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kettlequills · 7 years

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soulmark pt 1

inspired by this post about polyamorous soulmates. Polydiamonds, part one, Yellow Diamond/Blue Diamond. Art kindly provided by @papersketch, used with permission.

Yellow is born seeing in shades of gold, with buttercup yellow eyes and three soulmarks. The marks are young, of course - there’s a blue splotch on her skinny chest, a pink blur on her right ankle, and a phrase, sometimes words, printed on the back of her neck in a neat, stylish hand, all in grey.

She is too young to understand the muttering of the doctors as they rush back and forward over her cradle, snapping photographs and running tests on the marks developing clearly on skin too young for scars. Her mother looks worried, asks about defects, is quizzed about drugs she took while pregnant. They stay in hospital for over three weeks. On her medical file there is a pitying note written by a nurse who went home and cried about a doomed child who looked in the physical pinnacle of health.

Three is so highly unusual to be almost never heard of; everyone is sure that she is broken, that she will never find her proper life companion. The soulless are seen as creatures of abject pity and fear.

To Yellow, the marks are the only indication of colours other than her namesake that she has. She looks at the pink blotch on her foot and compares it against the endless wheat coloured grass, flowers all the colours of sunflowers and dandelions, as if the whole world has been dripped and slathered in honey, oversaturated, bright, brilliant. She imagines whole skies the colour of the blue mark on her chest, sometimes a wobbly splotch with undefined edges, sometimes a child’s portrait of a cat, sometimes a messy handprint, like her soulmate has just stamped a hand in paint just underneath Yellow’s skinny neck.

She is five when she discovers that having three soul marks makes her different, because everyone else in her new nursery only has one. In fact, Yellow is only allowed to spend half an hour there before one of the nursery teachers notices the words peeking out above her T-shirt’s neck, marching obliviously up to the child’s innocent hairline.

“We do not tolerate profanity from pre-schoolers,” the nursery teacher scolds Yellow’s mother furiously.

Yellow stands nearby, head down, not looking at the other kids gathering round for the show, the back of her neck raw and abraded from when the nursery teacher had scrubbed relentlessly at skin. The words were still there, of course, harsh and black and angry, sunken into her skin like poisonous claws. No one apart from the nursery teacher knows French, but the words have the anger of a curse, and Yellow can feel the despair, like an ache, sinking into the bone.

‘Fucking kill me,’ one of her soulmates has written, across space and strangerhood, into her flesh.

“It’s her mark, it’s one of her marks,” Yellow’s mother tries her best to explain, “this one has always been the most developed – it didn’t say that when I brought her here this morning, look-“

“One of her marks?” The nursery teacher exclaims.

Like all good mothers, Yellow’s keeps a careful photo diary of her soulmarks’ progression. Unlike most mothers, she doesn’t share hers. She brings up the appropriate photo on her phone, only three days old. Clearly visible, the mark is in the shape of a snowy white hawk, lovingly drawn, deeply detailed, in all shades of monochrome.

Yellow is still removed from the nursery. She holds hands with her furiously embarrassed and humiliated mother, sweating under the heat of the scarf wrapped thickly around her neck, wishing she could go back to the cool nursery, with the sandpit she’d only just got the chance to investigate. She pulls towards the park as they pass, gazing longingly at sunny children playing behind gold bars.

“Please?” she asks, quietly, “park, mummy?”

Her mother looks down at her, probably wanting to get home and put the embarrassment behind her. But her usually rambunctious child is quiet, still somewhat shamefaced from a telling off that she doesn’t understand, and her mother cannot bring herself to say no. They go inside, and her mother pushes her on the swings, back and forth, soaring higher like she is untethered to the ground, like the hawk one of her soulmarks had been only that morning.

The thought makes her want to get off the swings, but there is a sandpit nearby to explore.

And, off-puttingly, a child, screaming.

She has fallen off the climbing frame, facedown with hair in the darkest shade of yellow that she can see falling around her face, and the diagnosis hasn’t happened yet, but it is for the same reason that lands her in a wheelchair years later. Huffing, Yellow goes to see what the matter with her is. It’s rather difficult to play in the sandpit with somebody bawling for their mother right next to her.

She turns the little girl called Blue over and sits her up.

There’s a strange, funny feeling in her chest, and suddenly her eyes ache and her temples pound and now they’re both crying, drawing the attention of the adults.

