"Amy's Blue Period" by Travis Flatt

Amy talks to the space behind the refrigerator now. 

And she only wears blue.

When her mother dresses her in the morning, any unblue clothes she fights free from, squirms and kicks away. Today, I see her leaving for school in blue shorts, blue flip flops, and a puffy blue coat, under which, I imagine, hides either her Bluey or Grover t-shirt. 

I sit at the kitchen table and eat my English muffin, spread with strawberry jam, studying the latest blue-on-blue drawings that Amy’s brought home from kindergarten, a series of blues done in Crayola on construction paper, which we’ve taped to the cabinets, walls and fridge, which Amy grows distraught if we adjust or displace.

“They’re like the alphabet,” she says, and we’re supposed to learn them. 

Today, her class finger paints, but Amy refuses to touch white paper and tantrums so severely over the shortage of blue paint that I have to come pick her up. 

Ms. Richards, her teacher, stares at me blankly when I say this must be Amy’s “Blue Period,” which I think is low-hanging fruit, just a dad joke, but Ms. Richards, who looks seventeen and always stands torn threadbare, like a cat’s scratching post, coated in children, overcome and loathing her life choices.

On the way home from the tantrum, I deny Amy ice cream because we’ve resolved not to reward bad behavior, her mother and I. 

My wife, Amy’s mother, works with grown children as a college advisor, and most days comes home with that same look that haunts Ms. Richards, saying her students were rewarded for bad behavior and it shows.

After snide comments from her father about my drawing unemployment, my wife insisted I find work. In her parents’ minds, a “stay at home dad” is a concept we invented.

Compromise: 

I work from home, taking orders for Pizza Hut all over the planet. I had to learn, “Take out or delivery?” and “Our drivers carry twenty dollars for change,” in dozens of languages. 

People think Picasso painted blue because he was depressed by his poverty, but he was poor because he painted blue and no one wanted blue paintings, which depressed him. 

Once home, Amy goes to sit by the fridge.

I catch her there daily. On days it’s just us, I try not to leave her alone often, but I pace on the phone. My voice rises when I speak certain languages and I don’t want Amy to think I dislike my work, or I’m angry, that all grown ups are miserable. 

I ask Amy if she’s made an imaginary friend back there.

She says, “No. It’s blue all the way up,” and shoots me a look like I’m interrupting. 

All the way up, behind the refrigerator, she means, though it’s just dusty and rusty and dark, like most apartment refrigerators. Sometimes she’ll cram her arm in there, and I tell her that’s a good way to get spiderbit, or electrocuted, not to do that and to come out and play with her toys. 

She says that toys are for boys, implying intellectually, and asks the dark crease if it’s time yet? 

I feel in over my head and want her mother, my wife, who Amy eventually abides, and ask her to come watch a movie in the living room. This game has gotten old and weird and is freaking me out. 

I take a call from Acapulco, a large with pepperoni, which I upsell to extra large with a brownie and a two-liter of Dr. Pepper. 

Amy’s gone when I peek back in the kitchen. No trace. Believe me, I look everywhere. Behind the wall and the fridge I search with a flashlight, which is stupid—we’re talking, like, three inches of space. 

When I squint, like a Magic Eye poster, I finally see the blue. The faintest whisper of blue, like a pilot light.

But, it’s no blue I’ve ever known, like a ripe blueberry, but bluer, or a bluejay but a little less blue. Forget the sky, that’s not really blue. That’s an illusion. I can’t describe it to my wife or the police, who all say they can’t see it when they look—only glance—behind the fridge. 

Amy’s pictures wallpapering our kitchen are close, but they all contradict each other. 

In a folder in Amy’s backpack, I find a drawing by blue marker on orange construction paper, a drawing of a blue rectangle with a blue arm creeping out from behind. 

“That’s it,” I shout. “That’s the blue you’re looking for.” 

I want them to understand how Amy’s all blue now, how her blue is the blue we’d be lucky to be. 

When the cops take my wife out in the hall to ask her about my on and off unemployment again, my frequent terminations, I sit and study the blue paintings along the wall, that New Blue ghost light burning behind my eyes as a cipher code. 

Thanks to my job, I’ve developed a tongue for languages. Ironic, since I failed high school Spanish. I rush to the fridge, press my face into the crease and whisper in blues how I’m ready to come back there now, how I’ve been searching for years, but now everything’s perfectly blue.

Travis Flatt (he/him) is a teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in Fractured Lit, New Flash Fiction Review, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, Does It Have Pockets, MacQueen's Quinterly, HAD, Bull, Maudlin House and other places.