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There was a blue house down the street with green shutters that always put up neon pink Christmas lights around the holidays. When I walked through their yard, I always wore my brown shoes because it was never green with grass, just usually red dirt and a few pale weeds.
In the late afternoons, when they opened their front door, a yellow beam of sunlight would pierce through the clear glass from the back window in the house. It was always just for moment, one of those gray, sort of hazy magenta moments, that the yellow became so strong and bright that it turned clear, a glassy sort of clear, like running water from the tap, or that glue gel that came in tubes from elementary school. But that was only for a moment and then it was back to the orange and yellow sunlight that warmed their house, and drew me in. The door was open just for a second, long enough to reach their soft, pink arm out of the house and drop their white letters, dripped with felt-like blue ink, into their cold silver mailbox, that sat just to the side of the worn out door frame.
And then in that time, as their arm reached out, the light from the house shimmied down from the elbow and danced on the hundreds of blonde hairs, turning the tips of each tiny hair, green and blue, and even colors that you, or I have never seen before. Deep plums and the softest blues stained each perfect hair making it a capsule of color, so bright that my eyes could not understand. After the silver mailbox clanged shut, they shut their heavy brown door, and the light stopped moving through the house and out into the universe. It just sat there in that house, I imagine, with nowhere to go, or move. The walls soaked it in, and made their blue and tan flowered wallpaper curl off of the walls in the corners, and on the sides and on the seams where the sheets had been fit together, and it curled so much that the naked wall underneath that was waiting to taste the light,
Could.
And it was happy.
