It could be autumn, on a park bench, in the midst of a looming city, like New York, and you could be wrapped in a warm sweater, sitting lotus-position on the bench, watching crisp red leaves trickle to a final resting place. Of sorts. Until they are disturbed by the crush of a boot or kick of a dog’s paw. Then you could remember the last time you were here in the fall. A Labor Day weekend. Just as chilly and clear blue.
The day you wore that favorite natty wool cardigan, striped in orange and russet. The time you refused to go up the towers after a tour guide pointed out how they swayed in the wind. You stood backside to glass and steel, head retroflexed, watching the reflected sky ripple across surface, and you felt sick. Sick, and sure these new towers would someday topple. You had wondered if that moment was in that clear blue “someday.” The feeling made you leave and wind down streets for Battery Park.
To sit quietly on a bench underneath the shadow of the two mirrored towers. Intending to take in street hustle. To be shat on by pigeons aiming for the molting tree overhead. It seemed unreasonable, the guano smeared hair strands wind-whipping your cheeks in the bite of fall’s change. You thought you’d never return to repeat. You’d never guess how in future autumns you’d just want that bench, only that sky-blue, and all that fell from that overhead.
It could be now you remember this, and staring upwards you wonder why in the 19th year of 99 the Pantone Company announced Cerulean, “sky on a serene, crystal clear day,” the color of the new millennium.
Catherine Moore is the author of Story (Finishing Line Press, 2015), 921b Elysian Fields Avenue – Return to Sender (Kentucky Story Press, 2015), and Wetlands (dancing girl press, 2016). Her writing has appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Cider Press Review, Blue Fifth Review, and in various anthologies. She won the Southeast Review’s 2014 Gearhart Poetry Prize and had work included in The Best Small Fictions of 2015. Catherine earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Tampa. She lives in the Nashville area, where she enjoys a thriving writer’s community and was awarded a MetroArts grant. She is tweetable @CatPoetic.