Her Blue Man

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My friend is afraid that if she stays out in the sun for too long, her wrinkled skin will turn cyan like the faded posters and books in display windows. She has a habit of flipping her eyelids inside out in the mirror and checking if the blood runs red.

“The veins are blue and green in my wrists. It’s only a matter of time before they bleed into the skin. At my age, it is a miracle that the inside of my mouth is still pink.”

She spends hours painting blue men, stretching her canvas tight with their thick, bulbous figures, blue-skinned and packed firm with blue lard. She never paints any children. “Men do not turn blue until they grow older,” she said. “A lack of collagen and an excess of blood.”

Just once, she painted a red woman. Her eyes were white, and her lips painted black like coagulated blood. I saw the painting hanging in the bathroom last week, but the next day, it was gone. I never saw it again, nor did I ask anything of it, though I often think of how it resembles her, with the same black sunspots around the mouth and the lopsided grin.

It must be nice to know exactly what you have to do and what you do not. She only has to buy a small selection of blue paint and some food for her husband, while I, indecisive and childless, resort to wandering around the block. I cannot paint as she can, sitting in the living room until the day turns dark, ass bonded firmly to the checkered couch. I spend most of my day outside, wandering at the bottom of the hill at Hyochang before making a slow crawl to the top. Often, I pause at the small corner shop near my friend’s house and sit on the wood platform with the yellowed, linoleum tarp. From there, I can see all the way to the hill’s bottom, dotted with school children in their white, starched uniforms and the men in gray jackets and leather shoes. When it rains, the water slows them, clinging to their ankles and pouring into their socks, so they all appear like strange, weighted animals, grazing on the cement slope. On those days, the old shop keeper will join me on the tarp with her black bucket filled with vinyl umbrellas and sell them to those walking by. To the children, she also hands a lollipop with a crinkled pink wrapper, flavored with lychee or melon.

The other day, my friend’s husband appeared at the shop. It was raining hard, so at first, I did not see him. It was not until he handed the shopkeeper a bill and turned around, that I saw his odd waddle and trot down the slope, his fat torso pulling him forward, and the plump behind of a young woman trailing him. In a moment, they diminished into two black dots at the bottom of the hill, like the small balls of a cherry, and vanished.

Seeing this was difficult for me. If I say anything to my friend, there is no guarantee she will believe me. The only thing she believes in is the growing scatter of blue men in her house; the blue men piled in heaps by the television, the three blue men crawling on the fridge, and the blue man leaning against her potted orchid. A particularly dashing blue man accompanies her in the shower, his tall, painted body reclining along the shower liner.

Just one of the blue men is not like the others. It is a photograph of her husband hanging askew above the headboard. There, he hangs long-legged and handsome in his blue policeman suit. Each time I glance into her bedroom, I see the glint of the city crest on his teal chest and the two buttons on either side like proud, gold nipples.

Today, I ask her about the photograph, and she smiles.

“If only he could see how handsome he still is, he may finally make love to me.”

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