I.
This is Hannah. She is five. She doesn’t like painting the skies blue.
They ask her why she won’t colour the sky blue, and she just shrugs her shoulders, up and down. Her round pink mouth is set in a pout, and the two sandy braids down her back rise and fall. She isn’t really sure why the sky can’t be blue, but she doesn’t trouble herself with thinking about it too much. She is, after all, only five.
She grabs the crayon, an any-colour-but-blue crayon. This one has a bright hue, like bubbles in lemonade, so that she can almost taste the sticky sweetness. She takes out her sharpener and sharpens so that the wax falls in little curls that sometimes look like roses. The crayon is soon so sharp that the tip begins to break, but she keeps on turning it and watching the shavings cascade down.
Someone takes her hand and leads her outside, pointing at the sky. She looks up, shielding her eyes against the sun.
“Look. It’s blue. Not any other colour.”
Hannah looks at the adult dumbly. She knows it’s blue, but it shouldn’t be. She doesn’t like it.
II.
Hannah doesn’t believe in religion. She doesn’t have anything against it, it just confuses her. If there is really something out there that can create anything, or that is everything, then why should it care about people? The universe is big. Humanity is tiny, miniscule.
She doesn’t believe in religion, but she believes in holiness.
Holiness such as she feels now, watching the sun slowly emerge on the horizon and begin its steady creep across the not-blue sky. She is wearing a jumper over her pyjamas and trainers without socks; she snuck out early to be here. One hand clutches the letter she received only yesterday. She sits down on a weathered gravestone, smoothes out the paper against her knee, and reads the words again.
You have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry…
She gives the sentence one last satisfied look and then raises her eyes to gaze around the cemetery.
She does not find it odd that she likes this place, that she doesn’t find it frightening in the least. She would be afraid if she were by the newer graves, where the ground is still bare, but here the headstones are so worn that she can no longer read the names. Here the grass grows lush, and there are fir trees alive with the songs of birds. A decorative stone basin sits on top of a headstone a few feet away, glinting to the brim with last night’s rain. When she was younger, her mother would bring her here, and they would have picnics by the grave she now sits upon.
She examines the small blue forget-me-nots at her feet and thinks about Hogwarts.
She is happy to be going there. Everyone else is happy she’s going, so she is too. They talk about houses, and she doesn’t really know which one she wants to be in, because she isn’t very brave or clever or cunning at all…
She frowns at the forget-me-nots, but then she realises she’s going; she’s going and that’s all that matters.
She gets up, and she dusts herself off. Then she leaves, and the sky she left behind sighs in relief and slowly begins to turn blue.
III.
Hannah likes to draw. She decides this in her second year, during History of Magic, while doodling a bird on her parchment. She doesn’t draw well, because all her people have small heads and fat necks and her horses look like dogs, but it doesn’t matter. She just likes doing it.
And so she draws. But, it’s always sunsets, always sunrises, always nights, always storms, never crisp, clear days. She draws through her second year, her third year, her fourth year, her fifth year, her sixth…
She sits in the common room, a sheet of paper before her and the paint jars she received for Christmas open in front of her, lined up in a row. A paintbrush lies to the side.
She reads the label: avoid contact with skin.
Very carefully, she dips one finger into the blue paint. Slowly, she runs it across the page. Coolness and roughness melt into her hand. She is very serious, very calm. It is vitally important that she touch. She doesn’t know why. Why doesn’t matter.
She sits there, trancelike, for an hour, her fingers dipping in and out of the paint and making images bloom on the paper. And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, she is finished. She sits back and examines what she has created.
It is a figure. Male or female, she doesn’t know. It is hard to tell because whoever it is stands at a distance, in the centre of a field of waving grass. All of it is of a single tint. And above the figure lies a sky, a sky…
“Hannah, are you alright?” Susan comes over, eyes concerned. “You have the oddest look on your face…”
Suddenly she is crying and yet she isn’t sad at all, so she merely sits there perplexed as the tears stream down her cheeks and drip onto the paper in front of her. Susan wraps her arms around her shoulders and whispers comforting nothings into her ear.
The drops form rivulets that gleam on that strange, blue, terrible sky ” the one she had never meant to paint.
IV.
The sun bears down heavily on her, brutally sharp. It is baking her. She is wilted.
Her eyes mist over, but she knows it isn’t because of the bright glare. Someone is talking in a monotone ” loving wife, gentle mother ” but somehow she doesn’t really hear them. Probably because she knows they are telling lies. Hannah remembers her as fierce, a fighter. She’s barely into the grave and already they’re distorting her. They’re moulding her into what they wanted to see.
And then of course, there is the word they skirt around ” Murder. A sinister, dark shade of blue, like a bruise. Thinking of it makes Hannah shudder.
She looks down at the flowers in her hand. She picked them only that morning, in the part where the graveyard isn’t really grave. They shouldn’t bury her here, she thinks. Not where the tombstones are freshly cut and grass hasn’t even begun to sprout over the graves yet. She wouldn’t like it.
And then Hannah doesn’t think anymore. Hannah is good at that. She can push all those little troublesome thoughts away, swat at them like flies, until there is a blessed silence. She can breathe the emptiness.
So, she thinks of nothing as the speaker finishes. She thinks of nothing as people around her begin to rise. She thinks of nothing as one-by-one they offer sad-eyed condolences, as one-by-one they say goodbye. She thinks of nothing when, finally, she is alone.
Then she gets up, and she walks towards the grave.
When she reaches it, she looks up at the sky. Hannah isn’t looking for divine counsel, but something else. Something different.
The sky is cloudless, unobstructed by any barriers, and she can see its true colour at last.
Oh, Hannah thinks. It figures.
And she lays the little blue flowers on her mother’s grave, because blue is the colour of the sky, and forget-me-nots, and the hole in her chest that just won’t fill.
V.
Later, much later, he kisses her under a twilight-blue sky, and she wonders how it happened because she is Hannah, just Hannah. These things aren’t supposed to happen to Just-Hannahs, especially when the sky is that exact colour of blue that she hates and fears. And yet it is happening.
She always had a space in her that was blue, and that space was loss and the colour of loss. But what is lost must always be found somehow, somewhere, in another form, in another universe…
Hannah stands back. She looks at him and at the field behind him. She looks at the sky, and she deliberately paints it all blue in her mind, from the tip of his nose to the far-off horizon, and the colour makes her laugh for the very first time.