Flashfiction - Red

     Five hundred words or less is an extremely tight box to tell a story in. This flashfiction story was a Creative Writing assignment, I'll probably expand it later on, because I like these characters. It clocked it at exactly five hundred words.

     They say some colors have emotional impacts – for whatever reason, they’re especially communicative. Red’s exciting and dangerous, like fire trucks or burns. Maybe that’s why we associate it with love. Blue is calming and restful; it means importance. “Royal” blue and all, and the carpet of the Oval Office. Green can be mysterious and/or fun, depending on the shade.

     I’ve been working at Dale’s music store for a while; Glenda was visiting her twin sister and he was picking up lunch. There was a middle-aged guy named Ron coming in for a lesson, so I was working with him on barre chords with the Rascal Flatts song “My Wish”. He was using a cat-tongue pick; Southern Cross was the only place I knew of to get them. They were easier to hold on to, didn’t get lost that much. Near the end of the lesson, Taylor tripped lightly in. “Don’t hurry, I’ve got time.” She scrounged around for a bit, checked to see what was on sale this week. She tested out a used ganjo while Ron and I finished the lesson before she got a couple dollars’ worth of fingerpicks and a new capo for her orange Ibanez acoustic-electric. She was a regular, too, and so got Dale’s discount on everything. He liked having both of us around, and we often leaned on him or Glenda for advice.

     It had been a couple weeks since we’d had a real good chance to talk; she’d been on vacation and then our work schedules made it difficult to hang out. We were fixing to team up on a duet when we headed up to Springfield with Josh and Eddie. Nina wasn’t coming this time; that was another part of the reason Taylor and I hadn’t had a chance to talk much. Nina was dropping off the deep end pretty quickly, and Tay had her hands full trying to slow the fallout. It was one of those facts everyone knows but nobody talks about, but we all knew college was going to eat her alive. She was missing….It. Whatever that “it” was. Pretty sad, but that’s life. C’est la vie, the Chevrolets would say. They were coming along the trip, too.

     With her money, she pressed something else into my palm. She took the fingerpicks, capo and change, the door chimes jingled as she walked out. I tucked the whatever-it-was into my pocket and waited on Ron. Dale got back right about then with Braum’s.

     “Ran into Taylor on my way in,” he said after a minute.

     “Yeah, she came by.”

     Dale finished his burger. “She’s a keeper, Justin. You guys…you’re something special. By yourselves, and then when y’all are together, even more. We – we’ve been prayin’ that maybe someday-“ He shrugged.      “We love you guys.” (Pause.) “’Temporary Home’ could be a good one to play.”

     I nodded, thinking, and remembered that whatever-it-was she’d given me, and curiously dug around my phone in my jeans pocket.

     It was a red cat-tongue pick.