“Lucette,” fiction by Kimberly Jean Smith (fiction, ’12), appears online at Flyaway:
“One of the most difficult things to do is to paint darkness,
which nonetheless has light in it.”
–Vincent van Gogh
Three days before her father delivered Lucette to Madame Macard’s, the Dutch man arrived in Arles. This meant everything unfolded exactly as destiny would have it, or so said the little-yellow-house-girls, who believed the number three held extraordinary significance. The Madame’s girls spent hours behind its yellow walls, forecasting futures and deciphering dreams–Lucette’s more than anyone’s. Blindness, they thought, gave her second sight. By now she knew nothing turned out as anyone could think it.
The morning of her departure, for example, she remembered pressing her cheek against Mama’s and then the baby’s cry. A close sweet odor of breast milk clung to her mother, damp like earth. When there was nothing left to do but leave, she kissed the baby’s toes and slid her hand along the table where she’d sliced onions for their soup.
