Pleasures of Chalk

It is something akin to a chalkboard, strong and solid against the taught canvas of the tent walls. Unlike a chalkboard though, there is no faint layer of dust covering it, no pigment to marr the black surface. When a hand wipes clean a creation or signature or message, it is gone forever and the black surface on which it was written is as black as laquered wood.
Patrons making their way through the 'Chalkboard Tent', as it has come to be know, leave their signature, small pictures of flowers and figs and trains, messages to friends or to any reader who feels like perusing advice left by strangers. Children draw nonsense worlds, artists draw things they have seen in the circus. All with the multitude of coloured chalk kept in a large shallow dish on a pedestal in the centre of the tent. The results are black walls filled with stories and pictures.
One picture is of a cup of tea. The chalk on the board is warm to touch, the cup of tea smoother than the block board behind  it, and when one touches their fingers to the drawing, they come away wet and smelling of darjeeling. A patron, walking pensively around, notices there are no curls of steam rising from the surface of the tea, and procedes to draw them. Darjeeling scent clouds his head and there is a sudden heat when he brings his hand closer to the tea cup.
Elsewhere a strawberry has been drawn in red, and a sun in yellow above it. The smell of sun riped strawberries emenates from the board, only noticable to those close enough to see the tiny seeds in the strawberry, which feel prickly to touch.
Only inches away the smell changes to that of oranges, daisies, marmalade and dry leaves. A hurriedly sketched rabbit takes a waistcoat from his pocket, standing before a tunnel ringed with roots and tubers. His fur is silky, smooth as the fur of the cats performing two tents down.
Patrons pass it off as fanciful notions. "The night has run away with us, we've had too much excitement," they claim. Nevertheless, they indulge in more drawings and stories before leaving the tent.
One adventurous child touches the tip of his tongue to a purple plum. He stands, goes to the low dish and sifts through the decay of once full pieces of chalk, until finding one roughly the same shade of purple as the plum. He returns to the picture and make a small line in the centre of the plum, curved as though he has split the skin with his thumbnail. He touches his tongue to it once more, and stays until the plum is shriveled and collapsed around its pit.

Text by Lucie MacAulay