When I was a child, I was given countless sets of watercolor palettes. Each time, I popped the clear plastic lid open with a giddy, swooping feeling in my stomach, plucked out the slender brush, and believed.
Using the velvet-bristled brush, I dropped pearls of water fro
(more)m a plastic cup onto the jeweled discs of red, blue, purple. The water floated there, touching the colors but still separate from them, until I lost what little patience I had and ground the brush into the plastic hollow, making brilliant mud.
In my mind, the brush was now a magic wand, coated as it was in dripping, sparkling potion, poised above the pale yearning paper. The first stroke of it against the paper's skin could be anything, could mean anything.
With belief, I set brush to paper, and with a sound like a snake slithering through rain-damp leaves, a floating horizon appeared. Like magic with logic bleeding through, the brush pulled my lagging hand from left to right, and back again, following the rush of the clock's pointing fingers. A foreground appeared with the uniformity of scrolling binary code. Upon it, squares within squares built a house, the fanciful restraint of an isosceles triangle crowning it, pointing toward the banded wavelengths of a twilit sky. As the brush released my hand from the paper long enough to outline the perfect but hidden revolution of a sinking sun, a glitch occurred and the magic wavered. My hand twitched upward, away from the painted horizon, the arrow of time, into the stratosphere of my thin, dampening canvas, swirling the brush into blue-tinged thunderheads, touching their bellies with a millimeter of black. The brush and my hand, magnets repelling each other, scanned the watercolor tidepools for the precise shade of lightning.
Logic. Belief. Intertwining strings.
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