Young fingers plunged into lukewarm paint, reached in deep, up to the elbows. Donna watched with avid fascination, waited for her newfound friend to stop staring into the opaque surface like she could see something, and paint her famous paintings.

Mai kneeled there for a few minutes, drumming her fingers on the bottom of the stolen paint can, liquid chocolate eyes turned inward to a world that no one had ever seen before.

With deliberated slowness, Mai raised her arms, fingertips dripping blue globules like a monster’s teeth dripping with saliva. She faced Donna and smiled.

“Go,” Donna urged, the word slurred with excitement and uncoordinated facial muscles.

Mai put on a face that belied her anticipation and brought her paint encased arms over a sheet of tarpaulin, stolen from a mechanics shop. Grasping her right arm at the elbow, Mai scraped the paint off her arm, letting it puddle into a massive stain.

Performing the same operation to her other arm, Mai used the backs of her fingers to brush and sweep an image in to life on the canvas. An arch, a curve, straight lines going back and forth. Soon, a crazy creation was being rendered to the eye, of a world not known to anyone until now.

Donna stared, mouth agape, at her friend’s fervent frenzy. Slashes and smears were seared in to her vision as the painter’s emotions unfolded before her very eyes. A scene was coming to her, one she remembered, of a not too distant past.

The day before last was coming back to her in bits and fragments, the vivacity of that day brilliant in the streaks of blue, scratching out the truth like Mai’s fingers scooping out the paint.

Flashes of pain, a sense of abandonment; loss, pain, anger, confusion. Her mother, clinging to her father. Her father, shaking his head, eyes closed against her.

Snapshots of dark nights and even darker nightmares. Screaming at the top of her lungs and fighting away her fears as best as she could.

Then there was today, etched into the canvas in blue paint, of finding a friend to stand with her on top of the grounds hill so that they might be greater than all the pain that threatened to destroy them.

Hand in hand, they stood with their faces to the sun; Mai, with a smile to rival the sun and her, Donna, with a lopsided grin that had left them both giggling before they could get serious.

A hand on her shoulder grounded her back to the earth and she turned her shining eyes on the finished masterpiece. There they were, hand in hand, with a blue sun on their backs, ready to face the darkness together.

High above them, a banner in the sky, like God calling down, were the words, “I love you, Donna.”

Mai smiled her thousand watt smile as she watched Donna’s eyes trace the words on the canvas. Perhaps she could not speak, but she felt she had said everything she ever needed to say on that tarp.

“I love you, too, Mai,” Donna said, her words almost indecipherable for all the tears choking her voice. “I love you, too.”

Hehe, first shot at a one shot. Hoped you liked it! :) Written for the RG's November WCC. And hey, go vote for me in the Review Game, there's a link in my profile. Look for Writing Challenge Contest!