My eyes are only half open. One half of openness each. No one would suspect that each is not entirely open — I’m wearing yellow, plastic sunglasses I bought at the filling station. They are hideously yellow, but around my eyes, inside the lenses, that’s the only thing keeping me awake. Yellow and the $2.63 cup of coffee I got at the filling station, too. I filled up with coffee and (20 minus 2.63 minus a yellow 1.17 equals) $16.20 worth of gas. Coffee into a cup, gas into the peeling paint blue, driver-side hole. In a basket on the counter there was a blueberry muffin that I almost bought, too. But the wicker around the muffin was lined with grease, somehow. Underneath my broken shoes, the tiles were held together by the stuff, and the inter-wicker grease of the basket was the inter-wicker grease smudging the once-upon-a-time-white of the table and chair set in the corner. I couldn’t stomach the muffin. I just paid the man my last $20 bill. Someday it’ll be his last twenty. And I suspect he might pass it onto his sons, along with the whole station. Maybe they’ll split it four ways or they might fight each other for more than $5 and one fourth of a filling station. Either way, they’ll die with that blackness beneath their fingernails. If they ever try to wash it out, their fingernails will fall off and the rest of their dirt would follow falling out of their pores until they fell into a million clean pieces that would suds up the tiles and break them apart. And the whole place would fall right down. Maybe their father would be standing in all the soap, hanging onto a muffin and my twenty dollars. From behind the counter, he handed me a lid for my cup.
Son #4 looked at me curiously from the greasy wicker chair, pushing the black stuff further into the creases of his forehead. He was looking at a comic book about some dashing man and some woman, I suppose. On the cover, I could see a man wearing classically blue tights leaping over a black and white building engulfed in red flames, while a yellow crowd of civilians looked on from the left-hand corner. Inside, all the dialogue was on his reading level — established long ago — and he knew the names of all the colors. All the colors were only made of tiny dots of ink. Those were all I could see of the cover anymore, fading in and out of focus. Still looking at him, I swigged a black swallow; as black as his fingernails into my stomach and into my blood stream and into my eyelids.
If I was the mother of his child, it wouldn’t read comic books, and I would feed it clean muffins and clean the dirt from its fingernails. I pressed my back against the door, staring into the grease-lined, snack-packed home. And I pressed into the door, walking into it backwards, ringing a bell for myself, or maybe for them. With two fingers I swung the yellow shades between the 1:37 PM sun and me, hiding my half open eyes.
I roll down the window to get some air on my face. My eyes are close to two thirds open. Two thirds each. The radio is broken. So I sing for myself, like I had to ring that bell for myself, or for them. I don’t know very many songs. I sing about tertiary colors. About civilians red-orange and yellow-green. But they are only a bunch of ink dots huddled beside a black and white building watching a blue-violet hero. They are all yellow ink-dots, the color of my glasses. One of them is wearing blue tights.
The coffee is all gone from my cup. Into my blood and into taut, invisible strings tied to my eyelashes. There is only blackness left in a ring around the bottom, and there is some underneath my fingernails.