Coloring Imagination

By Peter Bowden

 


She sat at the kitchen table where the afternoon light came through in long yellow bars and made the crayons shine like stained glass. The coloring book lay open before her, its pages filled with patient outlines waiting to become something more than paper. A rabbit in a coat. A castle with impossible towers. Flowers too perfect to grow anywhere except in a child’s imagination. She held the crayon tight in her small hand, careful at first, staying inside the lines because that was what grown people praised, but slowly the colors began to wander. Blue found its way into the grass. Purple climbed into the clouds. The sun became green because, for reasons she could not explain, it felt right that day.

Outside, the world moved with its ordinary seriousness. Cars passed. Somewhere, a dog barked at nothing anyone else could see. The clock above the stove ticked with the steady patience of old things. But at the table, another kind of world was being assembled, one color at a time. The wax smell of crayons mixed with the scent of supper beginning in the other room, and she leaned lower over the page, tongue pressed lightly to her lip in concentration. Every stroke seemed to wake the picture a little more. The rabbit no longer waited quietly on the page; now it looked ready to step out and carry secrets into the woods beyond the edge of the paper.

When the box of crayons spilled across the table, she did not rush to gather them. They rolled like bright little comets through the sunlight, reds and yellows and deep midnight blues, each worn down by earlier afternoons. She looked at them with the solemn affection children sometimes give to simple things, as though they were companions instead of objects. Then she chose another color and returned to the page. Because the world, as she understood it then, was unfinished and waiting. And somewhere between the heavy black outlines and the soft whisper of wax across paper, she believed she might help complete it.

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