Okay, Unipeg inspired me and I went back and re-worked a story I first wrote a couple of months ago. It's got flaws (lots of flaws) but I like it and I want to share it. So, uh, here it is.

Tom

Color

In a way this was his favorite view of her, from straight above, staring down. He could trace the part of her hair, watch the top of her stubby nose and rosy, glistening cheekbones. The soft protuberance of her breasts beneath an emerald cardigan, the subtle shift of her shoulders, her lengthy calves flashing beneath the half-moon roundness of her buttocks. He could tell when she smiled because her whole body would lift into the air, as if she had stepped right off the earth, floating a little closer to him and a little further from everyone else.


And he liked that he couldn't tell how long her hair was -- she was too well mannered, she stepped with too much alacrity and posture to allow him to see below the very top of each lock. Though the light rebounded from her straight, ordered mahogany tresses (combed exactly one hundred strokes each morning, he was confident), it gave only an impression of depth, a hint of a surfeit that might or might not be there.


Light, color, color, light: Monet, he knew (he mused, in the musée) had adored the sparkling, spraying, shimmering possibilities of la lumière; Van Gogh in his truncated old age had turned his remaining ear to spare grays and browns, to pale, forceful blood reds, to lazy blues and oranges. The Dutchman had been right. Experience taught that blurred intensities exposed more than the vagaries of shadow.


As he had learned again the day before, when he had rested on a bench before the darkly stained glass doors of her apartment building. In between the rumbling masses of passerby he had been able to see the stairs that led to the street. Soon she had walked down, heading to work, barely resting a dainty, brown-toed foot as she touched the first step. He had seen that first -- just the one foot. It was as he had expected, as he had planned, and he had leapt up like a jack in the box, acted as if he were just walking by, jauntily balanced his bag on his shoulder. "Oh, Rebecca," he had shyly said, "How long it's been since I've seen you." She had smiled, and the rough, warm pink of her cheeks, the scratchy denim blue of her eyes; they had been brilliantly evocative, far more so than the glint off her stark new shoes or the vitriol of her pithy t-shirt.


And now he stood looking down through the cutaway floor of her favorite art museum, thinking that there was no better shade for hair than brown. Beneath him Rebecca examined a painting, leaning first one way -- ah, she had worn her hair long today -- and then the other -- the glimpse of her face! -- before she turned and moved on, towards his position, out of his view. He almost tripped hurrying down the stairs to regain his view of her, brushing past sinewy lines of babbling school children and slow gray pockets of senior citizens.


His face glowed sanguine when he finally reached her level, his hands braced on his knees and his breath coming in short tremblings. He gasped with the effort. Turning to the sound, she saw him from across the room. He stood up stock-straight as she lazily walked towards him. "Tell me again," she said, "why is it that you've been watching me?"


"I can't -- we're in public, Rebecca."


"Go on. I want you to tell me." She gestured at the carefully ignorant crowd. "No one's listening to us."


"I don't know. It's just that, I don't know, everywhere I go, I see shades of you. Everywhere. You're in all of it. You color all my perceptions. The tones of you -- it's everything I feel. You mean more than the sun or the moon or the stars. You define it all. Everything."


The words rushed out of him, echoing and lapsing into silence. Eyeing her carefully, he knew what she truly was; she was his favorite color. Identity dissolved into intensity, the hue of her becoming the whole of her.


And she smiled at him with luminous pleasure. After all, she mused, what he had said was trite, but he didn't know it was trite, and that made all the difference.