Then they go silent, breathless, watching colours swirl around them. Blue sees buttercups shining bright gold and a yellow painted climbing frame, Yellow sees the deep turquoise of the sky, the chipped and flaking paint on the park bench. And together, they can see the verdant spread of the emerald green grass.

When their apologetic mothers collect them, their eyes have turned bright, hard green, and they are clutching onto one another and staring with the dazed, blissful expressions of those seeing something wholly new.

“Oh, thank God,” says Yellow’s mother. “Does she have all three too?”

The mothers, nearly teary eyed with relief, adjourn to a nearby Americano café, small and neatly-kept with zinc-topped tables and a smiling blonde waitress. Blue and Yellow must be fussed, of course, and bought cakes and hot chocolate to celebrate the Finding. When the two children are adequately placated, staring alternately at each other over steamy mugs of hot chocolate with the innocent curiosity to the young, then at the wide, suddenly colourful world beyond the fogged glass of the cafe window, the mothers are free to talk, pouring out words in hushed whispers hoarsened by relief.

“I thought that Blue would never know-“ Blue’s mother stops, because Yellow’s mother has taken her hand, perfectly able to understand a mother’s fear that her child would never know something she considered a great joy.

They exchange contact details, and haggle over free weekdays for regular play dates. Each mother leaves satisfied, convinced that she has worn down the other into a better deal, half-yanking their child along when they stop too frequently to stare in intense and enrapt amazement at the light shining through a veined leaf, a yellow bumblebee’s iridescent wings, the deep murky blue of fountain water.

As Yellow grows, her childhood is spent split double, half in her own life, half in Blue’s. They have sleepovers that last over four days, their own mugs in each house, using clothes (Blue steals Yellow’s combat boots, Yellow borrowers with no intention of returning her sweltering hoodies) and toothbrushes interchangeably, living inside each other, like wearing in comfortable shoes that never break. Yellow comes to look on Blue’s mother like a stepmother, her second family.

It is Blue who approaches Yellow’s mother and tells her and Yellow both that Yellow is dyslexic. They work on strategies and techniques together, in between visiting Blue at hospital, finding ribbons and spray paint to decorate Blue’s new wheelchair’s rims.

They do everything for the first time together, learning to ride a bike, watching the sea coming in colours they can both see, watching films through special tinted glasses, swapping books with the text printed in Braille, shopping for clothes by texture rather than colour. Yellow comes to look at her life as an addendum to Blue, they are inseparable, parts of each other – she is convinced she can feel Blue’s patient amusement as she struggles through a timed essay, her pride when Yellow argues with her science teacher.

Blue kisses her for the first time when they are thirteen. They are sat on Blue’s bed, Saturday sunlight streaming through the window, highlighting the glossy darkness in Blue’s hair, the liquid shine of her eyes. She is leaning close, applying wobbly eyeliner to Yellow’s eyes. She leans back, to survey her work. Then, in that matter-of-fact way that Blue sometimes has when she is most nervous, Blue puts her small hand on Yellow’s cheek and her lips clumsily on Yellow’s. They both pause there, uncertain of what to do next, until they are interrupted from an untimely quarter.

Blue winces, Yellow grimaces. The grey soulmark is burning as it changes shape. United, they move apart, and Blue shifts her leg so that they can see the soulmark altering on the inside of her left thigh, bared by her shorts. Yellow’s legs tangle with hers, so it looks like the vivid pink mark on her ankle (in the shape of a wobbly child’s drawing of a ratty doll missing one leg) is the shadow of the grey mark on Blue’s thigh.

The soulmark shapes itself into words, and without needing to be asked, Yellow Googles a translation. She hesitates a bit before saying what it means.

“I’m nothing without you,” Yellow translates.

Blue looks at the soulmark on her thigh, then pokes the broken pink doll on Yellow’s ankle. “Do you think they’re okay? Do you think we will ever meet them one day?”

“I think if I have you, I don’t care,” Yellow told her honestly, slumping back on the bed to reply to a text.

“Mm,” Blue agreed, and lay next to her, her head a pleasant weight on Yellow’s shoulder, the sunlight moving in dizzying patterns across the ceiling as the screen of Yellow’s phone scattered reflections.

#inkwrites #steven universe #soulmates #yd/bd #bellow diamond #papersketch

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anneedmonsonus · 4 years

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We Won a Cubbyhouse!

