'We Live In Yellow' by Noémi Scheiring-Oláh

We live inside the Yellow Pages floating in the yolk of yellow paper.
Pepper-black phone numbers stick to our fingertips like crushed ants as we pick out his name – dot dot dots guiding us to his phone number like tiger footprints across peed-on snow.

We live on the hyphen connecting his dark numbers, and we hold onto it like a pair of canaries perched on a phone line, and when he talks, our bodies shake with electricity. Who’s this, he asks, his voice salty like a sunflower seed, and we hear his beard scratch the receiver before the line cuts off and beeeeps to death.    

We live inside the holes of the receiver, lighting up like fireflies as we dial and dial and dial again, his voice getting crunchier like buttered popcorn, Who’s this, Stop it!, I’ll call the cops!, and he doesn’t realize that every time he picks up, seizing his receiver, it is our hands he’s holding through the phone cords that connect us, spiralling like DNA.

We live inside the sunrise when Mom comes home drenched in the ink of night, and we jump around her like baby chicks, our yellow ponytails flying like wings. We eat the remains of school lunches for breakfast, chewing on gummy rice that sticks to our teeth, elastic with the fat of some kind of meat, and we imagine his kitchen behind the phone number: him, standing by a marble counter in rays of sun, preparing double pancakes shaped like an 8. And we imagine Mom with her back straight like a 1, standing outside among 3 3 3s of yellow butterflies, kissing us goodbye as we mount the 5 5s of a yellow school bus.

Through the backseat window, the road stretches behind us like a hyphen –

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Noémi Scheiring-Oláh is an autistic writer from Hungary. Her stories have appeared in Passages North, SmokeLong Quarterly, Fractured Literary, Bath Flash Fiction Award, The Molotov Cocktail, Maudlin House, New Flash Fiction Review, and elsewhere, and have been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and The Pushcart Prize. She’s a fan of stray cats and underdogs. Tweets and Bluesky: @itssonoemi Virtual home: noemiwrites.com