Describe your favorite memory.
Blue sits there for a moment, lost in thought, before finally speaking up.
“It’s hard,” he says, “but I think it would have to be my wedding night. I know that’s pretty cliche, but I can’t remember a night where I was happier. …And whenever I think of that night, the moment I always come back to was later in the evening. The reception was winding down and I’d spent all of my social energy already - Kayleigh, of course, could tell before I even had the time to realize. She politely said goodbye to the people we were talking to, and took me outside the venue - which had been this gorgeous mansion, this place that was something out of a fairytale. Kayleigh kept joking that we should have filmed a music video there.
There was the lovely little gazebo off to the side, where we’d taken a few pictures before, and she pulled us over there. There was no one else out there - just us and the stars and the crickets. We sat down, I put my head in her lap even with my hair still all done up, and we… talked about nothing. Just like we always had.
We weren’t considering our future, or contemplating our relationship, or doing elegant soliloquies about our love for each other. We were just talking about the same dumb shit we always talked about as friends, making stupid jokes that no one else would ever laugh at. And I looked at her laughing, leaning back with her face all scrunched up in the cutest way… I’ve never been more in love with her than that moment. It reminded me that, past all this pomp and circumstance with getting married, all these grand romantic declarations of “til death do us part” or whatever — we were still just best friends.
And that’s always been my favorite part of our relationship. I’m really glad it hasn’t changed.”
-
Bailey frowns at her canvas and cocks her head. “I don’t think this is right,” she says, “but I can’t figure out how.”
Blue leans back from his canvas to look at hers, still holding his brush like he plans to paint without looking. He hums, then gestures vaguely around her painting with the brush. “Check the proportion of the leaf to the rest of the flower there,” he says, before he goes back to his own work.
Bailey squints, and she feels like she’s going insane. “It looks fine to me,” she says. “They look pretty in proportion.”
Blue points to the reference image without looking up. “Look at the grid.”
Bailey looks back and forth between the reference and her painting, making a few careful splotches of paint, and — yeah, that was the problem.
“How do you even notice that?” she asks, fixing up some of the shading that was ruined.
Blue shrugs. “Practice,” he says simply. “I do a lot of still life paintings.”
“…why is that, anyway?” she asks, watching him paint for a moment and definitely not putting off painting the petals in more detail.
“The still life paintings?” Blue asks, looking at her with a quirked eyebrow.
“Yeah,” she says. “You always do flowers.”
Blue shrugs with a small laugh. “I just think they’re beautiful,” he says, leaning back in close to the canvas, making brush strokes as delicate as the flower he’s painting. “There’s something about them — it reminds me nature is an artist just as much as we are. It’s hard to look at a flower, with its petals curved and shaped, with these beautiful colors… and think that nature doesn’t have an eye for design. …Or maybe we were just born to love the look of nature, so we could always be a little bit in love with the world around us. So we’d want to protect it and keep it safe and alive.”
“Hasn’t stopped us from destroying it anyway, of course,” he mumbles, then pauses and adds, “and maybe that’s why I paint it all. To keep it safe in my own little way. I can’t save the world, but I can save the memory of a few beautiful flowers.”
They both sit in silence for a moment, Bailey staring somewhat mesmerized at her sibling’s mostly-finished painting of some wildflowers he’d picked just off the path at a city park.
“Or maybe I just really like how flowers look,” Blue says with a good-natured smile to his little sister. “Who’s to say?
-
“If we’re talking about the best animals,” Kayleigh says, perched on the side of the bath tub, pausing in putting lotion on her leg, “I feel like elephant is a no-brainer.”
Blue furrows his eyebrows. “An elephant?”
“Elephants, yeah!” Kayleigh says, gesturing wildly. “They’re smart, they’re nice, they’re super fuckin’ huge and strong, they have it all. Best animal.”
“So the best animal is the most well rounded animal?” he says, wiping another smudge of makeup from his face. “I’d like to argue that crows and corvids in general are the best, then.”
“Psh, what have they got that elephants don’t?”
“They’re even smarter, for one,” he points out. “And I think they’re prettier! Elephants are cute but they aren’t beautiful like corvids are. Plus, you can’t have an elephant as a pet.”
Kayleigh wrinkles her nose. “You can’t have a crow as a pet, either, though, can you? Like, I’m pretty sure that’s illegal.”
“Not as a house pet or anything, but you can train them to like you,” Blue says. “And you’re not in danger of them destroying your house if they come up to your window.”
“But are the best animals ones that make really good pets, too?” she says. “Cause if we’re including “possible pet” as a standard, then dogs just kinda blow everything else out of the water. Hey, can you put this back over there?” She reaches out with the lotion.
Blue pauses, frowning, thinking for a moment. “I feel we’ve gotten away from the original intent of the ranking of animals,” he says, “but perhaps it’s just a fully subjective thing anyway and we’re on a fool’s errand.”
“Blue. Lotion.”
“Oh, shit, yeah, sorry,” he says, grabbing the lotion and putting it back on their bathroom counter. “…I still think corvids win in most metrics.”
“That’s OK. Everyone’s wrong sometimes.”
“Including you, right now, because you can’t see the potential of corvids.”
“Or you because you just hate elephants so much. And dogs.”
“I don’t hate elephants and dogs!”
“Oh yeah?” Kayleigh challenges. “Then let them be #1.”
“They’re like, #2 and #3,” Blue argues. “Corvids are still #1.”
“Corvids isn’t even like, an animal!” Kayleigh pouts. “It’s like a category of animals!”
“So are dogs!” Blue points out.
“They’re basically all the same.”
“Go look at Roxy and Daisy side by side, right now, and tell me to my face that they’re basically just the same,” Blue says, gesturing to the door.
Kayleigh sticks her tongue out. “You just don’t want me to win.”
“That too, but I really do believe in crow and raven supremacy,” he says. “They’ll take over the world when humans die out, mark my words.”
“…I kinda wanna see that, actually.”
“Unfortunately, you’ll be dead, since you’re a human.”
“What if I’m just built different?”
Blue laughs. “You know what?” he says. “I can see you surviving the apocalypse. …But not well.”
Kayleigh shrugs. “Yeah, I’d miss my warm, cozy bed too much,” she says, standing up and stretching. “Speaking of, I think it’s calling out. It wants us to go fall into it.”
Blue rinses his face off, patting his skin dry gently. “I can hear it too, I think,” he says, letting himself be dragged up to his feet and into the bedroom.