Wet Paint

Who knew that purple was such a dangerous color?

It all started when my wife grew bored with white kitchen walls. I arrived home from work on a sweltering August day to find color samples strewn across the kitchen counter. Before I could decipher their significance, Margaret’s car pulled into the driveway.

I walked out to greet her, beer in hand. She struggled with two gallon pails of paint. I bent forward to kiss her and she drew back.

“I could use a little help.” Eyebrows sharp enough to cut flesh arched over her eyes.

I flushed and looked in vain for a place to set my beer down. I reached for the pails and a splash of beer spilled from the tilted bottle. Margaret pulled her white pump away in the nick of time. She shot me an evil look. “I’ve got these,” she said. “Get the rest out of the trunk.”

I trotted to the open trunk. Two more gallon cans crouched within. As I carried them to the house, Margaret triggered the remote for the garage and I had to duck as the door came down.

The cans swung at my side, sloshing, stirring. One of the lids made a popping sound and dimpled upward in the heat. It was silly to imagine that something was trying to get out.

###

I had planned on working in the garden the next day, but Margaret was up early, dragging the kitchen table into the dining room and laying tarps. When she got a bug in her head you either got out of her way or got run down.

She almost flashed me a good morning smile. “Bring the paint in, will you? And start stirring it.” She surveyed my groggy, pajama draped form with her efficient top to bottom gaze. “You can have some coffee first, if you want.”

###

Sharon was Margaret’s younger sister. It was my misfortune that she had married a much more successful man -- success being measured by his annual salary. Since he worked nearly every minute in an effort to humiliate me and every other man on the planet, Sharon was often at our house.

“It’s purple,” Sharon said. Few people I knew could inject such contempt in so few words.

“It’s Raspberry Beret,” Margaret said. I could imagine her cheek muscles twitching as she clenched her jaws, but I didn’t dare to look away from the wall that I was spreading paint across.

Sharon came and stood next to me, examining my work with a jaundiced eye. Her only reply to my wife was to take a long swallow from her orange juice and vodka.

I glanced at what little we had left to do. “I think you bought too much paint.”

Margaret whipped her head up to look at me. For a brief instant her eyes showed uncertainty, vulnerability, fear that she had made a mistake. For a brief instant I saw the girl I had married.

Her eyes turned flinty and she swept her gaze across the kitchen. She saw things differently from me. “It’s going to need a second coat.”

Sharon was right. It was purple. The innocuous name Raspberry Beret did nothing to prepare you for how hideously purple it was.

Margaret never wavered. She took in her new kitchen with pride. She had once more remade the world to match her vision, and all was good.

###

We had two cats, Guy and Molly, gray-striped tabbies from the same litter. I suspected they were prince and princess exiled from some distant cat empire. I should say my wife had two cats, since she brought them with her into the marriage. But they both showed me a modicum of affection, however diffident, that my wife had long since forgotten how to give and receive.

From the day we painted, the cats refused to enter the kitchen. Even the sound of the electric can opener could not entice them into the purple room. Weren’t cats colorblind? Or was that only dogs?

After the first day, I saw that they would starve if I didn’t move their bowls into the utility room. They followed me, scampering past the kitchen door like their tails were on fire.

Late at night, as I lay in bed, I heard the familiar sounds of the cats racing through the house, pursuing each other and wrestling. I imagined I could see dark shadows spreading across the ceiling. My dreams were purple.

Four nights later, Guy disappeared.

###

I lay in bed like any other night, staring at the shadowed ceiling. Margaret's sleep was troubled. Usually she slept like a stone, but that night she tossed about as her slumbering body searched for a comfortable position.

The cats romped and tumbled. I was on the verge of falling asleep when Guy let out a deep throaty growl of pure menace that rose up the scale to a shrill cry of pain.

I leapt out of bed before I had even woken up. Margaret sat up with a cry. As I dashed into the living room, her aggrieved voice followed me. “What are you doing?”

I switched on the light to find Molly standing in the center of the room, her tail erect, the fur on her back bristling. She let out a piteous cry, a moan of unending misery.

