The Song The Florescent Lights Sang

I remember the creaking of the old wooden stairs, each one greeting the tips of my toes as I crept down into the cool of the basement. Dark wooden walls framed the descent into a room that was filled with the magic of lost, drying arts. The fluorescent lights always flickered on with a wink before settling into a familiar hum that lulled lazily - a strange lullaby for a place so full of wonder. The air was scented with the rustic scents of metal and grease - a perfume of mechanics and hands that knew how to labor. Work benches lined the walls and were laid with an organized chaos of tools, rubber, cork, feathers, and dried deer tails - a mismatched craftsman’s rainbow. 

I could always find him there, that rough around the edges man, hugged by time so much that the red of his hair was fading into whips of silver. He pulled out a yellow backed stool; the hinges creaked with an unspoken welcome. I sat eagerly, my eyes tuned into his hands, and I watched quiescently. 

His wrinkled hands, freckled with age and angel kisses moved with the confidence and precision of a practiced artisan. He wouldn’t have liked the comparison, but it was as if his hands danced over the work bench in a well rehearsed ballet. The scent of melted aluminium chasséd across my nose as he poured the molten liquid into a mold. The sand paper swirled across the surface of the finished piece in pirouettes that begged perfection from the metal. Then with a flic-flac he whipped out a paint brush and bottles of brightly colored paint that heavily contrasted with his gray plaid shirt. 

He held a gold cellophane wrapped candy out to me without a word, barely turning around. I unwrapped it slowly, listening to the plastic crinkle, a mimic of my wrinkling smile and for a brief moment I thought I saw a soft crinkle too, on the corner of his lips. The candy felt warm and familiar on my tongue, the rich caramel flavor so comforting it felt as if my being had been wrapped in the coziest of blankets. I wondered if he felt that too, as he popped his own gleaming yellow piece into his mouth before stashing the crinkling wrapping into his pocket. Hastily I shoved my wrapper into my own, patting the wrapper so that it scrunched, muffledly, beneath the surface of the denim.  

In steady small motions I watched the ballet begin again. A plie into an ocean of chartreuse - a color of green that just screamed bitter rage that left me wondering what sort of creatures found it attractive. Soft glissade circles in white and black rimmed with red made the shape of grim cartoonish eyes.

The butterscotch cracked in half in my mouth, the sharp edge splintering my tongue so that the homely flavor blended with a sharp copper. But the ballet wasn’t done, and the fluorescent lights continued their constant hum, so I sat still as the dance continued. 

In a flourish a strip of rubber, brightly colored, and sparkling appeared in his hands. He pulled and twisted the whole of it with multiple tour jetes, rond de jambe’ing a dangling spool of thread in synchronicity with it before a decisive fouetté unfurled what had been a flat seemingly whole piece into a multi-tendriled starburst. He repeated the small but grandiose movements in a steady rhythm with contrasting feathers the same shade as the summer sky, until at last, his hands stilled. An un-noticeable pas de bourrée of glue, an arabesque lifting a spinning willow leaf blade into the firework tail, and the lure was complete.

He turned to me then, this chartreuse starburst fluff of a ‘bug’ in his weathered hands, and he placed it gently in mine, allowing me to examine it up close - the cartoon eyes, the pointed hook, the flashy jewelry of its charm, and the tickling koosh ball of its tail. The weight of it filled my palm with a heaviness that strangely lightened something within me that I was far too young then to name. But it was there, resting in my hand, in the lingering warmth of long gone butterscotch, and in the smell of metal and paint that had seeped into my clothes, and it was the song that the fluorescent lights always sang.