On our third last date, a white egret thrust its head into the still water before us, and came up with some blue fish, dangling in its bright orange beak. The abandoned church stood large behind us. You told me not to look at it so often. But I did. If you’d listened really hard, you’d have heard the bells too, begging the devotion it’d once housed, to come back, and give. Now the silhouette of time, green and stringent, went up, up to the roof, down from the roof—Améline? Your voice was small against the Aspen leaves shuffling overhead, the dipper on the swaying branches that covered, uncovered, covered the sun sinking across the pond.

“What was that blue fish?” I said. The water lapped inches from my fingers.

“Blue?” You looked up from your sketchbook. You were sketching me. Had never had anyone sketch me before. “It was grey, I think.”

At the end of our second last date, I took you to my apartment. You grinned like a child seeing my secondhand synthesizer. “What do you play?” You were already plugging it in, switching it on, drawing the stool.

“The piano.”

You patted the stool. I waved for you to play. You did. The clefs flew, swelled in the little room, cleared all mildew, cleared all clouds from before the moon—but they must still, be put to rest. Is there no escape? I wanted to ask when you’d stopped, and sat back as if fed what you’d been most hungry for, and said it was Tchaikovsky. I nodded. If you’d asked me then, how it felt to stay, to see through to the end of at least one symphony, I’d have packed up and left in the middle of the night.

In bed, at dawn, the lilac poured from the lone window on your sleeping form. The curtains danced shadows all over you, like over Mamie when I was little. She’d snore. I’d watch her snore, and turn to the south-facing window—outside the birds would sing of new endings, the palm leaves would sway fervently against the timid blue. They’d look like a child, flailing her arms, begging to be picked up by her mother. Now slanted in the faint sun. Melted on your slightly parted lips. My fingers hovered over them, as they did over the keys sometimes, when I cleaned the synth, when I switched it on and apologised and switched it off. I got off the bed. You might’ve woken. Like others before you, you might’ve discovered the disarray in my pulse.

At breakfast I told you about my dream. “I have it so often I…so I’m at this pub. And it’s by a river,” —you grinned at your plate—“And it floods and there’s this, this huge crowd, and I can’t for the life of me get out of the pub. And so then, heh, then I turn into a frog. A frog, of all things.” Cheese oozed out from the middle of my omelette. You’d stopped nodding. You now chewed and stared at the cheese that stretched thinner and thinner between the two pieces of your omelette. “Don’t even like frogs.”

“And then?”

“Well I swim out of there.”

I thought I was seeing it wrong, but there clearly appeared those blue mottles in your omelette. I hadn’t put in anything blue.

“Can you swim?”

“Swim? No.” No, they weren’t blue now. They were green. You stuck one to the tip of your knife. Cilantro. “Can’t swim.”

“Then there’s your answer.”

On our last date we went to a museum, and walked about within walls adorned with the act of giving. Around, there clearly appeared those strings between the paintings and the

people, stretching thinner and thinner as they walked away. Yours was a rope. I turned to Renoir. Lise in a white dress, standing where the shade of trees ended, on a clear patch of grass, holding a black, lacey parasol that shadowed her face and let light fall amply on her dress. I had no string. Stepping outside into a throng of people, this was the painting you talked about. I checked my watch. The sun should’ve been down by now. But it was still an orange ball, hovering between the two vertical lines of endless bricks. Sweat trickled down my neck, beaded across my palms that dangled free of your palm. You were telling me something. What were you telling me? Wasn’t Renoir.

I said, “Where are we going now?”

“Why, the act of giving!”

Oh. You plucked a primrose from a shrubbery outside a shop, and sniffed. Soon you’d discover that I cannot give, and thus I cannot be given to. You handed the little yellow to me. I sniffed and returned it to you. But oh, oh it was too quick.

You’d looked at me skeptical, you had, surely. Surely it’d laid bare how digressed from giving I am, that a mere smelling of a flower had to be hastened, lest it should humanise me. I sensed myself shrinking. Again. It was the hands at first, of course—the fingers shrank and the nails blew up like bubbles.

Skin thinned.

When my body has warped completely, you stop your talk, and look back, and like others before you, cannot notice a bright blue frog on the pavement. Améline? You call out loud against the cars, buses, you look around, shoving people left and right.

Somehow I’m not trampled on. Somehow the broiling pavement doesn’t burn me entirely. I hop toward the shrubbery. I must go. Find some water.

***

If Chelsea Allen is ever taken on a date, she'd love it if it's to a Mozart concerto. One can visit her at chelseaallenwrites.weebly.com, or @ChelseaAllen03 on Twitter.