Done! I'm done with my paper! (I also got my bag today!)
I've decided just to post my color analysis. It's my favorite.
There will be a house, quiet, on a quiet street of a quiet city. The porch will sag a little, and weeds will have grown up over the railing and partially pulled it down. The paint will be coming off in curling strips, showing the greying wood underneath. Inside, through the door that will be slightly ajar, the fall leaves will be lying on the carpet, although it will be difficult to tell what is carpet and what are leaves. Ivy will have grown up to the first landing, but no farther, leaving the second floor untouched, except for where the rain has blown in through the partially open windows.
The trapdoor to the attic will be just outside the master bedroom, which will have a slate-blue embroidered coverlet carelessly tossed across the foot of the bed. There won't be much in the attic, just a few cardboard boxes rotted open, spilling old clothes and sheets of paper across the unfinished floor.
There will be a journal lying in a box that has not yet completely fallen apart. It will be open, as though someone placed it there. On this undated page it will say:
The world is growing darker with every passing day. Every news report speaks of more playgrounds being mined, more nuclear weapons amassed, more scientists saying they'll never find a cure for the Red Plague. The analysts say that at least two thirds of the population have died, either from the War, or from the Plague, and they say those numbers will only increase. Some people say this is the end of the world, and others say it is the beginning of a new world--one of peace and prosperity. I cannot believe that this is anything but the end of the world--"the end" as in, when the smoke clears and dust settles, there will be on one left, and nature will pick clean the bones of our civilizations--if there is any nature left to speak of.
This is so different from what I remember as a child. There were, of course, wars and diseases, and there was always some crackpot yelling about the end of the world being upon us from some streetcorner, but things were normal--although the world we have now is what Charles and Sophie thought "normal" was. The things Mina and I grew up with, the things we lost, they didn't know you could lose.
I'm tired of being mad at Mina. She just didn't want the Endless injection. She didn't know it would be her fault Charles and Sophie died too. It seems impossible, though, in this house. Our house. Some nights I think I can hear them, even though the dead are everywhere. So I'm leaving. My badge doesn't give me the access it used to, but I know enough back doors and unscrupulous people to travel.
Carey's smuggling me into New Zealand first, the north island. I don't know where I'll go beyond that, or after that, but New Zealand seems like as good a place as any to start. I don't know what I'll do, either. All I know is that now, every insignificant thing has become arresting, and every arresting thing reminds me to pray for hope, even though I know there is nothing left to hope for.
The haphazardly piled sheets of paper will all be written in the same steady hand and blue ink that will fade to a greyish blue. Near the back of the attic, in one of the boxes closest to the little faceted round window will be three pages that were once rubber banded together, but it will long since have become brittle and snapped. This is what they will say:
Terraced hills between Auckland and the national park
The green of cool summer sunrises, when there is no spectacular color change, simply the slow shift from black through every shade of blue it's too painful to name. The summer morning when you receive the phone call, letting you know they're gone--dead, or no longer care, and it breaks your heart not to cry, but it breaks your heart to cry even more, and no matter what you do, the fragments of what used to move your blood fall through the cracks in your fingers between your feet. They bloom there, in great white blossoms that smell of rain and heartache, and you want to scatter them to the wind, but the green stem against your calloused fingertips is too elegant to bear. The brown of the summer afternoon you were riding your bike without training wheels, the one that whistled and flapped up and down the block, because that was as far as you were allowed to go. You fell, as you were trying to ride up over the curb, because your older, wiser friend who lived next door last year told you it was easy. Your knee hurt, so you limped home, only to discover the front door and garage locked, and you were too short to reach the latch on the fence. So you sat on the bottom front step, and only then did you discover your elbow had been badly skinned--at least that's what you believed--with pebbles caught in your red-rimmed flesh, stuck against your childhood nails.
Sky just outside of Masterton, fall day
Blue:
You woke up early, before the sun rose, when the world was still encased in its blackblueblack shell and dressed quickly against the mist. The wooden boards were cool against your bare feet, but you didn't bother to put shoes on as you crept past your parent's bed and into the dark soil surrounding your home. You could hear your brother in the lambing shed, trying to quiet their newborn cries, as you fetched your well-loved basket from childhood.
On the top of the hill, you paused to watch the sunrise, with its playful yellows dancing over the land's edge, like your baby sister used to do, before the winter's hard frost found her lungs. Each blade of grass was illuminated, edge first, as the wind bent it towards the town. You turned just in time to see the spires of Paris light up, watched the shadows run and snap. You were still watching it as you made your way to the south side of the hill, until you had to look away as you pushed through the bushes. The small, red berries peered out at you under their heart-shaped leaves. Kneeling, you picked one, and then six, and then twenty-nine, and then you lost count, even though you had barely covered the bottom of your basket. As you quickly tucked fabric up about your knees, the wind caught your sleeves and puffed them up like clouds. By the time the sun had reached the height of your elbow, you straightened, unable to fit the strawberry in your hand into the basket, so you put it in your mouth, sucking sunshine and youth and ease from it.
