Thirsty Blue Slaked

There’s a particular shade of blue that I’ve tried to replicate with pigment for much of my life. I think it’s blue, anyway. There’s gray in there, too. Indigo. Violet. Black. Flickers of gold. This blue is luminous, despite its darkness. This blue is heavy and satisfying as a thirst, slaked.

I can’t point to any objects that are this color. It belongs to something more ephemeral: the bruised underside of a storm when the sun is at four o’clock slant on the opposite horizon, burning the prairie white in the space between. It’s a waiting color, one that heralds a sky shattered with lightning, boom-cracking thunder that ricochets inside your ribcage, and the transformation of hardpan to mud. The things that come when the spreading anvil cloud drags the hard shield of its belly over your head—tightening the blue now to opaque gray, then obliterating it in sheets of rain.

On road trips with my family to the High Plains when I