Margaret came into the room. “Molly, what’s wrong?” She went to the agitated cat and bent to pick her up. Molly flattened herself to the ground, her ears pinned back against her head, one forepaw raised to attack, mouth stretched in a primal snarl of warning. Margaret thought better of comforting her.

I switched on the light in the hall. I called Guy’s name. Our tom was not showing himself. Molly’s desperate moans of grief continued to pierce the air. At the end of the hall I glimpsed one short wall of deep purple.

I turned away from the kitchen and into the guest bedroom. “Guy?” I called. I went through all the rooms of the house including, eventually, the kitchen. Guy was nowhere to be found.

“Come back to bed,” Margaret said. She stood in the hall, hugging herself, her lips trembling. The air conditioning usually didn’t make the house so cold. “He’s hiding.”

Margaret was right. Something had scared both cats. Guy would show his puss in the morning. We went back to bed. Lying still, side by side in the dark, miles separated us on that queen-sized bed.

Molly wouldn’t shut up until Margaret got up and threw a glass of water on her.

###

Guy didn’t turn up the next morning, even though I opened a can of tuna in place of the regular cat food. I didn’t have time for a finicky act. I had to get to work.

I spent a good chunk of that evening searching every room in the house. I looked behind and under every piece of furniture. I shuffled through every closet. I poked past the spider webs under the basement stairs. In the kitchen, surrounded by purple, I opened every cabinet.

I did find something that I never told Margaret about. In an obscure corner of the kitchen, just above the floor molding, I found a tuft of cat fur the size of a fingerprint dried into the purple paint. This was not a tumbleweed of fur that had been shed and ended up stuck to the wall. A patch of skin and dried blood held the mass together.

I took a tissue and tugged it loose from the wall. I expected fine cat hairs to stay imbedded in the paint, but the finish was smooth to the touch. The wall seemed to mock me. A vague sadness for Guy swept through my heart.

I buried the wad of tissue in the garbage can and retreated, purple at my back, dogging my footsteps.

###

It rained hard Friday night. The constant patter of fat raindrops was a poor replacement for the patter of feline paws. The frenzied activity outside was contrasted sharply by the intent silence within the house. The only sound was the slow muttering of the color purple.

In the morning, I looked forward to a serene day of puttering in the garden. The earth would be clean and muddy. Standing at the back porch, I was greeted by a vision way off the bizarre scale. The backyard was swarming with birds. They flew off as soon as I stepped outside. I saw what they had been feasting on.

Worms.

The yard was lousy with them. They wriggled inch by torturous inch through the grass that was a jungle to them. Some were foolhardy enough to venture across the cement walk where they began to dry out in the bright summer sun.

I chose my steps with care as I crossed the lawn. The sea of worms parted for me as I made my way to the patch of garden against the back fence. These were not ordinary brown earthworms. These were worms of a regal nature, golden and mysterious. When I reached the garden, I turned and looked back.

A carpet of worms writhed toward me with agonizing slowness. I marveled at the phenomenon. As they surged forward, I felt a whispering in my mind, sonorous words at the back of my brain. The multitude of worms spoke to me with one voice.

Canary is a friendly color.

Then they burrowed into the ground. All of them. Simultaneously. Within five minutes, I couldn't see a single worm.

###

Sharon’s husband Larry was golfing on a Sunday afternoon and then having dinner with business associates. Who plays golf in the afternoon? Don’t ask me. I don’t play golf at all.

Sharon had invited herself over. She was on her third orange juice and vodka, each drink holding progressively less orange juice.

She chattered on about her tragic lack of a home life. I could feel Margaret biting her tongue, wanting to tell her how lucky she was. So much bitterness went unspoken between them, and, equally, so much love. They clung to each other, desperate in their private miseries.

The roast was done cooking and Margaret was stirring together a pot of gravy from the drippings.

I was the only one who saw it. Margaret wasn’t paying attention. I don’t think Sharon even knew what happened.

A sharp patch of purple leapt out at Sharon like a knife blade and severed the last two fingers on her right hand. We never found the fingers.

Sharon yelped and dropped her glass of orange juice and vodka. The glass shattered, creating a sunspot of sticky orange.

A thread of purple ran up her arm, slicing through her flesh like a razorblade. The purple was instantly accompanied by a flow of red. The doctors told us later that she had been sliced to the bone.

