With a career that spans travel, technology, advertising, and social media, Melissa Hassard can’t remember a time when she wasn’t writing. A long-time resident of North Carolina, she founded Women Writers of the Triad, a support and educational group for local women writers, and 20 Lines a Day, an online writing and photography project that began as a personal antidote to writer’s block and has become a community-driven blog with 50 resident members who challenge each other with prompts. Her passions are life, writing, and nurturing the passions of others. Visit her website.

This Shade of Blue
By Melissa Hassard

I don’t know what to do with this shade of blue. It’s sticky. It leeches to my fingers and now the cherries taste funny and I cannot eat them. Instead I eat this blue by the spoonful. It feels like cotton, like wool on my tongue and tastes like iron and honeysuckle: pain. My pain. Yours. It doesn’t fill my stomach but my chest. When I speak, a blue vapor escapes my lips and people look at me funny, as if they know. It is the blue of howl, dusk, a faucet dripping when you are too tired to turn it off. Concrete floors. Clouds. Collars. Creek. Echo. Funk. Somewhere, somewhere between a swell of ocean and the blue of lips. The seam of a uniform. Fading delphinium. Almost but not quite Parker’s bluebird, wavering along a minor chord. If I listen long enough it dissolves into a pale, pale grey, and thins, like a purse of lips, into grey lines that cage themselves around me. And I have only myself to blame.