Pineapples. That is what I smell. Sweet and juicy. The scent reminds me of swim club where I used to keep a few cans in the fridge for an after-workout snack. They tasted a little like heaven.
I open my eyes and see blue. Not the blue of skies or seas, but Wedgewood blue. The colour of my mother’s china. The colour of my grandmother’s serving platters. The colour of my brother’s GI Joe rucksack.
I allow my gaze to drift; there is nothing to focus on, nothing to see, then suddenly my eyes settle on something which is distinctly not blue. It is yellow, scarlet, green, and black. A Picasso come to life. It is Karen. “What in the hell are you doing here?” I ask. “You’ve been dead for almost twenty years.“ My eyes narrow a bit. When it comes to Karen my suspicions always go into overdrive. “Or at least you’re supposed to be dead.”
She smiles at me and waves her arms in the air and then spins around in a giddy circle. “I’m not dead silly,” she says. “There is no dead. Not really. Not in the expanding multiverse.”
Typical Karen, I think. She was always blathering on about the universe and the multiverse. Always going on about string theory, Schrodinger’s cat, and quantum particles.
“So am I dead?” I ask. That is soooo inconvenient. I just finished my last novel and already sold it to a big publishing company. It is scheduled to come out in the fall. Just my luck!
“I told you there is no death,” she says and then smiles her big wide smile at me. Her teeth glow white against the blue background. She reaches down and with surprisingly no effort at all pops me up onto my feet. “When I felt the waves in the quantum tide and realized that it smelled of chlorine, sunshine, and you, I decided to come and fetch you.”
I pucker my eyebrows and turn the corners of my mouth down, but the effort is too much and my “grump face” disappears into a puffy grin. Karen! Oh how I have missed her. I missed our long talks which lasted into the wee hours of the night. I missed having someone to toilet paper houses with. I missed someone whose shoulder I could cry on and puke over.
“We seem to be floating around in a can of paint,” I say. My fingers are tightly wound around her hand and I squeeze it tight.
“I miss you too,” she says. The flicker of a sad smile flashes across her face and is gone. Then she moves her other hand up to shoulder height and undulates it across the air like a hula dancer. Ripples appear in the floating dye. “See how right we were,” she says. “Quantum is a wave but it is also particles, and strings, and booms, and anything else you can think of. And the best part is that no one’s cat has to live and die to prove it.”
Lifting my hands I experiment with the hula myself, and then I add a little hip motion; suddenly I am swaying in a grass skirt, coconut bra, and have Koa wood beads on my bare ankles. We hula, Karen and I, as tiki torches come into existence and burn with an ethereal pale blue flame, and the mouth-watering aroma of suckling pig wafts through the air. “This is just like the first time we went to Maui,” I say. “Except we’re better dancers than those girls at the luau ever were.” I reach up and touch the crimson hibiscus bloom in her hair and we both smile.
I watch as the blue transmutes and blanches into bright skies and sun-dappled waves. Water crashes against a white shore, and the sucking, scraping sound of the beach, as it is dragged back into the depths becomes our only music. I curl my toes into the wet smooth-edged sand, then look up into Karen’s eyes.
“Humu-humu poop!” we both scream at the same time. Then we are off and running hand in hand across the beach and splashing water into sparkling crystals which hang like dew drops in the air. I dive beneath a big curler and feel the sudden silence and darkness close around my head. The sunshine, water, and Wedgewood colour is gone and I am surrounded by night.
“I had the strangest dream,” I tell my husband the next morning. “I dreamt I actually had my novel accepted by a publisher. Can you believe it?”
“Stranger things have happened in this universe,” he says. “Do you want some pineapple?”
Image Credit
“Red Green Blue” by @Doug88888. Flickr. Some rights reserved.
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