There is a girl sitting squat on hands and knees and above her the summer afternoon is so blue that she finds it hard to believe that the day is real. She is crouched on the driveway: the halting grittiness of the asphalt on her knees and palms, the dust swept up on the wind that scatters itself across the pavement and into her hair. Her hands are covered in chalk; she is trying to keep it off her sleeves.

Beside her is the box with the colored sidewalk chalk. She has several of these boxes but beside her are the most worn sticks, because she wants to save the newest ones. If she doesn’t use the new ones, they will remain pristine.

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(If she doesn’t use them, she finds out later, they become stiff and damp; they give her about as much pleasure as finding an eraser that turns out to only leave insolently bleary smudges on her keep-change-flip division.)

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One of the pieces of chalk snaps under her fingers midway through a line — a sudden plume of color — the edge chipped and smearing the asphalt as it rolls down the sloped drive and off into the grass. Kind of a smothered melon shade, she notes of the dustings that have gathered under her nails. She attempts to remove them but begrudges herself to the prospect of intense hand-washing that awaits her.

She sits back on sore haunches. Her mother has told her to draw hopscotch squares and then to call her brother outside. The girl does not want to play hopscotch, nor does she want to involve her brother in her own private hazy sun-spotted afternoon.

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She gets off her knees. The world spins around her, tilted on its axis. There is something different about today in the sense that it is so so normal but still presents itself in such sharp relief that when she closes her eyes the sun-rimmed flecks of color do not go away when she opens her eyes again. Maybe it is the tingling sensation of marching caterpillars low in her stomach. Maybe it is the pleasant thrum of sun against the back of her neck. Maybe it is the chalk on her hands and sleeves and the gravel in her palms and her knees rubbed dry and white and crinkly with a sand-weathered age that she does not recognize.

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She wipes her hands on the sweaty grass, picks the chalk up again. Her sleeves are chalk-stained. 

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She blinks again. Readjusts herself on the driveway. Removes gravel from her palms.

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In her hand: blue. Not blue enough. A polaroid crayon that cannot capture the spots that dance under her eyelids. The blue that she is sure must burst only from far-flung corners of a bright Pacific, or a cornflower under a magnifying glass. Not a Minnesota blue, and yet –

 

And yet it is. 

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Knowing already that she will not be able to capture the sky on the asphalt, she begins again to draw.