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THE BLACK CRAYON - Poetry & Short Story by Neha's Notebook

THE BLACK CRAYON

 

Once upon a time

there was a girl named Gold.

Her eyes like bright sapphires

her cheeks like blossoms red and bold.

 

Gold had a box of crayons.

With which she painted dusks and dawns.

Colouring mornings bright golden

with crayon yellow

and with green crayons

sketching blades of grass, soothing mellow…

 

With her box of crayons

Gold coloured the sky and the bluebells,

Lost in the sketchbook of her life

Gold carved herself a sparkling rainbow shell,

Reds of roses, and pinks of sunsets,

orange of marigolds, and creamy white of jasmines,

Oceans of emerald blues dripping from her dance

As she played with winds, fire, moon and earth’s skin

With a palette full of sparkles and colours,

She painted her laughter and playfulness

 

Until one day,

 

when she came across

a crayon

the black crayon,

 

As she picked it up,

and scrubbed it against her sketchbook’s paper,

her laughter turned to dismay,

a look of terror clawed over her face,

Sitting atop a cloud, she starting falling down

down and down into some dark alley

she shrunk and shrunk

but she kept colouring

as if a giant bucket of black paint had spilled itself

and now her fingers couldn’t stop

using this black crayon,

 

the yellow golden sky smudged into darkness

bluebells and marigolds drained of their colours

Nothing remained,

except for a gigantic dark blackness

and some slivers of white and grey spaces scattered hither-tither

 

Her joyful and playful world

had been engulfed under a giant shadow of black

Her box of crayons

nowhere to be seen or found

Everywhere she saw

there was only darkness,

a grim gloomy terrifying darkness

a cold hauntedness

there was quiet even though, but no silence

unlike in the worlds she drew with

her box of crayons…

 

Gold didn’t know what to do.

Her colourful world had shattered apart

Tears rolled down her icy white cheeks,

but the black crayon didn’t wash away

It was sticky, a wax crayon after all.

 

Gold spent days and days

weeks and months and years

crying and yelling

trying to smudge away the black crayon

from her sketchbook

and once again see the world

she had drawn with her

box of crayons…

 

but nowhere to be seen

was either her colourful world

nor her box of crayons…

 

Everywhere she saw

was only

a giant shadow

smudged everywhere around her

with black crayon

 

She slapped herself

she wailed

And regretted

why did she ever use

the black crayon…

 

But what else could she do

she didn’t know

what colour this black was…

she was an explorer

she explored all the colours

she had received

in her box of crayons…

but this one crayon

had smudged her entire world

into a blackening darkness,

a darkness she couldn’t escape from…

 

everything she drew

anything she painted

now got stained with

the colour of black…

 

She felt claustrophobic,

and immensely sad,

She wanted more than anything else

to get back her world

her vibrant playful blissful world

of colours,

her lovely box of crayons…

but all she could see

was the black crayon

which didn’t seem to finish,

only magnified and magnified

shattering every other colour

staining with black,

her box of colourful crayons…

 

She felt disgust,

She felt choked,

And shackled

 

She felt every moment

getting shrunk and shrunk

into tinier and tinier and tinier

her entire being

getting swallowed up

by the black crayon

 

She wanted to throw away

this black crayon

and free herself clean

 

But the black crayon had smudged

not only the colourful worlds in her sketchbooks

but her entire self

her hands her cheeks

every pore of her seemed to be

getting coloured by this

spooky curselike black crayon

 

She stood in front of a mirror

and shrieked a cry of horror

because now she herself

was turning bit by bit, pore by pore,

into

a black crayon.

Her teeth growing into giant pointy triangles

Her nails into pinny paws

She was getting covered from her foot to her scalp

in the colour

of the black crayon

 

She screamed

she kicked her feet

Her breath seemed to be getting choked out of her throat

 

But the black crayon

was now spiralling around her

spreading like giant branches

of a poisonous tree

wrapping rolling snaking around her

covering her pore to pore

into the colour

of the black crayon.

 

She used her will and might,

she used her power, and all her sight

but she was unable to get free,

from the serpentine grip of

this black crayon….

 

Losing her breath bit by bit,

she slumped down exhausted,

she had lost all her will,

but the memories were still

rolling down her black smudged eyes,

the memories of her colourful bright worlds

and the memory of her

box of crayons.

 

She had lost all hope

of even surviving,

let alone get back

her box of crayons….

 

Gold was not Gold anymore.

She wasn’t the same girl

as she was before.

Losing her box of crayons

she was now turning into a giant monster,

a monster, darker than the colour of black,

a monster, named as Black.

 

Her box of crayons

was now

but only

a giant black crayon,

and, Gold,

Gold was now,

Black.

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