Yellow

"I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process." Vincent van Gogh

In the middle of a blossoming garden sits a sunny room surrounded by windows. However the light is subdued by sheer, tall, white curtains, and fruit trees that clutter the outside of the windows. Flattened tubes of paint sit around the room while brushes scatter the creaky hardwood floor. There are half-finished Van Gogh look-alike paintings that decorate the room. In the corner is a partially complete copycat of the “Vase with Twelve Sunflowers” but instead of rich yellows the flowers are brown and lifeless. Nearer, on the floor lies a version of “Starry Night” without the deep blue sky, and in the center of the room there is an easel, with a perfect copy of “Blossoming Pear Tree.” Every detail is exact. The tree is drawn to scale of the original. The colors were borrowed from Vincent himself. The painting is mathematical not a stroke out of place. This painting is like Fitzgerld’s Gastby, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, it’s masterful. Next to the painting is a stool, and a table that is covered in tubes of yellow paint.

A woman named Iris enters the studio dressed in a long white nightgown and a baggy grey house sweater that hangs over her body like a towel on a cold wet child. Iris’s body is slender and frail, her skin pale, and her eyes sunken in and colored purple. Her hair is unbrushed and sits lifeless on her shoulders. The skin around her lips is so blue, it gives the impression she’s always cold. Iris drags her feet to the easel. Slowly and carefully, as if in every movement she was balancing on eggshells, she hoists her body onto the stool and faces her painting. She studies it for what seems like decades, runs her fingers along the flowering tree, and scoffs at the carefully mixed shade of blue. Her eyes fill with tears, she sobs and hits her chest. Iris muddles out the words, “It's not right.” She grows angrier still. “It's just not right….” Anger bursts like a bear in a trap, and Iris screams,“It's not right!”

Iris knocks over her masterpiece. The easel clatters on the hardwood floor. Her painting leaps off the easel and like a rock skipping on a pond it lands across the room. Clumsily, she reaches toward the table and grabs a tube of yellow paint. In a frenzy she rips the cap off, squeezes it into her mouth, and all over her fingers. She licks off the yellow.

Elouise, her lover, a beautiful girl with kind eyes watlzes through the door. She has a soft look about her; freckles paint her nose and cheeks. Her hair is the color of earth, but in the sunlight, her flaxen highlights glow. She has natural rouge on her cheeks, and her eyes are golden brown, almost yellow. Elouise notices Iris eating the paint. Iris stops; she is stark still.

Shaking her head and hoping it’s not true, Elouise says, “No.”

To herself, Iris exclaims, “It’s wrong, It's all wrong!”

With a look of horror, Elouise continues, “No. No! NO! Iris what have you done?”

Iris looks faint and weak; she starts swaying back and forth in an attempt to keep her balance. She drops the tube of yellow paint. Her eyes roll back in her head, and she collapses and melts into the floor. Elouise cries out, a sound of struggle is strangled in her throat, she runs to her, making it just in time to catch her head from hitting the floor. “Wake up. Iris open your eyes. Iris!” Elouis pleads. She screams, “Iris!!” She shakes Iris. Iris remains limp. Elouise cradles her head and desperately clutches her face.

Elouise softly entreats, “Iris… please wake up.”

Iris opens her eyes hesitantly, slowly, and says faintly, “I--I’m sorry.” Elouise moves a stray hair out of Iris’s face. Iris whispers, “I couldn’t stop.”

Elouise’s eyes fill with tears instantly. In a hopeless attempt to find strength, she tells her, “Shhhhh… It’s okay. We are gonna get you out of here, see a doctor, and make you all better.”

Elouise reaches for her phone.

Gently, Iris pulls at her wrist and says, “Eli, just be here with me. I just want to look at you.”

“No, we have to get you help.” She begins dialing on the phone.

“Eli stop…” she ignores her and continues to dial. Iris fears these are her last moments and in these moments, she craves to look into Elouise’s eyes. She craves to get lost in the kindness and purity she holds in her giant, watery, golden eyes.

With what voice she has left says, Iris implores, “Elouise stop! Just look at me.”

She looks up from her phone and asks, “Why? Why did you do this?”

“I just wanted to feel better…,” Iris whispers.

Elouise says, “You will! We are gonna fix this.”

“I can’t be fixed, I was just born blue, no one can fix this.”

Elouise stammers, “I—”

Iris holds Elouise’s hand then tells her, “I love you.”

“I love you so much.”

Iris breathes the words, “Dream of me.” She closes her eyes, her grip on Elouise’s hand loosens, and then slowly but all at once... she is still.

Elouise feels her heart pounding, her body begins to shake, her eyes grow the size of the moon as she says, “Honey, Honey. Iris, wake up.” Elouise shakes her, but Iris is motionless. Urgent, begging now, “Please wake up, you’re gonna get better, baby, just please open your eyes!”

Eloise’s screams echo through the room, “Please! Iris! Wake up!” The girls lay on the floor. Elouise sobs, while Iris lays lifeless. All color is slowly taken from her body and she is overcome with a wash of blue. What subtle, pale shade of pink that is left in her lips disappears, her fingertips turn as blue as Starry Night’s painted sky, and her crystal blue eyes lie there... open. Now her eyes are nothing but a bottomless void of blue. Elouise looks into those empty blue eyes and realizes that the girl she loves is nothing but a memory now. She clutches Iris’s body close to her chest, holding her as if she were a child and surrenders to weeping. Elouise takes her fingertips and gently traces them along Iris’s eyelids, as she closes her eyes for the very last time. Iris carefully pushes herself off the floor like a baby horse who has just learned how to walk. She wobbles over to the painting of the pear tree. She stares at it, grabs it off the floor and holds it for a moment, “Oh darling it’s beautiful.” There’s a lone nail on the wall, it's old and dull like it’s been there for a long time, waiting for a painting to be hung on it. Elouise hangs the painting, “You finally did it.” She caresses the painting “You got the yellows right.” Elouise collapses onto the ground, she lays her head on Iris’s chest and stares at the pear tree; she whispers to her love, “It’s perfect.” The girls melt deeper and deeper into eachother, until they have sunk into the room and they slowly become a painting themselves.