The Yellow Luminescence
By Max Hartley
fiction | 12.21 min read
Today I discovered I look very appealing in yellow, despite my sallow skin. You could skim a layer off the top of my face, like a pot of rice pudding left in the microwave long after the ping. By the time I remember to extract the dessert, the roof is gloopy and the pudding cold, a solid layer on top like ice on a lake. I press my index finger into the centre and lick it clean, swallowing the skin in one gulp. At night I buff my forehead with a teal exfoliating glove, rubbing small circles on my cheeks in the hopes I’ll wake up burnished and alabaster. I wake up vermilion; fade back to wan as the day slides by. Or at least I used to.
I had assumed that my complexion precluded me from wearing yellow. Since I could remember, my parents’ nickname for me was Peaky. I wonder whether my parents deliberately chose a primary school for me where students wore baby blue. A secondary school where we wore navy. A sixth form where we wore grey suits; skirted for the girls and trousered for the boys. I fashioned myself some grey culottes and a grey waistcoat to sit snug under my blazer, pulling my enigmatic chest in tight. At university, with its supposed freedoms, I allowed myself one fifth of the colour wheel and baggier fits, lolling around campus in a forest green T-shirt the size of a body bag.
Yesterday I had eaten two bowls of garlicky orzo and was slouching on the sofa, expanding, arms at my sides. I had fallen asleep in front of the small television I bought myself after a year of sexual abstinence. Buying the television would have felt better had the abstinence been planned, had it been a challenge to myself or an attempt to restrain my voracious appetite. In fact, I am simply unwilling to behave in the ways expected of one who wishes to have intimate relations. Baring the flesh, allowing direct contact with body parts I have never acknowledged, playing along with power dynamics that appear wholly linked to genitalia. Still, the television keeps the living room busy with noise and light. A bright lozenge in the corner, like a backlit capsule of cod liver oil. When I woke up and looked at the lozenge, side on, my head still slumped to my chest, I heard a man’s voice, plummy and wizened.
‘A banana slug. So called because it is bright yellow. Or, occasionally, black and yellow, like an overripe fruit. It avoids dehydration by secreting a layer of mucus which covers its entire body. Moving at a maximum pace of seven inches per minute, the slug has only one lung and one foot. It is also…’ the man said with a weighty pause. ‘A hermaphrodite.’
Here, I lifted my head up to full mast.
‘While banana slugs appear to enjoy courtship, unlike most animal species, they do not need it. Possessing both male and female genitalia, they are able to reproduce without the help of a mate.’
I found myself kneeling in front of the television, its screen and my face glowing golden.
‘After reproducing, the banana slug buries its eggs under leaves or soil. And before the eggs even have a chance to hatch, the slug simply moves on. It is neither a mother nor a father. Nor, it’s fair to say, is it a parent of any kind.’
I have never had any desire for offspring, but until that moment I had never known how easy it could be. As I watched a particularly dazzling banana slug – the second biggest species of slug in the world, I learned – mooch away from its eggs, I felt a kinship. The slug appeared to take pleasure in two things: moving slowly and eating. It moved through the world (read: the Redwood forest in California, USA) in the way I wished I was able to: indistinctly shaped, unknowably sexed.
On the lozenge, the slug was now being swallowed whole. I sighed. That’s what you get for being slow and soft. I scrabbled behind me for the remote and my hand hit peppercorns. I had a habit of grinding black pepper, crudely, over the pale mulch that made up most of my diet: porridge, mashed potatoes, bread and margarine, white rice, orzo, savouring the rare friction and heat against my soft palate.
Last week I bought a kilo bag of peppercorns and discovered a hole in the bottom corner. My living room looked like a television advert I’d seen as a child, a whole sunny street filled with a rainbow of bouncy balls undulating like a psychedelic wave. Except my flat was dim and the peppercorns didn’t so much bounce as scatter, covering my floorboards with tiny black pellets that resembled rabbit droppings. Ever since then they’ve appeared in inopportune places: between my toes, under my pillow, inside the grooves of the soap dish I keep in the shower. I began to wonder if they were in fact droppings, rolling them back and forth between my thumb and index finger to test their strength, texture, bite.
Once I had located the remote and tested the three pellets against my incisors – they were categorically peppercorns, rapping against the surface of my teeth with a robustness droppings could only aspire to – the slug was back on the forest floor, covered in saliva but perfectly intact. Pulpy, sedate and androgynous, the banana slug appears defenceless but, I learned, it had the enviable ability of producing anaesthetising slime. I watched as a snake, mouth overflowing with froth, regurgitated my sunny sibling and skittered out of shot.
