"A Slice of Brilliant Color" by Sandy Olson Hill

A Slice of Brilliant Color

by  Sandy Olson Hill 

“Why don’t you call before you come?” she asks, as I stand outside her trailer. A rope serves as a door handle.

“I can’t” and I remind her, “you have no phone.”

It does not matter. This week she is a government agent and the pope is the anti-Christ.

“Where are your meds?” I ask.

“I don’t need them. I need a good lawyer”, she says in the song we sing in the game we live. She is going to sue the cable company and the radio stations. They are eating her head.

I have come to do my duty, drop off cigarettes and run as fast as I can from her illness. She was. She is my sister, whose limbs entwined, whose head nestled next to mine, whose hair entangled in dreams willed upward beyond the weight of expectancy into the realm of extraordinary.

I am leaving now. She needs what she has and has what she needs. She has forgotten I am here.

With the agility the absence of drugs has given her, she crosses the red clay to argue with a neighbor. The clay rises a dusky rose climbing. The warrior, broom in hand resplendent as a blade, glides a slice of brilliant color amidst a landscape of opaque indifference.

Biography

VSA Teaching Artist, Sandy Olson-Hill's poetry and prose recent publications include Anomaly Literary Journal, Tuck, Mandala, Red Paint Hill among other excellent zines..Awards include Academy of American poetry Prize, Open Doors Short Fiction Award. Nominations include: Million Writers Award and Best of the Net. Olson Hill is a Disabled Artist and an animal rescue volunteer and advocate.