Five Words for Pink
by Juliana Rappaport
Five Words for Pink
1.
I trudged past Lee’s grocery store in sneakers, pockets stuffed with bubble gum and peanut butter cups. Tongue scarlet with the stain of sour cherry, bus tokens in the small plastic bag, useless. Pink school lunch card, frayed.
Walking the long road in the slush marked with soot. My sister dashed ahead to catch up with friends. The sun too bright, the air a dry bitter cold, loneliness, a parka like a fat suit, the static electricity of dirty blond hair stuffed under a wool hat.
Nibbling on chapped lips when the sweets ran out.
2.
On the front steps of the old pillared school in Philadelphia, I waited for a mother who was always late, the wind whipping, scattering the leaves into the yard of the Charles Addams-like house with the cupola on top: a hat, the rickety porch: an apron. The mysterious old woman who lived there, draped in scarves, whose doorbell on Halloween was always a fearsome dare. I would stand a few feet behind as the other kids rang the bell. One Halloween, the door opened, and they ran off spooked, screeching. I remained planted in my ghost costume, a plain white sheet with eyeholes. The antique woman in front of me was drowning under a heap of colorful fabric—fuchsia, rose, her cheeks thickly powdered.
“Here,” said the scarf woman, in a quivering voice. She held out a chipped teacup with three unwrapped butterscotch candies inside. I reached into my bag of loot, pulled out a large Hersey’s chocolate bar, balancing it on top of the teacup, her eyes lighting up. “Little ghost,” she said, delighted, clutching the bar in her hand.
“Aren’t you something?”
An emerging writer, Juliana Rappaport has been a finalist in several fiction contests including Fractured Lit’s micro fiction contest and the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction -Bellingham Review. She was awarded a Crossfield Fellowship in Fiction to the Cuttyhunk Writer’s Residency. She’s also the author of the Tarcher/Penguin book “365 Yoga: Daily Meditations.” She lives in Berkeley, CA with her family.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Five Words for Pink”? I wrote this piece first as a list: objects, slices of memory, tastes and colors-many turned out to be in the pink family. I then shaped these components into the story.
There was at least one intimidating house in Philadelphia whose doorbell we were too afraid to ring on Halloween. One where the inhabitant seemed surprised to have a visitor, as if she’d never had one before. She might have been as lonely as the girl in my story. Two outsiders who connected over a candy bar.
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