Crimson Sky / Separate Peace

Around 6:00 am, figures of red black and blue opened a door and discovered a black sky turned blue. They walked for some minutes and uttered hushed exclamations of wonder and glory and hope. They walked into a green field that had slipped off the pages of a book, come to cradle their steps. While weaving streams of red black and blue settled on grey stones, other paths of red and blue peed among the damp brown trunks of the trees that crowned the green field that slipped from the book, that they might ensure that the green field that slipped from the book was not temperamental, and would rest awhile to allow them passage back. The green field that slipped from the book breezed consent, and with sterling trust these red and blues paths joined the others on the grey stone. Tracing lumbering green ripples to the edge of the earth, they viewed a secret agreement, and to show their respect murmured hushed exclamations of wonder and glory and hope. There, at 6:14 am, brilliant orange fingertips crept gently toward a great green lake and a vast grey ocean of clouds. The great green lake and the vast grey ocean of clouds had breezed the dawn their own, but a minute later at 6:15 am, for a brief moment, agreed with sterling trust to open a small pale crevice between them, so that the brilliant orange fingertips might creep gently through, for a brief moment, to match wonder with wonder, glory with glory, and hope with hope. So for a brief moment, the brilliant orange fingertips crept into the small pale crevice all the way to the brilliant orange palms of its hands, and gasped at the beauty it saw at the footstep of the earth. There, seated figures of red black and blue watched its tacit intrusion between the great green lake and the vast grey ocean of clouds. For a brief moment, all the guilt and impropriety of the world vanished in an invisible white blaze. And after a brief moment, the brilliant orange palms retracted the brilliant orange fingers outstretched as they were in a gasp, and the great green lake and the vast grey clouds zipped back up the small pale crevice. Figures of red black and blue commenced to weaving paths back across the green field that had slipped from the book, and back toward the door behind which the blue sky was once black.

"It wasn't the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace."

Two hours and nine minutes later, in La Canada, California, brilliant orange fingertips would peek above the Angeles Crest mountain and hilltops. But the figures who sat on grey stones at the footstep of the earth to see them had already seen brilliant orange tongues all through the night, and traced them like lumbering orange ripples spilling over the edge of the Angeles Crest Highway. Two hours and nine minutes later, through streaming scrims of pale ash, they would see a streaking crimson shaft in the sky, the fire retardant birthed from the sterling belly of a DC-10 emergency plane.

The clouds and the lake granted the sun, for a brief moment, a crevice between them so that it could meet wonder with wonder, glory with glory, and hope with hope. They gave me that separate peace, so that in the brief moment without guilt and impropriety they gifted me with sterling trust, I could look to one of the dearest areas of my home, sky streaked with ash and retardant, and murmur in hushed exclamation, with wonder and glory and hope, once more, “I’m not worried.”