Today I ventured to the high street and was lured into a shop christened New Look. I bought two T-shirts (McDonald’s arch yellow), a pair of socks (Big Bird yellow), leggings (biohazard yellow) and an anorak (Simpson yellow).
‘Lot of yellow,’ said the person on the till.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I saw a yellow slug and thought: that’s a bit of me.’
That’s a bit of me is an idiom. Most people like idioms, so I keep a few on standby.
‘Hard to pull off,’ the cashier said. ‘Yellow.’
‘You can say that again,’ I said, impressed that I’d remembered another.
‘That’ll be £22, then.’
I tapped my card on the reader, waited for the beep.
‘Have a lovely day, madam.’
‘Madam?’
‘Yes?’
‘What makes you think I’m a madam?’
The cashier stopped folding my clothes and regarded me through narrowed eyes. Narrowed eyes were a threat in the animal kingdom, I’d learned. I took a step back.
‘These clothes are from the women’s section,’ said the cashier.
I pointed to a T-shirt to my left, in a section where all the clothes were larger and plainer.
‘If I bought that T-shirt…’ I said, with what I believed to be a weighty pause. ‘Would you address me as mister?’
‘£22 please, person.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, baring my teeth.
I visited trusty Greggs for sustenance and then wandered, sluggishly, over to Tesco, letting bites of cheese pasty dissolve on my tongue. I took a trolley and calculated that, if the average banana slug grew to around nine inches and moved at 7 inches per minute, then accordingly I should move around 1.2 metres per minute. I pressed my weight against the trolley handle, feeling it dig into the soft pouches on my ribcage, and took steps I believed to be appropriate in size and timing. I received some hostile looks as I inched past tinned tomatoes, fresh soups and sliced bread. One person reached above my head to grab orange cordial, believing, I assume, that I would rush out of their path. Instead I stopped altogether, final slip of pastry between my lips, and turned to face them. They skittered away, snakelike, and I proceeded.
‘All yellow, this stuff,’ said the cashier, pointing to each item in turn. ‘Custard. Bananas. Melon. Cheddar. Corn.’
Their uniform was royal blue, and I pitied them.
‘I can see that,’ I said.
‘Any reason behind it? Party or something?’
‘No.’
‘£11.40, sir.’
‘Sir?’
‘Uh—’
At home I changed my grey linen bedsheets for daffodil, flinging peppercorns into the air as I ripped the covers off. I changed my computer’s background so that it was made up entirely of Minions, and arranged yellow post-it notes and highlighters on my desk. I made myself a dinner of sweetcorn and eggs with the whites cut off, drizzled with American mustard. I put on my new clothes and started one of my preferred guided meditations.
‘Now, as you breathe outwards just imagine: your body is slowly filling with sunlight. All the way from the top of your head and down to your toes. Your body… is filled with light.’
I smiled as I imagined a yellow luminescence filling my veins, visible from the inside out. I lined rubber ducks around the perimeter of the bath, then submerged myself in hot water. Afterwards, still wet, standing on the bath mat, I slathered myself in baby oil. My skin was slick and moist, my hands whisking across my body so fluidly I couldn’t tell where the neutral areas ended and the more offensive ones began. I slid into my yellow anorak, feeling like I was nothing but a glop of skin, shiny and amorphous. Indistinctly shaped, unknowably sexed. Earlier, I had visited one more shop before returning home.
A shop I’d previously stared at, abashed, each time I passed it. Blacked out windows, red XXX sign above its shrouded entrance. Today I stole inside, laden with goods, the pit of my stomach telling me I hadn’t yet completed my task. I descended a narrow staircase and, upon reaching the bottom, had a strong sense that the cashier had been watching my legs as I emerged, step by step, into the basement. They looked ravenous.
‘Can I help you, darling?’
I cleared my throat.
‘Darling?’
‘—’
‘I’d like to see whatever you have in yellow.’
There was one item. The cashier called it a toy. I tried to purchase that alone but the cashier pressed something else into my hands, something I was told was essential. I relented.
My daffodil bed linen beckoned. I pulled the duvet covers over my head, imagining I was beneath a verdant canopy. I whispered the name: Satisfyer Vibes: yummy sunshine. I ripped off the packaging. Almost nine inches, vivid and buttery. I took a deep breath into my lung(s). With a press of the circular button at its base the thing came to life. I had suspected, but never been told, that one could end a year of abstinence without a mate. Without courtship. I slathered the thing with the mucus I had been sold and found the cashier had been entirely correct.
I am filled with sunshine. I am filled with sunshine. I am filled with sunshine.
