Ficly

Transfiguration

He was riding his motorcycle on a bright summer day when he first saw the ineluctable.

He was roaring down a lonely stretch of highway and a field of cornflowers streamed past on both sides, a vast, shifting mirror reflecting the sky above. The motorcycle skidded to a stop, and he moved through the knee high grasses to stand at the barbed wire fence.

He was a man intoxicated.

With what, the sight of mere flowers? No. It was more than that. Worlds flickered under the soft undulations of the blooms. The sun shone, and glimpses of an otherness titillated. Then the moment was lost. He got on his motorcycle and went home.

He was haunted by the color. When he got a post card from his daughter of Tahoe under a cornflower sky, he was transfixed.

A cornflower blue post-it on a bulletin board.

A looming Western under a cornflower blue expanse.

When he was on his deathbed, the sky through the nursing home window was that indelible color. He reached out.

They found a smile on his corpse.

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