after Lexie Liu She wakes up and as always, has to remind herself that the world isn’t ending when she opens her eyes and sees herself painted red, the sunlit window colored crimson by the lanterns hanging outside of her room. She robes herself red as well and veils her visage in an attempt to dull the din of the day. This technicolor town has only ever known how to glow neon, bioluminescent at all hours of the day. Like the fish tanks in seafood restaurants, blue as the moon, shimmering in her dreams — electric, enigmatic. She dreams of cool colors, of being a flying fish in a cobalt sky wider than her window. In one of these dreams she succeeds in flight, no longer tethered to this town. The news puts her picture in the paper: wanted, for fleeing the scene of a crime she didn’t commit, flying fish to freedom. She peered through too many windows and learned too much about the language of the back channels of this town that men have paid for over the years with blood — not their own, of course. Of girls like her, like those before who were vanished into the night before the sun could raise them again. They say a girl is only beautiful when she doesn’t know, and that only the lucky daughter makes it home by nightfall. The unlucky ones are folded into paper swans and caught in cages with ruby-lit windows. She folds herself into another day and prays for a yellow sun. In another dream, the sky is eclipsed by the sun in a single swallow and everything is on fire — the window frames, the newspapers, the red lanterns, all engulfed in burning tongues that lick at her feet. Her vision darkens. She wakes up and as always, has to remind herself that the world hasn’t ended when she opens her eyes and sees herself dusted golden, the window intact, streaming soft sunbeams onto her skin. The lanterns are gone, as if they were never there to begin with. The town trembles with the silence of the day. She turns her back to walk home, towards the horizon without looking back. She’s one of the lucky ones — and nightfall never comes.