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This is a crime reminiscent of crayons on kindergarten walls.

She remembers those moments well, the rainbows and construction paper stapled, sticky-tacked, plastered in every possible place and bending at the corners. She remembers the wax crayons more vividly than yesterday’s cigarettes, in a swirl of regret and fascination; adventure.

There was a canvas. Taller than herself, the top edge barely meeting her fingertips when on tippy-toes. Even the child-sized easel was too large for her tiny, shorter-than-short form. Still, it just wasn’t large enough to suit her.

Her frenzied strokes had filled the page quickly; large black towers, for there was no gray, strewn with city lights and uneven roads with long ovals in lieu of cars. She stared up proudly at the sheet, depite her disappointment; the skyline of her imaginings stretched beyond sight, and no page limits should have hindered it.

The walls were stark blank.

The crayons; a spectrum of invitations.

(She couldn’t resist.)

And now she’s freezing her ass off in the midwinter air, thick with cigarettes and pollution and everything that seventeen years of life had prepared her for. The aerosol cans are at her feet, and their smell is already going to her head, their colours marking the sienna bricks in even arcs of colour.

“Give us a hand, ‘Ri?”

Her glare goes unseen. “It’s Zeïri, douchebag.”

The brick barrier fills like a colouring book without the lines, guided by mind and memory alone. Dull by dark, vibrant by morning, like the paint smudges at her fingertips that she couldn’t care less for.

She smiles at the colours, colours and colours and shaded cells of hard work before her eyes, and a single verse of truth to top it off.

Get with the times.
It’s art, just like your soul and mind;
not meant to be coloured between the lines

The thought lets her drift off to sleep with a smile on that night. The image of a sunrise upon their masterpiece flutters though her mind.

It's freedom of the un-spoken; so unlimited that it must be wrong.

Not that we care.

Not that we don’t.