her eye. Too close for comfort, she thought with a wince, and brushed her sleeve against the fringe of her eyelashes. She strained forward, glad of the healthy burn in her lungs as she inhaled through her nose. Afternoon sunlight filtered through the flaking leaves, and the wind flushed out yesterday’s color-splotched debris from the gutters of the road. As she jogged along the perimeter of the neighborhood, the color continued to drip into her hair.

I’ll look like a rainbow-haired hippy today, she grinned wryly to herself. But so will most everyone else. The stuff was so hard to wash off, but it had a peculiar, comforting aroma that reminded her of the incense of burning pumpkin seeds.

He smelled like pumpkin seeds. She had smelt it in his hair one day, when his head lolled to her shoulder while they’d been watching a movie he didn’t like, Garden State. She could tell he didn’t like it, because he’d fallen asleep after a pretty restful day after exam period. It was the only thing on TV, really, and it though she hadn’t liked it the first time she’d seen it, this time she had; perhaps with him by her side she could see past the drugs and hysteria, and there was real tenderness and novelty in the relationship and in the plotline itself. He woke up before the credits ran along the tiny television screen.

Lea missed him. Hence the jogging.

She raised her hood with a jerk of her hand as she ran, fuming over the prospect of waiting in the long lines at the laundrymat for the second time that week. Already, it being late November, her new hoodie had become a patchwork of messy vibrancy. But people were resourceful; in this town it had been unofficially decreed as a new seasonal trend, this inevitable bohemian, gypsy-patterned look. Global warming was supposed to mean rising temperatures and sea levels—and it had, autumn all but replacing winter completely—but in the face of dealing with disappearing islands and broadening deserts, who bothered with a bit of overflowing color saturation? It wasn’t life-threatening, unless the liquid color was consumed, which seemed unlikely; the animals in the neighborhood would sniff the rainbow puddles and wrinkle their noses in distaste.

Apparently color was not the new ambrosia. Lea sighed. All in all, it was becoming a messy, messy world.

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