The Catharsis

Chapter 39 - Toys In The Attic

Colors

I would like some pink today

But it seems that she has gone away

I could use some yellow now

But yellow, he has gone to town

I do miss the color green

But he can be so very mean

I wish that I could see some blue

But blue, she has up and moved

Colors, you leave me on dreary days

And won't come back no matter what I say

XXX

Rubin held his shaking lover by her shoulders, wishing she would quiet down. People were beginning to stare. Maybe it wasn't the crying so much as the way her legs were twisted up beneath her like a deformed pretzel. Whatever it was, Rubin didn't like the eyes on them.

In the circus, those eyes had always conflicted him. They kept him alive, fed him, clothed him, put a roof over his head. But they judged him, too. They stripped away his dignity, labeled him, dismissed him. Freak. Orphan. Immigrant. Not one of us.

He didn't know if the other people in the waiting room were thinking these things, but his cheeks burned anyway. Rubin looked down in shame, hoping they would not perceive the filth of his background. He heard Minka's sobs magnified in his ears as he hid his flushed face in her long swath of platinum hair.

He and Minka, a team from the start, united in their abandonment. Tied with the rope of distrust. Well, not distrust. Wariness. Wariness against the world and its tricks.

And here was another, perhaps one of the cruelest yet. Poor Mink. Rubin knew what she was feeling; if they were alone, he might have cried as well.

Right now, he felt as though he and his beloved had been trapped at the bottom of a dry, empty well for a long time and someone had finally come by with a rope. Only, just as they were about to lower it into the well, they realized the two of them were not the ones they had intended to save. They coiled the rope back up and moved on.

Minka released a particularly horrible sob. Rubin pressed her face to his shirt, whispering, "It's alright, Kwiat. Why don't we go home now? You'll feel better after a good meal."

"Home, Rubin?" snapped Minka, her voice uncomfortably loud. "What's home? The circus? The Springs' house? Poland? Where is it you want to get back to so badly? Face it, there's nowhere for us to be except here. Waiting."

"Waiting for what?" Rubin muttered under his breath. They had been having this argument on and off for the past few hours. This vigil in the hospital waiting room was, he knew, a pointless exercise in persistence. Family members only, the woman at the desk had said. I'm her mother, Minka had cried. No you aren't, the woman retorted.

Minka said she was waiting for the father, the mother, someone to come out. She was going to ask to go in and see Amethyst. His poor little ukochana, so convinced of the goodness in people. She had her heart fixed on the fragile, erroneous assumption that the Turners would understand what their daughter was to her. How could they? How could anyone, when their connection was so obscure, so fraught with darknesses?