Battle of The Body Parts
It was a bleak day, raining in harsh, sporadic bursts. Held above my head, my bright yellow umbrella valiantly defended my hair from the rain’s devastating attacks. In the other hand, I clutched a portable strawberry milkshake container. With each step, I felt my socks, now more like giant sponges, releasing and reabsorbing the water trapped in my shoe. My bones themselves had practically become one with the water.
In the gloomy weather, all the warm colors seemed to look defeated, like ghosts of their past selves. All but yellow. Everywhere I gazed, my eyes picked out the yellow, as they inevitably did. Thin luminescent lines erupted from the center of my chest — reaching out to each yellow item, my eyes tracing the lines without fail. My world consisted exclusively of yellows and the spaces between.
Then I glimpsed it in the shop window. I couldn’t believe my eyes. A sunflower. “But it’s Autumn,” my brain reminded my eyes.
“No, we swear, we can see it. It’s actually there,” replied my eyes rather huffily, as anyone would, if not believed.
“Let’s go closer,” my brain replied, not yet willing to admit defeat.
As unwilling third and fourth parties, my feet reluctantly hauled the rest of my body towards the edge of the sidewalk. Soon I had a three-dimensional fight going on in my head. My feet wanted to take a quick look at the flower and continue on. They couldn’t really be criticized, due to the fact that they were in the process of drowning. My eyes claimed not to see any cars and were in partial agreement with my feet. They were all for me navigating across the street right then.
“It doesn’t matter if you two imbecilic blinkers can identify any moving vehicles. You can never completely eliminate the possibility of a car.” My brain yelled, rather loudly I might add. “Plus, the light is red,” it added self-righteously.
My brain continued its tirade about how we were in the process of proving my eyes were unreliable. Then changing pace, it got started on my feet. My brain was extremely harsh, and I would rather not consider the remarks it uttered to them. Fortunately, they didn’t comprehend half of the words used to insult them. Essentially, my brain informed both my feet that they didn’t have eyes and couldn’t see cars in any case. To which my eyes replied with, “Ha.”
At that point I tried to drown them all out; I was not in the mood for quarreling body parts.
As the light produced a brilliant green, my feet, eyes, and brain finally all agreed, and I could finally walk across the street. As I stepped off the sidewalk with one foot, and the other was about to pass the first, I saw yellow to my right. This was what I had unknowingly been training for my entire life.
Headlights, glittering in the rain were moving towards me. And for the first time, seemingly ever, every single body part was silent. They were all frozen in shock, and could do nothing.
My ears wailed, as the car slammed on breaks, creating a mechanical ripping sound. My eyes could not believe themselves when they saw the car was, supposedly, slowing down enough not to hit me. However, as my brain had said all along, my eyes were not reliable. The car wasn’t slowing down fast enough. It was going to hit me, all of my body parts agreed with that after some yelling. My legs, of their own volition, launched me onto the hood of the car to prevent the car from shattering them. It was really a matter of self-preservation.
I rolled across the hood of a yellow taxi cab, my milkshake spilling over the windshield, creating a pink and yellow blob in the middle of the street. It looked like a petulant child had obtained paint canisters and gleefully dumped them out.
Since then, yellow has never brought me the same joy it once did, all my body parts agree. That is except for my left pinky; bless her heart. Then again, she has persistently shown herself to be the strangest of my fingers.