Pass me that mother of the year baton, guys. I don’t get to have it too often, but I totally deserve to hold it for a good minute or two. I won a cubbyhouse! I won it late last year through an Instagram competition held by a local Perth cubbyhouse company called Kidzshack. To enter, you had to describe how you would decorate your cubbyhouse if you won, and I said I would paint it black and white like our house and put succulents in a windowbox. You could have knocked me over with a paintbrush when I found out I had won.

And what a cubby it turned out to be. The kids LOVE it. It totally brought this unused corner of our garden to life. I want to blog about it because I feel so grateful for it. Thank you, Kidzshack. I got so many ‘cool mum’ points for this one, and it’s way healthier than suggesting we have pancakes for dinner again.

I could not WAIT for Little Nerd to finish kindy that day so I could tell him and Miss Nerd the big news. It was cute. I took a little video of his reaction (if you’re on Instagram you can see it in my Highlights reel under ‘Cubbyhouse’) even Miss Nerd seemed into it. Of course, because I’m nice that way, I told Little Nerd he won it but really we all know it was me.

For about three weeks Little Nerd spoke of pretty much nothing else. He asked me to tell ‘the story’ about the cubbyhouse competition over and over. AND I WAS PLEASED TO ASSIST. I only realised his four year old brain might not entirely grasp the idea of an Instagram competition until one day in the car when he asked me to retell him the story for like the 84th time. I was like, “Well, I entered your name into a competition to win a cubbyhouse, and the people picked your name as the winner.”

“Yep, and those people thought my name was great and they said, ‘That is the best name’ so it won.” Yeeeeah… so that’s not how competitions work but you’re four so ok.

I was probably as excited as he was; I knew they had had a TON of entries and I couldn’t believe we had won. We were all so damn excited – me, Mr Nerd, my sisters, my mum – I cannot lie, we all spent a good hour or so online that afternoon, looking at the Kidzshack website and having a lengthy adult debate on the merits of each individual cubbyhouse (“Well this one comes with an alfresco kitchen, if you want to work on your mud pies”) and trying to choose. The prize was for a Funshack, but the lovely people at Kidzshack said I could pick any design I liked if something else worked better for our garden.

We ended up choosing the Funshack anyway, as it had a sandpit underneath, two ladders to climb up and a slide.

BEFORE. A cubbyhouse is way better than a ‘potato patch’ without any potatoes.

BEFORE

NOW

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Well this is my blog and I can post whatever photos I like.

Beyond excited about her No Boys Allowed future clubhouse.

What sort of family doesn’t clear away all the branches first THEN do the cubby and do things in logical order? A family like ours.

There is just something about the idea of a cubbyhouse or a treehouse, isn’t there? Even if you’re an adult. We were all excited. Mr Nerd couldn’t wait to build it with the kids; I couldn’t wait to hang cute crap on it. It brought back all those childhood memories for me and my sisters of pretending our garden shed was a secret clubhouse, and putting up signs saying NO BOYS ALLOWED a la Berenstain Bears.

We told Little Nerd all about things like tin cup phones on strings and pulley systems and Harriet the Spy and every night before bed he asked to hear a story about a kid (always himself) and a cubbyhouse. Even Miss Nerd got swept along in the excitement.

The kids got a huge kick out of their letterbox. It’s from Kmart and it’s like $20.

I have to confess as the cubbyhouse was going up, I did entertain fantasies of it one day becoming my writer’s shed. I’ve always harboured romantic fantasies of writing from a small, quiet shed in the garden, a la Roald Dahl or Virginia Woolf. Mr Nerd laughed so hard when I told him this he nearly fell over. Idiot. “You can barely stand up in it!” “Well you don’t need to stand up to write, you just need to sit down.” Logic, people.

We put the cubby in an unused corner of our yard where we had our old, unused potato patch. Because you need ventilation and sun around the cubby (so it doesn’t get mouldy) we had to cut back our trees and our hibiscus hedge. Quite a lot. Our poor rear neighbours. They seemed a bit aghast for a while, and I’m sure the bloodcurdling screams of kids playing pirates as they sat having a beer on their back patio didn’t help. Don’t feel too bad for them though, it’s all grown back nice and leafy by now, so they have privacy again. (Hibiscus can take a good hard pruning, so if yours is looking leggy, go for it).

