INDIGO KEEPS
Voices arriving as color — Short fiction by Timothy Collyer
INDIGO KEEPS
By Timothy Collyer
On the promenade, the day runs low, chalk warming in my palm, voices arriving as color. The busker is tin-bright yellow; the coffee van hums milky brown; children streak past in beetroot flashes. I kneel by a square of pavement with one clean crack. It will do for a seam.
“Portraits,” I call. Coins clink. Someone laughs green. Then I see her. Coat fastened throat-tight, hair tucked neat and flat, eyes the pale brown of tea left too long. Around her, a hush like a church after a hymn. Where a voice should be, one color holds—indigo, the shade that lived in my mother’s last words.
I ask with a nod. She taps her throat and shakes her head. No sound. She sits. I lay out bone, ash, peach, rust, dark green—the indigo, short from not using, waits. I draw. Jaw in quick strokes, eyes set back with ash and a thumb. Hands folded, skin thin as paper. Around us: salt, grease, the damp wool-weight of weather. A gull lifts a crisp packet, silver rattling like cheap jewelry. I ignore the busker’s tuning and make the coat’s nap, the mended seam, the small tilt of a woman who has learned to survive winters without telling anyone how cold it got.
Her silence isn’t empty; it weighs, settles, stays. Indigo pools in the hollow at her throat—that small dip where laughter used to lift and start. I touch the chalk at the corner of her mouth. The color is faithful, fixed, and cruel. I soften it with peach, hold it with white. The coffee man offers tea. She thanks him with her fingers.
“Would you like to see?” She nods. People drift closer. She leans over the drawing and taps the indigo hollow. Then, gently, her own. Here.
I think of my mother’s last sounds—content forgotten, color remembered. I take the indigo and lay two faint bands below the collarbone, then veil them with the lightest peach. Not a bruise. A ribbon. The blue remains, but held.
She squeezes my hand, finds a small notebook, writes carefully: My voice went after surgery, four years ago. My husband’s went earlier. He died here, the year of the oil spill. You’ve given it back to me, once. Below, in a shakier hand: Thank you for seeing.
She presses two fingers to my palm and shapes letters there: MOTHER. Chalk dust lifts, settles. She tries to pay. I refuse. She insists, notes tucked under my lid. I lift the fixative can, then hold. She watches the water and shakes her head. Don’t fix it.
The first drops come, big and far apart. White runs. Pink puddles. Ash smears. Indigo holds as long as it can, then thins, leaves a stain, goes. When the pavement stands ready, rinsed for tomorrow, a faint blue remains between my thumb and finger. I rub. It refuses.
I write inside my notebook: Indigo keeps. I slide it into the chalk box and let the dust have it.
Tim Collyer is a Wiltshire-based, award-winning writer of literary and speculative fiction. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he won the Seán Ó Faoláin International Short Story Competition, the EYELANDS 2025 International Short Story Contest, and the inaugural New2theScene Flash Fiction Prize.
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