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-por- trait in thousands of neon-colored marker dots, each point a color so loud she must press her hands over her ears to see herself.
[…] Here is a sample piece by Angela Rydell in NANO fiction 5.2. I’m fairly certain that this piece is about “synesthesia,” but I could be completely wrong; I’m no scientist. Either way, the writing in this flash piece is incredible. I’m not familiar with Rydell’s work, but if this instance is any indication of her writing style, then I’m sure I’d enjoy it. . ”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.” […]
I pretty much adore this group of sentences. Thank you Angela, for writing it, and thank you NANO Fiction, for publishing it.
Simply good stuff.
Reminds me of this autistic savant who saw numbers as colors. He could memorize any series of numbers no matter how long. He made a portrait of how he visualized pi out of pieces of colored construction paper. He said that pi was the most beautiful number. I see music as shapes but i’m no savant
Lovely. poesía lírica, dulce e infantil.
This is just beautiful thinking and writing: “. . . a funeral that lasts seven hours.”
People who can, do. Other people who can, do and teach.