Cornflowers

by Ruth Hatfield

It is the most beautiful of days. Mid-December – not everybody’s favourite time of the year – but a day such as this one can give nobody any cause for complaint. It’s cold, so cold that breath mists in the sharp, glinting air and children roar along the pavements like rampaging dragons breathing flames of cloudy pearl and burning silver from their rounded mouths. It’s crisp and clear and the sky is that vivid shade of blue you find in the swift flash of sunlight off a kingfisher’s wing. It’s a darling of a day, after weeks of nothing but sodden, motionless grey beyond the window-glass, and it’s the kind of day that only ever comes unexpectedly, just at that point when autumn’s colours have faded almost entirely from memory and all human creatures are beginning to dream enviously of the winter-blind sleep of hibernating squirrels.

And then along it comes. I can feel it in the air before I even wake up. It’s waiting for me inside my bedroom, trying to creep under my bedclothes and push me to stir. I can’t ignore it and I don’t want to: within ten minutes I am dressed and out of the house. Who cares where I’m going? Who needs to know? I could invent some excuse for being outside, some errand to the shops, some appointment I need to keep. But the truth is that my feet are not my own. They pull me onwards into the hard, bright air and they display before me what the world is capable of; what a show it can put on.

In all its colours, under the gleaming blue that someone has gaily and abundantly sloshed across the top of the canvas, it is there. A bakery van unloads crates of brown bread and glossy pastries into the shop at the top of my road. The delivery man is fat, red, puffing and cursing cheerily as a group of scraggy urchins pretend they’re trying to pinch his van. They don’t mean any harm by it, really, or at least they’re making a good double bluff out of it if they do. Beside the florist’s shop the lady with the mannish voice has laid out all her buckets of flowers and started her first cigarette of the working day. I know them individually, these flowers: purple irises, red roses, yellow dahlias and pink chrysanthemums, all imported from somewhere in deepest Africa, although at this time of the year they’re often sad and insipid, their tropical brightness dulled by exhaust-fumes and spitting drizzle. Today they shine for me; the warmth in the golden sunlight coaxes from them what little scent they still retain. It is soft, sweet and subtle and a little chemical in overtone.

Loose dogs gallop across the street in wild, traffic-stopping chase. The cars break and scream, skidding on the cool slick of ice that has painted the surface of the road like a mirror. The dogs don’t care. The drivers care, for an instant, but then they leave their cars to meet each other, inspect their front bumpers and shake their heads at irresponsible dog owners, and then they notice the blue of the sky reflected strong in the looking-glass road and their voices turn to rueful, shrugging smiles. It is cold, they agree, stamping their feet like Russian bears. Their gloved hands bang together as if they’re applauding the efforts of winter in providing such glory, and they carry on driving a little slower than before, taking a little more time to peer upwards through their windscreens at that impossible, unnatural, sparkling shade of periwinkle that has invaded their sky.

Ice has collected under the gutters; icicles drip as the morning begins slowly to thaw. The sound of their steady splash makes the inside of my mouth feel cool, as though I were sucking an ice cube. Around me the activity of the street is as it always is, it is happening as it always happens, except that today there is colour in every tiny aspect. Today the sun has come out on the oil-streaked puddle; today is gold and rainbows cast by spinning prisms under a beaming, laughing embrace of cornflower blue. Today is a day when vision is a treat and eyesight a genuine privilege.

Someone takes hold of my elbow and says “excuse me, do you want some help crossing the road? I don’t want to bother you, but… I saw you’ve got a white stick. Are you waiting to cross?”

I smile and shake my head.

“I can cross well enough by myself” I say, shrugging. “It’s easy to tell when a car is coming along here. But thanks anyway.”

We stand for a moment on the kerb. I turn my face to the sky, to the warm kiss of the proud, fierce sun.

“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” I say, to put her at her ease. “The sky up there must be very blue.”

“Oh, yes” she says, and from the way her voice lifts I can tell she has raised her face, also, to the sun. “Yes it is. Blue, like… like… like…”

“Like cornflowers?” I suggest.

“I’ve never seen a cornflower, whatever that is” she says. “But the sky’s the brightest blue. Really intense. Like no other colour you’ve ever seen before, outside, you know, in nature. Maybe… blue like… like a king. Like something only a king would have, if that makes any sense.”

I tell her it does. More sense than a cornflower, really, to me.

And then I carry on walking. Blue, I reflect. Blue, like something only a king would have. And all my senses – the smell of the frosty air, the feel of its caress on my face, the taste of its sharpness on my tongue, the sound of its thin harshness in my ears – set at once to work. They gather threads and spin and weave me a cloth of the brightest, richest, most imperial blue an eye could ever hold, and then they tie it up on a flagpole so high that, pennant-like, it spans the entire sky above me.

It’s a cloth no-one but me will ever see, but it’s a cloth of pure, swift and daring joy. The most beautiful of days, I think, as I turn my face back to the pavement ahead. The most beautiful of days, and every atom of it belongs to me.

My face stretches into a no-doubt ghoulish grin. Rarr… I say to myself. Rarr… I am a dragon. I can breathe clouds of pearly smoke and jets of silver flame, and when I’ve torched as many treetops and rescued as many fair maidens and warriors as I see fit for today, I can launch myself off up into that blue, blue sky, find the top of that flagpole, gather up that cloth of joy and roll it up under my pillow at home. And then tomorrow, when all the world returns to grey, I’ll crown myself king.

Highly Commended - Cornflowers by Ruth Hatfield