Prompt #114
Colorful life
Hello, there.
(Note: I’m on the road again (hanging with my grandkids!) and most likely won’t have a chance to look at your comments in a timely manner. Apologies!)
I can’t remember…
… if we’ve done a version of this prompt at some point in the past. I suppose I could search the archive, but even if we’ve covered the same territory in the past, today is a new day. For every prompt I’ve posted, numerous stories can be written. So, if this one is familiar, give it another go!
Today is all about COLORS.
Have you read the book Bluets by Maggie Nelson? Oh, such a lovely book! It’s divided into 240 short segments, each exploring her emotional connection to the color blue.
Here’s how the book starts:
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.
There is so much to love in this paragraph! That opening word: “Suppose.” She’s asking us from the very beginning to use our imagination. To, perhaps, suspend judgment or belief. To simply go with whatever is coming next. And then we learn what comes next: she’s fallen in love with a color.
Here’s the first paragraph from the story “Red” by Katie Knoll:
Before, we were blue. Bluer than robins’ eggs, bluer than the tiny veins in our wrists and some of our eyes. Even our skin was blue: palms, fingernails, elbows and knees. Our mothers weren’t as skilled before, and the dye from our clothes stuck to us. Then the dye ran out, and our skin over time unstained, and only our clothes were blue. Then the blue cloth and yarn and thread ran out too, after years, and our mothers carded, spun and pulled and wove, making cloth without color, until it all was ready. Today, our mothers make us a new color. Today, we become red.
I love the mystery there—today, “we” become red. Whatever that means…
And here’s a paragraph from a story by Melissa Bowers (“Preservation”) that uses several colors to describe memories:
So many shelves of them now in the basement. Jelly jars, pickle jars, fruit jars, all empty to the naked eye. But I can see what swirls inside the glass: the red one from the night he said, I think I love you, and I shoved him shyly and said, Too soon for that, take it back, although I’d eventually learn he took nothing back, good or bad, because the best way to move on was to move forward. The blue one from the night he proposed, light and wispy and glittering, like cotton candy spinning and alive. The silver one from after our wedding—not white, decidedly silver, but thick and choked with promise. The two bright yellow ones—my favorites—both from predawn mornings spent in a hospital chair, his hand on a tiny new foot.
Okay, your turn!
TODAY’S PROMPT
Choose a color to write about.
You can fall in love with your chosen color, as Nelson has done.
You can feel some other emotion regarding the color you’ve chosen.
Maybe you wake up one morning to find out you are now a certain color. Or everything in your world is suddenly…purple.
Your story can be about the color itself, or the color can be only a mention in your story. It’s up to you.
Remember how many shades there can be of a single color. Blue can be cyan, aqua, navy, indigo, cobalt, teal, sky, azure……
If you want, start your story with the word “Suppose,” as in Bluets. Give your reader something to imagine.
That’s it! That’s the whole prompt.
See you next time!
Note: Stories more than 400 words have little chance of being read by yours truly.
He called me Goose. Goose is what he named me, what he called me. He said what's for dinner Goose? He would yell, Goose! Goose! Where are you? He would yell into the dark night calling me to come home.
We were mated until life ends. And I was his Goose. Always following, always honking. A brown, black, and white creature. One with beady dark eyes and a comical waddle for a walk. Just a Goose, his Goose.
They agreed the living room should be white. Walls, ceiling, trim, everything, the same white.
I’ll pick up some samples this afternoon and we can try some tomorrow, she said.
We want a warm white, right?
Get whatever you want, I’m pretty easy on colors.
It wasn’t so easy at the paint store. The in house color expert told her there were infinite whites. Warm to cool and back again. Tens of thousands of whites, he said. Where would you like to start. Now this here, is Alabaster, and this one Easter Lace, and we can change those, you know, wherever you want to go.
She got rollers and trays and good China bristle brushes at $45 each, recalling how he’d bring home throwaway brushes that drove her crazy. She got rags, extension poles for the rollers, sand paper. And twenty seven quart cans of custom warm white samples.
She covered the dining room table with a drop cloth and organized all the supplies. She lined the cans of paint from warm to cool, as best she could figure out.
What the hell’s all this, he said when he got home.
Paint.
I see that but…..why all the quart cans?
Samples.
Sweetheart . . . .
What!
That’s great, thanks for taking care of all this.
After breakfast next morning they put some paint on the walls. It got confusing what was what. Some of the lids with the color written on got put back on the wrong cans. Etcetera. They painted samples all day and at the end had no idea what they’d done. They went out to dinner and drank a bottle of wine and had fish tacos made with halibut.
He got up around midnight and got a trash can from the garage and dumped the 27 quart cans into it and stirred it with the iron rake. He started painting at 12:45 a.m. He finished at 5:30, cleaned everything up, made coffee and sat down to look at his work.
She’d picked the colors, so he was fairly confident, not positively confident, she’d be happy with the results.