once more in the boy in white’s hands.
Blue Ink
Morgan Hooker The blue ink on the door gave it away. I noticed it before the police. They were about to give up, declaring the case a lost cause. But I remembered the man. I remembered him stamping the passports with a dull and rhythmic kachung, his face stony and silent and still. I remembered his hands. They were huge and powerful, pressing down on the stamp and creating a bright blue blot upon the passports. A solitary dot among the throngs of people filtering the hub of chaos, trying to catch their flight. A dot that seemed insignificant, only necessary for boarding. The police didn’t see past this mask of unimportance. I was the only one aware of that blue dot’s role in the sudden disappearance of airport merchandise. Slowly, cautiously, I slid in front of the door, shoving my hands in my pockets. One of the officers turned to me, his eyes pitiful and his expression sorrowful. He doesn’t know. My hands dig deeper into my pockets when the officer shows me a picture of the man. He asks me if I know him, but I remain stony and silent and still, feeling as if my hands had been doused in a bucket of blue ink.
“College.” One word. One word that all but shook the earth between them and the once serene setting crumbled away until they were sitting in the bed of a truck in an empty void. The stars above them flickered out and the boy in black sobbed. “You’re afraid of being stuck, Ryan.” A name. A taboo in this world because it broke the illusion. The boy in black was fading away into the void, the other continued, “you dream of running away. But a part of you wants to pursue something.” He continued to fade. The boy in white placed a hand on him, the essence from his disappearing friend passing to him. “So study abroad.” No longer was there a boy in white and a boy in black, and sitting in the space that had once been occupied by two, was one. The boy in gray. The world shifted. Through a tunnel of light a scene came to life. A woman and a man sat on a couch, looking down at a paper in the hand of a boy that was shaking with a fear he did not know he could possess. Exhale. Eyes open. “Ryan? Sweetheart?” The woman, his mother, had spoken. “I’ve been accepted to a school in—“
34
The Echo
Volume IV Issue 2
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