Assistant Editor Lisa Low: “Two Moments Above and Below,” like many stories, begins with a bird—but instead of the singular, symbolic flash of color that many birds seem to be in books and movies, the opening pigeon is iridescent, indefinable. As the bird flies away, we’re invited as readers into an exploration of complexity via the idea of color itself. Perspective takes on an explicit role in the narrator’s gaze in this piece, and a scene of a sunbathing woman—complete with a swimsuit and a book—deepens with uncertainty and nuance.
To hear Austyn read her piece, click here:
Two Moments Above and Below
Iridescent pigeon on the window unit, preening. It flies away from me.
Trumpet vines on the chain-link fence.
From my high fourth-floor apartment I can see over the unit down to the dumpster where a man is walloping an old cathode-ray TV with a sledgehammer. Years ago the co-ed hippie fraternity at the school across town had a TV-smashing contest, protesting against American ennui, the boob tube, environmentalism, something.
But the man breaks the TV open like a crystal piñata, white and silver sheets of metal flashing in the hot sun. Colors I could never imagine, motherboards, red and green, blue. Like TV guts.
He squats down among the rubble in front of the dumpster and delicately extracts the copper cables. He walks off with them in his hand like dead snakes.
I run to the other window to watch him go down the street. He passes the house across from mine, which is boarded up with birch panels.
Later I am by the river. Green trees, blue brook, the red of my one-piece swimsuit. Lying as I am on this bankside rock, my suit stretching out in the foreground, water in the middle, trees in the back, I can abstract my vision to the three colors of light.
But red, which I think of as so vivacious, is the artificial color here, the lifeless thing, bouncing along with my breath. Melancholic blue moves with joy and purpose. With life. The trees breathe more slowly. They’re in between, reflecting their position as the lesser primary, the color swapped out when paint is subbed for light.
I’d like for things to be archetypal and fixed, symbolic, almost Jungian. For red to always mean a certain thing, for yellow to always mean a certain thing. For every noun to have the massive weight of just one adjective.
I’d like to sit by one river for ten thousand years and only then move on to the next thing. I put my hardcover book back on my face and take a snooze.
Austyn Wohlers is an artist from Atlanta, Georgia. She is working on a novel about an orchard and an album with her band Tomato Flower.
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