Whenever Cassie Freedman bought paint she felt like a bit of an ingrate.
The fact that she was never contented with white walls wouldn't have typically been thought of as anything terribly affronting except that Cassie had been known on several occasions to have written rather nasty letters to her landlords detailing their lack of inspiration and horrible sense of interior decoration as demonstrated by their color choices.
It wasn't that Cassie liked to complain or that she felt that any of her landlords were truly bad people. She just hated white walls. They made her feel as if she might disappear into their plainness and monotony. Thus it was always necessary for Cassie to expunge her living spaces of their threat of ambivalence by means of some sort of color and/or pattern.
This time she had selected a lemon yellow for the wall behind her television. It was shockingly bright. Almost abrasive. It was the kind of yellow that brashly brought the taste meringue to the tip of your tongue on sight. Not everyone likes meringue. But the hardware store in a small town is never a place known for variety.
Once home and properly outfitted in an old shirt and some baggy cargo shorts with velcro pockets, Cassie began to spread the color on the wall in haphazard columns with her paint-soaked roller. After about 4 minutes she stepped back to survey her progress. She stood legs squared with her shoulders, arms akimbo, paint roller decisively gripped in her left hand. She looked like a defiant child standing up to a boring adult.
Cassie stared at the squarish segment of the tacky yellow on the otherwise naked wall. Her grip on the paint roller loosed just enough to let the instrument plop down against her side, contagiously sharing some of the wet paint with the fabric of the over sized pocket on the over sized shorts. It didn't matter. They were Jordan's anyway. She'd planned on throwing them out once she'd finished the walls.
And then, still staring at the yellow spot on the white wall, Cassie's eyes narrowed as if she was focusing on someone running away very quickly. Without breaking her gaze, she slowly began to lower herself down next to the opened paint can sitting on the plastic sheet covering the floor.
She looked as if she might have been a devout woman praying to a holy wall (perhaps someone important and spiritual had died against it or at least touched it). Once on her knees in front of the freshly painted surface, Cassie groped around with her empty right hand, feeling for the paint can. Standing behind her, one might have thought she was blind.
When she finally found the open container's lip, cool, thick, and wet, she paused only for a moment and then plunged her whole fist right up to the wrist into the whipped and viscous liquid. She felt a shock of shivering cold ritter through her whole form. She didn't think the paint would be so icy. And that's the thing about paint: it holds the cold against skin like a frigid band aid. Cassie hadn't thought yellow would be so chilly.
She withdrew her hand from the paint bucket and looked down it the pills of rolling pigment suicidally streaming off of her now unclenched fingers and back toward the open container whence they'd come. Some missed landing on the plastic in a series of popping individual splats.
And then, in one decisive motion, Cassie flung her open palm against the right side of the oversized shorts, hitting the fabric so hard it stung her thigh beneath. She left her hand there for a moment and then slowly pulled away her yellow digits one by one to observe the scars they left on the drab and threadbare khaki. The result was less than pristine and this made Cassie rather satisfied. She looked at the print on her leg and decided it resembled bright yellow roadkill. She then looked up at the matching pannel on the wall. Then back at the shorts. And then at the baggy shirt falling lazily from her slight shoulders. On the front it had a picture of a brown bear standing on all fours with block letters beneath it reading "Alaska!". Whenever Jordan had worn that shirt she'd always remembered hating the exclamation point.
In her left hand, the saturated roller still lolled without any discernable will against the other leg of the shorts. Cassie lifted the cylindar to just beneath her chin and let the weight of the paint-soaked fibers pull the whole brush down against her clavicle. She then let the roller venture down the length of her chest, drowning the bear and the exclamation point in sticky yellow.
Cassie put down the brush and walked out onto the front stoop where she extracted a packet of cigarettes and a book of matches from her shorts pocket. She struck one of the flimsy matches and held it up to the end of the filter, noting the smudged yellow on the rolling paper.
Etiquette for an Apocalypse
11 years ago
