This month’s challenge is to write a story beginning with
“My favorite color tastes like…” Today’s story comes to us from Val Muller,
author of the Corgi Capers mystery series and the supernatural chiller Faulkner’s Apprentice. The story
below is written in the voice of a rebellious protagonist riling up the crowd
in one of her works-in-progress, The Salt
Rebellion.
* * *
Salt
By Val Muller
My favorite color tastes like salt. White is the color of
salt, after all. But my favorite color, the white I’m thinking of, isn’t the
color of innocence or purity, if that’s what you’re thinking. Brides and
baptized babies and all that. No. That is not my favorite color. Brides and
babies are white by default. White by inaction.
Inaction can never be my favorite color.
My favorite color is the color of salt. Salt as in sweat and
tears.
Action.
Think of what power salt has. It renders the ocean habitable
to countless creatures. It balances our metabolisms, aiding water in its vital
purpose. Salt aids our palate, taking the plain and ordinary and bringing out
flavors inertly buried.
We all contain flavors inertly buried. Dreams, goals,
desires, thoughts. We all have a purpose, something we were made for, and yet
in a place as bland as this, we wander about unsalted. We grow complacent and
look beyond ourselves for the spice that makes life worth living. But true joy
cannot come from without. That is not the place for greatness.
True joy—the ingredient of greatness—must come from within,
and we must be allowed to draw it out. May salt leave its streaky white trails
on our cheeks, but we must be allowed to draw ourselves out from within our
shells.
Perhaps this is why salt is not allowed here.
Perhaps there are those who do not want us to find happiness
from within. Perhaps there are those who already live without and wish for us
to seek joy in the externalities they can deliver. Perhaps there are those who
have only power to gain from our unhappiness, from our weakness.
From our inaction.
Salt is the color of action. Its whiteness is the color of
diligence, of work. A white piece of cloth will only remain so through
diligence and care. So, too, our freedoms. Ignored and neglected, our freedoms
will turn a dirty white, then a dingy dung, a soiled soot until no trace of its
whiteness is left as a testament to its former glory.
So I say hold out for salt. Hold out for joy. Hold out for
greatness. Don’t let our whiteness be sullied by the gentle agony of inaction.
Fight back and persevere until you taste the salt of tears and sweat and
action.
* * *
The Spot Writers- our members:
2 comments:
Love it Val....Very interesting....
Thanks, Melinda, and thanks for posting. I've got this deep-seeded love of freedom, and this book won't leave me alone, even though I'm writing other things that need to be finished first!
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