Painting Pots

I painted the world. I had to, nobody else would. I suppose they were content with black and white, with shades of grey. They did not know what to make of it when I brought out my painting pots and set to work.
I talked with them while I painted, keeping an eye on those more shocked for fear they would faint.
We laughed at wild stories of anasi the spider (and I painted the Mediterranean Sea in greens and blues), lamented our less than perfect test scores (the Nile was born and the hot brown sands around it), fancied ourselves kings one day and planning our castles.
I almost ran out of blue for the sky, so when I painted the horizon I cried into my paint pot. The paint was thinner, lighter, but the sky was still blue.
I spilled some red in the centre of a mountain and later I heard it had erupted in fire.
I left some things as they were, grey and white clouds, black shadows.
I painted my friends too, their skin and eyes and hair.
Sometimes I think I should have painted them as colourfully as I did the birds in the Amazon (which took me an entire hour), but they wanted blue eyes, dark hair, freckles.
Mama called me in for dinner and I left some of the world alone, let my wet paint bleed into it. Red bled into the sky, brown into the ocean.
When I came out again, the sky was made of fire.

Text by Lucie MacAulay