In the spring, Amanda colored her emotions with a standard 8-pack of Crayola Crayons. Her flowers were cheerful yellow and her sun cast a glowing caress of orange from the left corner of her clear blue sky. The moon was a bulging pale gibbous that eclipsed her father’s head to sit squarely upon his narrow shoulders. Her family’s black shoes bruised the tender green shoots of a harsh winter’s thaw. Upturned smiles graced their faces as they held hands and descended in symmetrical harmony from greatest to least.
Amanda’s innocent colors caused those around her to smile in melancholic reflection. All seemed perfectly normal, as these things normally do. There was that one odd detail though, that pricked at her father’s ego. Why had sweet little Amanda colored her mother’s face a soft beige, her own a warm cinnamon but left her father’s a translucent white? Why, was everyone’s smile large and warm but his so cold and blank? The school psychologist told her parents it was nothing to be concerned with; Amanda demonstrated all the traits of an emotionally stable, well-rounded child.
Still, her father was troubled, and asked for a different face as he searched the colorful drawings tacked to the school’s pastel walls. Other fathers had well-rounded Charlie Brown heads with cheery dimples and campaign slogan grins. He encouraged Amanda with his most paternal tone to fill in his skin tone and plant him with a proper fatherly beam. Amanda scrubbed the paper in right-angled patterns as she finished his features in a Picasso Cubism style. Dark apparitions peeped through the barred windows of his juxtaposed eyes. Her father found her artistic talent very unnerving as he stared at his red tinged canines that bled down upon his exaggerated bottom lip.
In the summer, Amanda ran away with the erogenous shades of her rampaging emotions. Sensual scarlet, hormonal fuchsia, hot horny pinks and deep throbbing magenta blended with golden rod and raw sienna to paint her fantastical experiment. She wandered ever deeper into the forbidden spectrum while using designer colors and revealing brush strokes to comfort her naked palette. Sharp geometric symbols no longer owned her. She escaped her imprisoning Cubism only to be whored out by the cursive brush strokes of her Impressionist beauty.
Amanda’s online profile described her as extremely celestial. Consequently, she provided entertainment for many astronomical events. She devoted entire canvasses in coaxing the sun towards his zenith. With seductive purpose, she allowed his warmth to press upon her ripened lips as she pursed soft lingering kisses upon his glowing corona. He lingered upon her artistic palette as her liquid eyes bled down upon his horizon. She relished his essence, just before a slow feminine swallow pushed him below the wrinkled horizon in a deep-throated swallow of night.
Amanda’s father never trusted the sun, or any star for that matter. He knew what they wanted; always tempting tender young girls to lie recumbent in the nude while he baked their sweet loaves to a buttery brown. What young lady could resist fondling his brilliant sunspots or straddling one of his solar prominences? Amanda’s father secretly envied the sun with his harem of solar-powered call girls.
At work Amanda’s mother talked openly to her friends about her unhappiness. Each night she worked a little longer to find herself in the handsome smile that found no fault. Amanda’s innocence returned whenever she saw her mother in the arms of her handsome American smile.
In the autumn, Amanda entered rehab and found the earthen tones of a ripened earth. The sun lost some of his prominence as she began painting her season’s harvest.
Amanda’s profile now described her as clinically bi, although she had never painted upon feminine flesh. She painted herself in moody mauve, plum, olive, wineberry and just plain brown. Her style became more natural as she blended her colors to match those of the earth and the setting sun. Her smile was more worldly as her trees burst into flames of burnt colors just as green escaped upon the ascending curl of gray ash. The leaves became rusty, falling with Amanda from the wind whispered boughs to lie prostrate upon the earth. The sun remained low in the sky, his head resting upon Mother Earth’s soft bosom He clawed about the horizon, as he and Amanda painted a brilliant sunset going down upon Mother Earth.
Together, the trio gathered in the season’s final splay of colors. Whore red purses left slow lingering kisses along the length of orange’s swollen girth. Fingers capped with translucent shades of promiscuous yellows stroked and clawed heated welts upon Amanda’s Expressionist canvas.