Purple berries at Waiohene Gorge
The purple of holidays, and of the never-ending universe, and of Simon & Garfunkel singing with an acoustic guitar. The holiday party where the color of the champagne makes your nose tingle, and the hostess greeted you at the door with bronze bells about her wrists. The Grecian columns holding up the room are the whitewhite of a void, but are wrapped with garland; the piano's slender notes wander about the guests, making conversation, but finding no lover. The never-ending universe you may catch a glimpse of as you stand, face parallel to the ground, staring at the Milky Way that arcs from one end of your soul to the other. The final moment when the sun dips below the horizon, leaving everyday supernatural shades in its wake, and the music swirling between your ears is Simon & Garfunkel, and an acoustic guitar.
White star mushroom at Waiohene Gorge
The white of childhood raindrops. Lying on your back, midday, on the soft grey wood of the porch attached to your friend's relative's cabin near the lake in Nowhere. Watching the raindrops fall what could be up from the indentations in the tin roof in strings of pearls. You could catch one, but you know that as soon as that reflecting pearl lands in your hand, the world will shatter over the edge of your skin, so you simply let them fall, over and over and over again. Watching each tiny world encased in such a fragile medium flash by your face, you become dizzy, and briefly, you're forced to wonder why the adults aren't out here with you, for you might as well be dancing to the fairy's lute that keeps time with the pattering on the lake.
Sunrise reflection on the water at Castlepoint
The pink-purple of functions, and old cribbage boards, and coffee, and beads.
Multi-variable calculus functions, ones written in pencil on unlined paper, triple integrals to find the flow of water through a kidney bean; the xs and ys and zs long and spiky, a style you've only developed in this past month. The cribbage board the two of you found in an antique shop when you were on vacation. It was the off-season, winter at the beach, so Main Street was deserted as you two shivered between shops, until you ducked into a tiny one with books piled high in the windows under the yellowing chandelier. In the back room, alone in a cardboard box, you found a worn cribbage board, and, on the way back home on the train later that week, you turned it over and over in your hands. You caught the early bus to school, before the sun came up, and so had time to sit before classes began. Cradling the thick ceramic mug to warm your fingers, you watched the grey light slowly illuminate the crosswalk. A collection of movements formed in the back of your head; a dance of streetlights and crosswalks, of grays and cold mornings, a dance you will teach when class begins. A wicker basket, just about the size of your father's head, filled with loose seed beads, a bright, luminescent green, like a playground of a spring morning before the mist has cleared away.
Sky noon at Castlepoint
Blue:
You own a tiny gallery at the start of a dead-end alley. An acquaintance from your friend's Christmas part painted silver swirls over the entire door you'd painted olive green earlier the week before. There was faceted glass in the door, so you kept that, but you had to replace the windows with their rotting white frames. Once, you though about putting in bamboo floors, but instead, you just took a sander to the wood, and then a chisel, to copy the swirls in the door, and then the sander again, so no one got splinters from the edges. You did this after you painted the walls light grey, so that all of the paint spatters would be gone.
There isn't much in your gallery. It moves quickly, so everyone wants you to have more, but you rather like it this way. Today, you have a steel sculpture, nearly seven feet high on its concrete base, mottled with holes that could each fit an egg. There's an abstract oil painting with browns and tans in great horizontal brushstrokes from one end of the canvas to the other. Your newest piece is a photograph of blurred hands scattering pink and white confetti across the cloudless sky. Your favorite piece, though, hangs in the back over your bare antique desk. Almost everyone who walks into your gallery wants it, but you won't sell it to anyone. It's a round mobile with fourteen tin birds painted muted colors flying in endless circles, bobbing in the occasional sunshine and casting long shadows across the floor.
Red wine found in a deserted winery
The redorange that came about the day you were sailing to the new world, a place you'd never heard of, where the apples were gold and spiderwebs of spun diamonds and grass blades of silk. The man in a dull yellow coat and brown vest came to the door of your wooden home and poured sunshine down your throat until it dribbled out your tear ducts. Your entire family found the carved mahogany ship at the end of the harbor, unmoving in the bobbing water with sails made of purple smoke. Eighteen days after you'd lost sight of land, Poseidon raised a storm, and, for the first time, the wood beneath your feet pitched. You watched from your tiny window, your family clutching at your legs, as the squid rose up to meet you, his tentacles playing with the ship, each one thicker than your eldest son's body, even thicker than he was tall. Its flesh was the same color as the inside of your daughter's mouth, the same color you saw every time she tried to wrap her tiny mouth around a honeycomb. As you were knocked from side to side, the breaking glass fresh between your ears, you saw the squid painting blood on the mast as you sailed to this new world.
Skin of a Maori woman currently unaffected by the Plague
Dusty brown. The fine-grained particles that fly up and around your neck and head in a tiny whirlwind, when you're standing all alone in the desert of every non-named wilderness. Your eyelids are bruised, inside and out, as are the very tips of your fingers, just there by the nail. The jangle of silver etched bangles, a bit thicker than most, each one with a different linear design. The melody your mother used to sing you to sleep. She'd hold you in the machine-carved yew rocking chair and rock for what felt like hours at the upper story window before a scene all lit up by the harvest moon. The picture you found in the museum basement. You were looking for something else, an obscure Vermeer, when you were prying crates apart. The one you found, though, was an oil painting thick with brushstrokes and history and strong winds, turned about in its frame, so only the time-loved back showed out from the gold-trimmed carved frame. You turned it over, and there found a lovely daughter collecting wheat, her head bowed in its white cap against the three o'clock sun; you stared at if for only a few minutes before replacing the nails in the box and returning it to the cobweb-laden corner.
m.
