Charles M. Saplak was born April, 1960 in Beckley, West Virginia. He’s worked at numerous jobs, including a six-year stint in the Navy during which he traveled the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans on the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga. He lives now in Radford, Virginia with his wife and six-year-old daughter Charlene. He’s published poems and stories in the past few years in places like Expanse, Argonaut, Urbanite, Terminal Fright, and in the Horror’s Head Press Noctulpa anthologies. He’s just finished a historical/fantasy novel entitled The Four Talismans, which is to be the first in a five book series. He needs an agent and/or publisher.
Saplak would like to acknowledge the encouragement and inspiration of Alayne Gelfand, editor of Prisoners of the Night. He had her market in mind when writing this story, and when he missed her deadline, she encouraged him to try elsewhere, which got the story into the Writers of the Future Contest. That’s known as landing on your feet.
Cerulean blue is the color of a cloudless sky.
Sandra watched the sky lighten over the city. She struggled to keep from feeling depressed these days. It was getting near the end of March and spring was late in coming. She would be thirty-five this spring.
“You’re young,” she said to herself, out loud. “Cheer up, you big baby.” Still, when she looked at the sky, she got that feeling, as if she should cry. The sky here was the same sky that people were looking up to in China and Africa. Over the royal family in England and orphans in Vietnam, it was the same sky.
Only a few windows in the buildings she could see showed lights. A lot of the apartments had curtains drawn. She was used to seeing the city wake up as she got ready to sleep. She’d been on the night shift at Sacred Heart for the past four months, where she was an ICU nurse.
Her attention was drawn to one large square of light in the building directly opposite hers. In one of the top floor studio apartments a man worked at a canvas on an easel; directly across the room from him a woman sat on a sort of stool or chair over which a dark cloth was draped.
Sandra was by no means prudish, nor was she a voyeur, but she couldn’t help but be fascinated by this tableau before her. The man was frantically painting; from palette to canvas his arms made broad, bold gestures. Sandra watched for a few minutes before she noticed that the woman was totally naked.
As the morning sunlight hit the window directly, it created a glare through which Sandra could no longer see. She stood for a moment, then stepped well back from the window to remove her own clothes, to prepare for bed. As she undressed she looked back to the window, reassuring herself that no one could see in. Visible to her through the window at this angle was nothing but the cloudless sky.
Red madder is extracted from fields of flower.
The city has a population of approximately one hundred and twenty-six thousand, including homeless and transients who do not appear on any census, voters’ register, or tax roster. Also included are an undisclosed number of criminals whose dealings are mainly cash, designed to leave no traceable records.
The population of the city fluctuates. The Hopeful arrive. The Disillusioned leave. Births. Deaths. This cycle of population is somewhat like the breathing of a tremendous sleeping beast, like a biological cycle of an animal.
In any given day apartments are left vacant; families are seemingly deserted; automobiles are abandoned to rust and vandalism; houses are left filled or half-filled with belongings. People seemingly vanish.
Some of these disappearances create quite a stir, depending on the visibility of the vanished, and upon the intricacy and depth of their relationships with those they left behind.
The people of the city enjoy a sort of privacy in numbers, a sort of chosen anonymity.
As that winter turned over to spring, numerous single, “unattached” women disappeared, relatively unnoticed.
Ochres harmonize a scene through their dulling qualities.
The intensive care unit at Sacred Heart has the qualities of a chapel, a sepulcher, a spacecraft module, a mortuary, a medieval prison. The ward has room for eight patients. The patients are separated by opaque curtains of off-white; the ceilings, walls, and floor are coordinated in the most neutral tones of beige, ecru, ivory.
Some of the patients hallucinate and frequently speak to dead friends or relatives. Others are not conscious. Some are attended by their own watchful friends or relatives in three-minute periods every two hours. Still others are alone. Most are attached to machinery designed to monitor, regulate, control, or even stimulate anatomical functions of living.
Sandra moves among these people every night. She is competent and professional, and she often reminds herself of the necessity for compassion, the importance of maintaining perspective in difficult situations.
She sometimes cries without knowing it.
She is meticulous and conscientious in matters of recordkeeping and maintenance.
Often her work causes her to touch people, making skin-to-skin contact, as they die.
Viridian is somewhat transparent, but withstands the ravages of light as it ages.
By accident, Sandra met the painter soon after that. She had stopped off in a coffee shop near her apartment, and there he was, sitting at one of the booths. She couldn’t have explained exactly how she knew it was he; she just knew. He had greenish eyes and hair of an indistinct color which was thinning, but which was thinning all over, not in the usual pattern. He had a sketch pad open on the table top in front of him. A cup of weak-looking tea sat cooling near his right hand; the morning light passed through faint vapors of steam above the cup. His hands were exceptionally slender and his fingers exceptionally long. His right hand was poised over the blank page of the sketch book, and his ring finger was bent so that the pad of the fingertip could rest on the paper. He moved his finger in a lazy, slow, delicate circle, over and over.
“I recognize you,” he said.
Sandra realized that she had been staring. Her eyes met his and she was ready to turn away in embarrassment, but something stopped her. His face was so open and relaxed, so natural, he was like a sleepy child.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and smiled back.
“Don’t apologize. Sometimes that’s what life is like. Recognition. The statue hidden within the stone, the spirit hidden within the body. Or the picture within the page.”
He held up the sketch pad and Sandra saw that there was a picture there, a woman unclothed, totally without tension, more like a spirit than a person, but just as the woman’s body was uncurled and open, so was her face unlocked, and her eyes open and streaming tears. But actually, as Sandra blinked, she saw that the page was in fact blank and held no picture there. Undoubtedly the previous six hours at Sacred Heart had made her susceptible to imagination.
“Maybe I’ll paint you someday,” he said.
“Stranger things have happened,” Sandra answered, and it wasn’t a yes and it wasn’t a no, but after eight years in this city—this city of rapists and con artists—she was surprised to hear herself say it.
She turned back to her toast and apple juice, and felt his eyes on her back, but it wasn’t exactly an unpleasant sensation like it could have been, so she turned back again, and of course he was gone.
Indigo is obtained from roots of the plant of that name. It fades.
“That corner is having a bad night,” her supervisor, Nurse Mitchell, says, glancing at Sandra over her hornrimmed glasses. “She may not last.”