Your Favourite Colour


If you look closely you can see that what you thought was your favourite colour isn't one shade of blue at all: slate, heather, pebbles, frost and winter sky; and as you move, the colour fluctuates as the light shifts across the fibrous shingles, as lantern light on moth wings.

The longer you are here the more you can see your favourite colour, in the loch and on the hillside, especially at first light when the cold breathes a vapour of corpse lips and dead finger tips from the white mouth of the sky. Love is cruel. Winter is natural.

Sisal matting and worn oak tables soft as thoughtlessness warm the parquet floors inside the castle walls; rough stone, rabbit grey, four feet thick to keep the cold out, or is it to keep you in? In or out, it is all one and the same many coloured blue: your favourite.

Just at the edges, there's that natural shade. A few fluffy tufts of bruised cream rose petals, buff, partridge feather pale in shotgun disarray. You note they were not there before. I doubt your favourite colour would look so appealing were they new, their warm hue sets off the blue most pleasingly, as fire to a granite hearth: see, beside the flames, how the particles do sparkle.

The pine on white, lavender light, crisp-edged linen on your bed was the coldest blue you touched, not tempered by the debauched blooms of the roses you crushed against the frigid weave of the starched fabric, stiff: staid flesh, a taunt to your love making.

You went to fetch logs, deer coloured, doe-full, fawn weight in your arms. The light caught your eye: a tree sea lighthouse peeping: pine fingered, vertical waves, and you went to look. You found it hanging from a branch, pinhole theatre puppet, swaying against the rhythm of the night wind, whispered over the loch into a thousand gathered secrets and blown here. With the lantern held in your hoof hand, stiff with fear, you look at the eyes, shimmering, moth eyes, Blue-bordered Carpet, Plemyria rubiginata, blinking many-shingled.

Buck heavy, moon skinned, you lift, lower and lay me. Pale as lime, rime eyed. You stare as though I care to see your mistake, your loss, but your eyes are not mine: once your favourite colour, but that, too, I know changes.

It was her chair, she sat there first, with you, legs positioned reminiscent of the parquet: interlocked, slatted, patterned. She was your perfect fit and you submitted beneath her pelvis as the earth lays, suppliant to your tread; as I lay now beneath the woodpile. And, I would think, the blush of your bodies did set off the blue of the seat of your chair in a complimentary way, as to make it more the blue of your favourite hue than it would otherwise have been: bare of the two of you; as do these logs, warm and knotty, become the death of me.


* Rachel J. Fenton is a writer who paints. Living in NZ and blogging at http://snowlikethought.blogspot.com