It was a gray cool, cloudy day with nothing to do and nowhere to go and no one to do anything with or go anywhere with.
So she took out her coloring book, and her crayons and began to color.
She colored a house, with two stories, and two porches, and four bedrooms, and a beautiful kitchen full of new pots and pans and plates, and full of beautiful fruits and vegetables and grains and sun flowers in vases, and a big bedroom with a king sized bed and easy chairs and walk-in closets, and she colored a big backyard with a lily pond in it, and shade trees and flagstones and a swing and picnic table.
And then she got up and walked into the house and sat at the table in the kitchen nook and took out her colors and began again.
She colored a cat, black and white, with long hair, very beautiful. And then the cat got up, and stepped out of the book. She put her hand on the cats head, and sunk the tips of her fingers into the cats velvety soft fur, and rubbed the backs of her knuckles up into the cat’s cheeks and into her ears. The cat looked deeply into her warm eyes and began to purr. Then the cat lay down beside her on a kitchen chair and took a nap.
And then she colored a boy, her age, with smooth skin, and dark hair and deep black eyes. And when she was done, he got up and walked out of the book and sat down at the table besides her. He took her hand in hers, and said, “I love you,” and kissed her gently on the lips. She put her hand in his hair and looked into his eyes. And then he sat beside her, and she began to color again.
Then she colored her soul, it all its detail, her lively personality, her fun spirit, her generous heart, her quick mind, her strong will, her gracious dignity, her glacial irrationality, her magnificent diffidence, her supreme anxiety, her overwhelming lack of confidence, her flappable existentiality, her her within the her of the very essential her.
Then all of her was there, in vivid colors, rising off the page and encircling her with bright shades and hues and tones, the colors glittering like water in the sun, sparkling like diamonds under stage lights. Then the colors curtained and rippled and pulsed like the Northern lights, and then they fell upon her even as she kept coloring, more and more, and the shades and hues and tones radiated into her skin like sunshine, rubbed into her skin like moisturizing cream, soaked softly into her skin like sugar dissolving in tea, soaked deeply into her very core like water dripping into an aquifer.
And then the house and the cat and the boy all disappeared and all the crayons rose up out of the box and out of her hands and ribboning themselves in a double helix, they descended into her head, and you could see them even through her clothing, diving into her very core, into the essence within the essence of her very quintessence, shimmering inside of her, flashing, pulsing, blowing up like the sun in ribbons and arches and flares within her.
And then she quieted, and glowed softly, and the colors subsided within, now occasionally flickering out of her eyes, now sometimes appearing at the ends of her finger tips.
And then she got up, and walked back through nowhere to where she had come from, ready for — anything.
Modern Fables and Antifables 