• Facebook
• Instagram

Disappointment, Blue, 1982

CJ Giroux

__________

Blue is the color of your best friend’s Honors Chemistry textbook when you got placed in what everyone knew was Biology for Dummies. In the dissection unit on a late spring Friday, it’s the fetal veins wandering like the Big Two-Hearted; you weren’t invited to your second cousin’s wedding along its banks. Your mom, though, is attending, bearing a brooch, lapis lazuli, something old, something borrowed, something…. Well, you know. And you know it’s all because of your grade, written in flair pen, on Mrs. Knott’s geometry quiz (true/fact, false, opinion). Fact: you failed again. Truth: it’ll happen again, though your dad says that’s just one opinion. It’s Elton John singing about eyes, never cracking Casey Kasem’s Top 10. It’s your stepmom’s Mustang, the driver’s door with the dent made by a runaway shopping cart at the old A&P. It’s her trying to cover up the chips, leaving her fingerprints in the metal slope. It’s finally (finally!) learning watercolors in 6th hour Intro to Art. Lightly, lightly, you pencil in elongated rectangles, edges rounded, to create your own still life: Milk of Magnesia bottles, table whites you never heard of. You number each shade, add layer by layer of cobalt, 1 being the lightest, 4 the darkest. With sable brush, you move on to Prussian, cerulean, ultramarine. From gallon jugs to blueberries, riptides to drowning. Your grade, another B-.

__________

CJ Giroux is the author of two chapbooks. He teaches college English and is a reader for Dunes Review.

__________

<< Back Next >>

To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.