The cubbyhouse wasn’t too hard to put together – I say that, even though I didn’t help one bit. So many people have gone to me, “You should do more DIY posts!” and I’m like yaaaaah I’m really not very practical. Once I was really proud of myself for putting together a simple shoe rack, then once I finished, I stepped back to admire my handiwork and realised I had actually managed to put it together so it was actually twisted, like a DNA helix.

Impractical though I may be, I feel like I’m a pretty amazing painter by now. (I’m always grumbling about how my father-in-law and I painted the exterior of my entire house, in summer, while I was pregnant) and painting the cubby was a job and a half. Little Nerd was my assistant. Once that kid wants to do something, he wants to do it. He is stubborn as an ox (not sure where he got that from).

You have to paint the cubbyhouses to make them weatherproof – in hindsight we probably should have painted the roof and walls before putting it all together, but oh well, it’s done now, and I burnt a lot of calories.

Like our house, I used my favourite Monarch brushes (which are the best brushes in the world) and for paint I used Dulux Monument for the walls and Dulux Natural White for the trim. And a chalk paint from Jolie Home for the floor, which I couldn’t resist from giving it a worn-in sort of beachy look. You can do anything with chalk paint! (I actually want to stencil the floor later. I know. I’m a bit excited about getting to decorate a new project).

Little Nerd and I painted together through a spate of 40 degree days, sweating away in the cubbyhouse like it was our own personal sauna, but we did it and he was so proud of himself for helping and we had a lot of fun together.

Also, I realised that while my husband can build and make stuff, he is a horrific painter. Like, ridiculously bad. Yet he always gives me shit about it and says I’M a bad painter?

When we renovate we normally agree that he’ll build or fix something and I’ll paint it. So, he never paints. One evening he offered to take over the painting for me because I was tired. So I watched him paint first-hand, I watched him paint splodgily over my carefully cut-in white window trim with black paint and cheerful abandon.

“STOP! Just stop,” I screamed. “What are you DOING?” “Er, painting?” “Please. Look at what our FOUR-YEAR-OLD just painted. Now look at what you painted.” “What.” Little Nerd eyed the wall too. “That’s not good, Daddy,” he said dolefully. “He is FOUR and he paints better than you. Now I have to fix what you’ve just mucked up. I don’t want you to paint anything ever again.” “Ok,” said Mr Nerd happily, handing me the brush back and hopping off the ladder. I realised he actually seemed a little too happy about my harsh words and that made me wonder if maybe his craph painting was really just a ruse to get out of painting, you know? Sort of like how he accuses me of shrinking all his T-shirts on purpose so he no longer asks me to do his washing ever. (This is unfounded, by the way).

At every park, there’s always that one kid that’s licking the playground. Always.

Balcony vista. That barbecue is moved now, yay.

I know this is a post with a lot of kid spam and I apologise but I can’t even with this picture. Like, where is her neck?

Yeah just chilling in the cubby, pretending to read.

The kids play out there in the cubby EVERY day now, which is awesome. Basically every evening, we are there, hoping robbers don’t show up.

I’m going to wedge a little shelf into the hibiscus for holding beverages. I dropped my favourite chopping board the other day (you know you’re a real grown up when you have a favourite chopping board; I know you have one too) and it split into two. I was so annoyed until I realised the broken chopping board would actually be perfect as a little shelf stuck in the hibiscus, for my coffee or wine. I could saw a little notch in the side to hold my wine glass. ADULTING. Like a pro. (Or functional semi-alcoholic parenting? I don’t know. Both are ok).

It did cross our minds that one day the kids will be too old to play in the cubbyhouse (in the case that we don’t end up moving from this house for a while yet) but then we were like, “Well I suppose we can make it a chicken cage when that happens.”

But after spending like three days painting it, I changed my mind. I LOVE chickens. They were my childhood pets from when I was four til when I moved out of home, I had chooks that lived for 12+ years and that even did tricks, like dogs. And I miss having them and having fresh eggs all the time. But no chicken, no matter how cute (or how impressive her tricks are) will ever crap on my painstakingly painted cubbyhouse. We love it too much.

Secretly I still think it can become my writing shed instead then. I won’t even hear Mr Nerd laughing at me from the house.

Thank you Kidzshack for the best surprise ever, you made our year! Maya x

The post We Won a Cubbyhouse! appeared first on House Nerd.

from Home Improvement https://house-nerd.com/2020/02/07/we-won-a-cubbyhouse/

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