Ketchup Clouds

[This is for Griffinclaw's Picture Prompt contest, since I can’t seem to upload my picture, here is the link. I haven't written short stories for a long time, so here goes my first attempt..]

http://www.youngwriterssociety.com/viewtopic.php?f=404&t=99151&start=75 ]

Are you, are you?

Coming?

Where we once soar high, with hopes and dreams?

In the morrow of a winter’s night. With the smell of decaying mind that trembles like a child in fright, amidst four white walls, begins our story.

The patients of this particular asylum remembered that year vividly, for in the dim lights of a new dawn. A girl and a boy would come meet together by the third wing, in that small room where they house the dying and the dead.

They were a strange pair, for they would not talk but merely sit for hours on end. Unmoving, as they stare through the tiny window that revealed a precious patch of blue sky, or sometimes, sky the colour of girl’s hair. Rolling hills of tattered raven hair that danced in a skeletal rhythm in the morning air.

Sometimes, the sky would be colour of the boy’s hair. A soft, lemony yellow tinged with wisps of gold, so gold it seems almost white. On those days, the two would silently join their pale hands together and the shadow of a smile would cross their lips.

Are you, are you?

Coming?

Where we once pick roses, from the coral clouds?

‘Sometimes’ said one of the patients that watched them from his cell, ‘they would bring sheets of used toilet paper and draw on them, with their blood.’

As the cold merged into a suffocating blanket of heat, the two would sit, in the wee hours of morning. With a knife that gleamed silver in the pale scarlet light, and drops of crimson would appear on paper the colour of pus.

Those drops form

Two crosses

Those drops form

Into ropes of blood-red ringlets

Those drops form

The prelude of a raging storm

Are you, are you?

Coming?

Where we once sealed a promise, in blood and bones?

So that we would be free in the ketchup clouds?

Before the reign of the moon would be over, in the autumn that followed the heat. The two, would paint side by side, transforming the white walls into a canvas of ketchup clouds and pavement earth. They continued it, for the entire autumn and when winter came, and the boy didn’t come.

That day was as dark as the girl’s hair, the clouds howled with anger and stormed the sky. Jagged lightning shattered the sky into a million broken shards of sable ink, which flooded the room in a sea of despair.

The rumours flew, that the boy found another girl. One with kaleidoscope wings and gossamer hair, but the truth was never told. For the boy never returned, and nor was he seen anywhere else.

The next morning, for the first time in years, snowflakes fell out of sky in crystalline crystals. They landed gently on the girl’s raven hair, her pale, skeletal hands and on the tip of her tongue adjoined with a knife gleaming with ketchup clouds.

Are you, are you?

Coming?