nekare

Talk about speedy translations! It's pretty truthful to the original, though, so that's okay. :) I like how weird this actually turned out, lol. It's weird, though, a chromatic circle in Spanish is the spectre of colors, but in English it can also mean some weird musical thingy that I don't get. o_O It still fits, but... It's just weird.

Title: Chromatic Circle
Word Count: 890
Summary: The end is nigh. No one seems particularly surprised.
Author Notes: This is somewhat like magical realism? And/or surrealism? An alternative title was Dalí, after all. A quick translation of Círculo Cromático.



Chromatic Circle

It starts while you’re washing the dishes. You stop what you’re doing and open the window with your hands still soapy. You look out, head almost completely out, eyes wide open and mouth set in an ‘o’ shape. The sky is purple, and it matches with your yellow jacket. The clouds are orange, and the contrast reminds you of your drawing classes, how only green is missing to have the three secondary colors.

You finish washing the dishes, and you sing to yourself every once in a while.

----

You lie down in your bed and try and ignore the half-finished score on your desk. You still hum without noticing, and when you shape a new note you stop and refuse to write it down. You watch the indigo-colored stickers you stuck to the roof when you were thirteen in a fit of puberty and you realize they’re about to fall off. You sit in front of your window, press your nose against the glass and watch the orange clouds move until they disappear. You write Mi on the part of the glass that’s steamed up from your breath and then you erase it with your hand and try and forget about the note and its sound.

----

The end of the world gets delayed at the end of your street, and you can barely remember what was beyond there before the nothingness swallowed it. You vaguely remember the ice cream parlor on the corner and France through an ocean.

The next day you put on your favorite shoes, the green ones, and you walk down your street making bubblegum balloons colored electric pink. You see your neighbor watering her plants and a kid watching tv through his open window. You sit where the world ends, feet hanging over the edge and swinging back and forth and repeat. You feel a mild suction on the tips of your toes, an itch that tells you the nothingness could drag you away. You don’t move, and you keep on looking forward to the inky blackness that extends as far as you can see, instead of turning back to watch the houses and buildings and lives that are already becoming translucent, getting ready to be erased by the end of the world.

You hear footsteps and you turn around to see a stray cat coming towards you. It stops a few steps before the abysm and sits. It looks at you, and you stare at it until it says, “Finish the song.”

“And what if I don’t want to?” you ask, and the cat licks its paw and it isn’t until it thinks it’s clean enough that it answers.

“Everything must end,” it says, and you nod.

You stand up, clean the dust off your hands and walk back home. The cat follows you. You hear a crunching sound, alike to when you step on dry leaves, and when you turn around the nothingness has eaten the exact place you’d been sitting at. You shrug, and walk in silence next to the cat counting the steps until your door with your fingers.

The sky is still purple over your head.

----

You disguise yourself as Little Red Riding Hood, a red sweatshirt and innocent face and you sit on the steps below your front door to suck on a lime-flavored popsicle. The radio recites in a dreamy, hazy way the number of people that have already been swallowed by the nothingness (4,587’349,203), and the air smells like summer, citric and oppressive.

“I always thought the end would be somewhat more… biblical,” you say, staring at the popsicle until your eyes get crossed. You take a bite, and the cold sensation travels from your taste buds to your nerves until it freezes your brain and you feel that prick of pain you’re addicted to.

The cat stretches next to you, yawns, and starts licking his tail. You finish your popsicle in silence, wanting to hum your song but now allowing yourself to do so. Both you and the cat are following the path of a floating feather when it starts raining frogs half an hour later.

“Here’s your biblical ending,” the cat says, and you almost smile. You go into the house and go out again with a sky blue umbrella that is almost a lost vestige of your childhood, you get your hood up and go out for a stroll in between the croak of the frogs and with the cat singing your song next to you.

----

It’s a Thursday when you walk towards the end of the street again (green shoes, red hood) dodging the frogs that jump around your feet and with a notebook and a pencil in your hands. The cat growls at the frogs from behind you, hair standing on end and claws out. You sit with your legs crossed right before the edge and take a deep breath before starting to write the last few notes you’re missing. The cat rubs its head against your legs.

It smells like pepper and paprika and another thousand and one spices as you write, and the cat purrs against your skin. You write the last Do with a firm hand and the heart serene. Then, a crunching of dry leaves, and you raise your eyes to meet the nothingness.