RM Soutar

On Sandia Crest the air thinned to nothing. It left space for grief to grow feral. The sky hovered above, a sharp, aching blue. Bright as his eyes the last time he truly saw me.

Albuquerque Blue, I used to call it. The shade his eyes held when he clowned around. Stood at his lathe.  Played music with me.

The shade mine held as he tearfully walked me down the aisle.

Now, the color was all I had left. Ever since his eyes stopped recognizing me. Then stopped opening. 

I stood on the mountain overlook. Albuquerque stretched out below me, hazy and wide, full of streets and shadows and echoes of him. 

He used to be everywhere. Now he was in a coffee can. An old Folgers tin from his garage.

The wind circled, dry, restless, smelling of decay. It was the time of year when things let go, when everything brittle began to fall. And somewhere inside the wind, a sound: thin, breathy, half-remembered. 

I clutched the coffee tin, scanned the mountainside. 

The trees moved differently than the wind, less breeze, more broken metronome. And among them…

A skinny boy. 

Something in me jolted at the sight of him, so wrong against the mountainside, against the day. His clown costume was short in the legs, loose in the arms. Face paint a ruined smear, like he hadn’t washed since last Halloween. One cheek bore the ghost of a hollow triangle. The other was bare.

 He played a melody on a wooden flute, familiar and sad, but distant. An underwater lullaby.

 “You’re early.”

 I started when he spoke from just behind me. I hadn’t seen him move.

“No matter,” he said. “I’ve been practicing since before you were born.”

“I just… need to scatter—” My voice snagged. I showed him the tin.

“He was scattered long ago.”

“What?”

He pressed the flute into my palm. It felt handmade. Like it had come from my dad’s workshop. Before the dementia. When his hands still spoke the language of wood. 

“You need to finish the song.”

The lump in my throat threatened to choke.

“You know how,” the boy said, tilting his head. Then: “You have beautiful brown eyes.”

I tightened my hold on the tin. “My eyes are blue. Like his.”

“No. He took all that color with him.”

“The sky is still that color.” I gestured upward.

The boy flickered out with a sad smile. His words remained on the wind. “That’s not sky. That’s memory.”

I placed the tin in the dirt. The letting go knifed through me, opening wounds to the cold. A sob escaped as I raised the flute to my lips. I didn’t make music, just fractured notes, a scratched record.

The wind surged, cruel and final. The tin toppled. The lid popped off and careened down the mountainside.

I seized the tin before the wind could steal him.

But there were no ashes.

Inside were two eyes, blue as the Albuquerque sky.

RM’s prompts were: In Your Home Town, a Strange Child, a Musical Instrument

RM is originally and proudly from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She currently lives in Denver and misses NM green chile. She enjoys reading and writing horror and fantasy with a cappuccino at her side. When not lost in a story, she can be found on the floor, practicing yoga with her rescue dog.