Her Favorite Color is Light

Nora thinks air and smell are one. You breathe in sweet or sour, musty or moldy or wet-dog or chicken-broth scented. You breathe out your own smell, and this is how animals know you. She’s five and reads the number one as white as snow, the number two as bluer than a dead man’s lips, the number four as orange-red like the tips of flames. Five is green as grass. Ask her to add two and five, and she’ll say a dead man’s lips and green grass equal a funeral that lasts seven hours. Her mother winces, reassures relatives and friends Nora’s just being silly, it’s a hoot, but complains of an ulcer and drinks something that smells loud at night to get to sleep, often lowers her voice to company or on the phone when Nora comes into the room. She’s stopped asking Nora how was preschool, cringes when Nora says her teacher’s voice is the texture of prickly stars and the shouts of other kids like rockslides or rope biting her wrist. Nora thinks her mother’s voice is the texture of a hundred tiny triangles of broken glass. She paints a picture of her mother, a scribble of loops pulling tighter and tighter, loops that smell like rotting leaves, moonlight and Wonder bread, knots a heart at the center that hums like a hive of angry bees. She paints her self-portrait in thousands of neon-colored marker dots, each point a color so loud she must press her hands over her ears to see herself.