Featured Fiction: And I'm Yellow

The color should make me happy, the sun’s warm, bright rays rising

as I rise for breakfast, peeking through the window, splattering

through the grate onto my face.

Forcing open eyes but also forced to squint, running on eyeballs

meandering through a forested mush of brain and blood,

reaching out to tap, with one, tiny, brainless finger, that place,

the center of my brain myself the world,

when the light will turn on, the yellow, incandescent bulb that burns inside.

But the light grows dim, the yellow grows meek, the

kid grows up.

The fire remains, clicking and crackling and cackling

greedily in my face. Yellow and red and orange

and blue and white and mixing and twisting and

jumping and heating and eating. It burns inside

it sits below a cast iron cauldron of dreams

boiling them

they bubble up and fly away

they’re overcooked they’re too well done.

The wood is gone the coals a memory

long forgotten the lifeless embers floating, drifting, lost

and now the fire consumes me.