She Wrote in Rainbows [Story #22]

Continuing my series. This is definitely more of a poem than a story… 

Today I will write in rainbows, she said, and took out her white pen.

All the colors filled the page and she began thinking of reds first, writing about poppies in the ditches and the strawberries on the vine. She wrote about the blood under her skin and raw chunks of meat.

She drifted into orange, as a cloud at sunset. Writing fire and tangerines. She saw faces, tanned by sunshine, turning jaundiced as her mind shifted to yellow.

Dandelions and daffodils sprouted between the cracks of her mind and made her sneeze. The yellow honey bees picked up their pollen; the gold finch darted and dashed among the petals. All dizzying sunshine and cat’s eyes (waiting for the finches to dip closer).

Shoots of grass began pop-popping from her pen, covering the paper, blanketing the entire earth. Sinking into the sea and becoming weeds, wrapping around fences and becoming vines. Roots expanded, grew woody, became trees covered with puzzle-piece leaves that brushed the sky.

So blue, not a cloud across it. It spread to meet the ocean, tipping its hat to the spraying waves. It rode on the backs of jays and bluebirds, and across glittering sapphires on ladies’ fingers. Winding down the river, the sky paused, looked over its shoulder

and found that it had turned to indigo, grew stormy. The pen paused and she thought of lapis-colored rain. It poured onto the petals of lupines, forget-me-nots, and lotuses in their muddy ponds. The sky darkened and she poured herself into violet.

The clouds darkened, shed their color into purple puddles and pitter-patted off grape vines and the backs of purple buntings and honeycreepers. She saw the lilacs quiver and the chives bob their heads wildly. A woman’s hair whipped behind her, the violet dye dripping off the ends and onto the sidewalk.

She threw the pen.

The storm stopped. When she picked up the paper, it was heavy with dripping colors locked in its fibers. She folded the paper and stepped outside, into the gray world. Determined to bring color to the streets.

As she walked, a trail of multi-colored dust drifted behind her.

Kate Bitters is a freelance writer, founder of Click Clack Writing, and author of Elmer Left and Ten Thousand Lines. She is writing a story a week in 2015-2016 on the Bitter Blog. Subscribe to follow her journey.

Author: KateBitters

Kate Bitters is a Minneapolis-based author and freelance writer. She is the author of Elmer Left, Ten Thousand Lines, and He Found Me. One of her proudest/nerdiest moments was when Neil Gaiman read one of her short stories on stage at the Fitzgerald Theater.