drabbles about color. accepting.
In mathematics, anything that can be broken up into a smallest unit is called discrete, whereas actions that follow into and out of one another are, unsurprisingly, continuous. Mariya Belyaeva -- in aviators with yellow-tinted lenses -- has always held the belief that a good operative is a discrete one: the body, in little moments, and nothing for the rest, all-drowning nothingness.
”Could you keep them off me?”
Her forehead has broken with sweat.
The operative is not in Kevlar. The operative will go down, and die quickly, if she is shot, in the stomach or the head or the thigh. Her shirt, deep saffron yellow cotton, bunched around her stomach and arms as she works, quick hands, mechanical.
He is taller than her, stronger than her, a more intimidating physical presence. It comes down to optimization, at times. She is optimal for what she is doing. And he, the same.
There are men here who would kill her, and likely him as well -- and then there is a sound, and her head down, and the red-yellow-orange, and the glass blown out, and the ringing in her ears, and there are no longer men who would kill them, and she does not speak for days.
The first flower grown in space is yellow, yellow against the grey of the ship, yellow when the alarms sound, yellow as oxygen drops out.
The mechanic on board estimates it’ll be a six-hour fix, and it takes him ten, and he emerges soaked in sweat and grime and shaking, and sleeps for thirty hours afterwards, but in the in-between they strap into oxygen masks and do not work.
It is hard to work. Harder, still, to speak, but in those ten hours the little yellow bud opens fully, and she sits across from it and stares for some time, and almost does not notice that he has joined her.
The first alien flower, or what she terms a flower, on the new planet is yellow, as well, so bright she has never seen it before, and then she is without an oxygen mask, and the whole world in stripes of green, and yellow, and blue.
The Breckenridge files are in a pale yellow folder, open.
She is younger, in them. Mariya still had baby fat, before.
Well, calling that girl with the dead eyes and the chin tilted up Mariya seems a bit wrong.
“I didn’t settle on the name for a few months.” The words come from her like pulling teeth.
Odds are, she will be dead by Christmas.
Which is something she believed in 2015, and 2014, and 2013, and before. This is not science, nor mathematics: there is no reason by induction. There is merely what will happen, and what will happen is that our dear atheist operative will die by the birth of Christ.
She supposes she could say the same of him, but there is little to her conceptualization of him beyond proper immortality, deep and biting in the gut.
The problem with this whole discrete existence phenomenon is simple: her nails are painted yellow, as they were when she was on a job, but she is no longer on a job, but speaking to him, in a cafe, in a gallery, moving her hands as she talks, or silently watching, and yet, and yet, yellow on her fingernails, like the little blood underneath them, and there is no smallest unit, no break, but a continuum.
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