Sharon screamed and jumped back from the wall. Blood welled from her arm in a crimson flood. She cradled it, horror wide on her face, and screamed again.

Margaret whirled from the stove. The pot of gravy slid from her nerveless fingers. Brown sauce splattered across the floor. Our kitchen was beginning to look like Jackson Pollack had come to dinner.

I snatched up a dishtowel and shouted, “Get out!” I hustled them from the kitchen, wrapping Sharon’s mutilated arm in the dishtowel. Behind them, they couldn’t see as I ducked away from a spear of purple that would surely have skewered my eye.

###

At the emergency room, Margaret huddled in my arms and wept. When Sharon had been stitched up and sedated, they checked her into a room. I guided Margaret to a chair where she could watch over her sister.

She looked up at my tense posture in askance. I avoided her gaze. “I need to go home. I need to call Larry,” I lied. “Someone should tell him where Sharon is.”

Margaret looked at me with eyes that spoke of utter fear. Perhaps she had seen some of what happened in the kitchen. Perhaps she suspected what I meant to do.

She begged me not to leave her, but I wouldn’t listen. I drove away from the hospital gripping the steering wheel so hard my fingers went numb.

Half an hour later, I emerged from Home Depot, armed with four gallons of Canary Yellow interior latex paint, a roller and brushes, a six-foot extension handle, and the biggest paint trough they had.

As I opened the front door, a flash of gray sped past me and Molly was off, hiding in the bushes.

The house was silent. I set down my supplies and began prying open gallons of paint. I didn’t dare approach the kitchen unprepared.

I poured three gallons of the yellow paint into the trough and soaked my brush. A high-pitched keening came from the kitchen. The purple knew I was there, knew what I intended.

I wielded the roller like a pike. I was a warrior defending my home. I trod down the hall as alert as I've ever been. The keening turned to a harsh rumble.

Dangerous purple spines covered the kitchen walls from floor to ceiling, all of them pointed directly at me.

I cleared a way before me, swiping the walls with broad strokes of the roller brush. The purple lunged at me fierce and hungry. For the most part I kept it at bay, but swift tendrils licked at my arms more than once, drawing blood from shallow cuts.

The more area I covered in yellow, the slower the purple responded. I kept backing out to reload my brush and advance to the attack again.

I had to be careful to cover every bit of the purple. I missed a thin line down by the baseboard. A razor sharp thread of purple snapped at my ankle, then shot up to lay open my pant leg and leave me with a seven inch slice along my inner thigh.

I picked up the fourth bucket and splashed paint against the wall. The purple screamed in pain.

It was fighting for its life. How it had come to exist, who could say? Cosmic rays? Sunspots? Nuclear waste? None of the bad science fiction answers mattered when facing this thing that moved and maimed and killed.

The purple strained and pulsed in the ever-narrowing sections left to it. I made the mistake of not painting a continuous stripe of yellow across the tops of all the walls. Some desperate instinct directed what remained of the purple. It leapt up to the ceiling where it spread in a slow puddle across the white expanse.

I tried to head it off, force it back with a wide circle of Canary Yellow down the center of the ceiling. The purple pooled and massed itself, began to peel away from the ceiling. A sheet of Raspberry Beret oozed down toward me, seeking to envelop me in its viscous embrace. I prodded the gelid mass with the roller brush loaded with canary. It recoiled, fled back to the ceiling where I could worry away at it, watch its domain shrink as the canary yellow usurped its place.

Soon, the last vestige of purple had been erased. I surveyed my work with satisfaction. But I wasn’t finished yet. It would need a second coat.

###

When we show strangers our home, they always snicker at the sight of the kitchen and its hasty paint job complete with paint drips and roller marks. We know they can’t wait to get to the car and burst out laughing. “Did you see? They even painted the ceiling that awful yellow!”

The FOR SALE sign swinging from the post on our front lawn gives the house a look of desolation. When you sell your house, the agents have you sign a disclosure form. Are you aware of flooding in the basement? Are you aware of unsafe concentrations of radon on the premises? Are you aware of any lead based paint in the house?

They don’t ask if your walls harbor a deadly shade of purple.