SandScript 2021

FADING INTO THE
WATERCOLOR
Courtney Armstrong
Fiction
A small square of paper floated
in his eye, what looked like a miniature
postage stamp hovering in the white void
of sclera where nothing is ever supposed
to be. LSD. He put it there to get a better,
faster high, he said. As if ingesting the
hallucinogenic drug were not enough, the
course of travel from mouth to stomach
too far, too diluted. He feared he couldn’t
escape the pain soon enough. The fear.
Of someday being just like his mother.
Or worse, his father. He always asked
me, which was less forgivable — to be
beaten by someone crazy or by someone
perfectly sane?
***
I remember the first time I saw
him. We were in the fourth grade, I was
nine. Benjamin was tall for his age, a
bundle of twigs always wrapped much
too tightly in a twine of dirty clothes that
were much too small, mismatched socks,
toes poking out the front of his shoes.
Everyone knew that his family didn’t have
money. Not because his father worked
at the mines in San Manuel. Not because
there were eight children. But because
poverty sometimes oozes out of a person’s
essence like the milk in a sickly eye, thick,
oily, so horrible that you can’t not see it, so
mesmerizing that you can’t look away. I
knew this because it was the same thing I
saw in every mirror I’d ever looked into.
But on this day, Benjamin was not in
clothes, but rather, naked, all except for a
diaper. An infant-sized, disposable diaper
whose adhesive tabs had failed to meet
at the sides, where crude duct tape had
been torn off into lashings of long strips
and placed on top as if it were a logical
solution. He sat on a buff of sunburnt,
umber grass where it met the curb of the
street, his pink skin beetling over the top
of the plastic waistband, not fat, but rolls
of pure flesh that had nowhere else to go.
A handwritten sign was attached to his
chest, again fastened with that horrible
grey of tape. Upon it, there were four little
words scrawled roughly in red ink.
I AM A BABY.
It was how Benjamin’s father chose
to discipline him for wetting the bed.
Beneath the damp down of his
straw-colored lashes, the little no-see-ems
swirling at the corner of his mouth, the
sweat pulling at his platinum curls, I saw
something I had never seen before. It
was something so foreign that I couldn’t
28