Amanda felt safe and secure in the gathered embrace of the earth and sun. She loved painting the romantic shadows in the sun’s twilight role. Still…she dreaded their autumnal equinox as it marked the end of her solar season. Time seemed suspended somewhere between pain and ecstasy as the harvest moon appeared silently upon their horizon. He reclaimed Amanda for his own as Mother Earth turned cold and fallow and the sun’s radiant warmth sank lifeless into the cold black night.
Winter gave Amanda’s smile a cold chill. Her profile described her as a spoiled caramel bitch in need of a strong fatherly hand. Her paintings took her into the shadows between her black and white extremes. Amanda’s dilated pupils reflected the moon’s cold white light as his twin orbs danced upon the surface of lunacy.
The moon was moody but predictable as he waxed and waned between his bi-polar phases. In his waxing phase, Amanda’s pale complexion achieved deeper tones of black and blue. When he was full he became unbearably round and demanding, introducing her soft nurturing shores to the pounding waves of his drowning tide. As he waned, he held her tightly in his cold embrace and whispered endearing promises across her tear soaked cheek. He achieved complete dominance while capturing her as his only satellite.
No one, especially Amanda understood the compelling gravitational pull that held her sway. He terrified her, and yet, she found an odd comfort in his lunar abuse. Perhaps, she felt that she could change him or maybe she needed to carry on the self-fulfilling prophecy that destroyed her mother. It was difficult to say.
The moon floated upon Amanda’s placid seas of surrender, enjoying her captive beauty as his cold pale fingers read the goose bump Braille of her canvas of fear. Her long muscled chords strained against the chaffing tethers of another binding black night.
Amanda absorbed his tough love with a beaten dignity, biting her full lips while clinched knuckles assumed a more ghostly shade of pale. Her awareness focused away from her searing flesh and onto her swaying breasts that kept time with his lunar phases.
Amanda masked her pain behind her pretty face and bedazzled her onlookers with an iridescent smile of pearled moon glow. She carried on as she had seen her mother. She was cloudy and opaque and layered life’s irritations with her hardened emotions; very much as an oyster slowly turns a grain of sand into a smooth sphere of cold erogenous beauty. Her little opaque jewel was contradictory in both form and purpose; hard and demanding to the touch and yet soft and feminine within its beautiful setting.
Comfort came from the pleasure of her precious little jewel. It took her away from the enveloping blackness with the promise of an early spring thaw. Amanda polished her glistening little pearl to ward off the cold dark loneliness. She teased the extremes of her dichromatic shading as charcoal still lives became her medium of pleasure. She squeezed her firm mounds between splayed black tipped fingers, extruding her pale orbs to rekindle her passion. Faint shades of pink became rosy red splotches that bled deep into scarlet—charcoal despair—melancholic reflection—a haunted warm sunset from long, long ago.
Her doctors were unable to break her cyclic mood swings and could only medicate her online profile of bi-polar orbits with schizophrenic tendencies. Amanda attempted to express her emptiness while the doctors drew revealing inkblots of their deviant still life desires. Eventually, they painted her in splayed submission upon their black leather couches, reinforcing her view that emotionally she was of no value.
The doctors fondled her in the Hippocratic Oath then sent her off with little black and white pills to dampen her phases and soothe her into complacency. She read the precautions as the childproof container wilted in her hand. The little brown bottle performed a seductive hip sashay as her lace panties slithered downward, oozing about her ankles. The slender bar code vials spilled their black blood into the bony cup of her palm.
Amanda bled upon her canvass as Life and Death kissed a mourning gray. She grasped the full moon and drew him near. Her fragrance was of perfumed flesh caressed and seared by tanned leather. The sweetness of finality flared his nostrils as he closed his eyes and enjoyed her soft lips. The kiss of death was not the cold embrace he had imagined. It was warm and sensual with a sexual appeal he couldn’t resist. There was a buzz in his inner ego as their tongues vied for dominance and he invariably lost.
She sucked the lunatic glow from his roundness as he waned into gibbous; towards his last quarter. His crescent shriveled to a faint amber slither as her painted soft purse extinguished him to blackness of his final new moon.