Box of Crayons

  Box of Crayons: an artist’s story.
When I was seven my mother bought me a great big box of crayons. She was an artist and she wanted me to be an artist too.      The box held more crayons than I’d ever seen in my life. They were lined up in neat rows, like the soldiers of a rainbow army.         “It’s every colour in the world,” I said to my mother.         My older sister overheard this and scoffed.      “There are way more colours,” she said. “There are infinity colours.”        She always knew more than I did, but this time I wasn’t sure I believed her. How could there be so many colours that there was no end to them?         My mother advised me to take the crayons out one at a time and put them back in their proper places in the box when I wasn’t using them. That way, she said, I could always easily find the colour I wanted. That seemed a sensible idea, and I was a cautious kid, so I did my best to keep the crayons in order. It was easy at first, mostly because I liked saying the colourful names of the colours as I put them back in their places. Desert Dune. Aquamarine. Lemon Dazzle. October Twilight.      But eventually, after a few afternoons with my colouring books, the crayons were no longer lined up in their proper places. In fact most of them weren’t in the box anymore either but scattered over my bedroom floor with all my other stuff. Finally, when the mess reached the adult-annoying stage, my mother ordered me to clean up my room. She noticed the crayons lying around and asked me to put them back in their places.     I did the best I could. I started with white in the upper left-hand corner and from there lined up the various hues, tints and shades so that they appeared to flow in the right order. When I got to black in the lower right hand corner I stepped back and decided that I’d done it. Everything looked to be in its proper place. And then I looked more closely.        There was a gap. Like a smile missing a tooth. There was a space for one more crayon.      I searched my room but I couldn’t find it. And even more perplexing, I had no idea what colour it could be. As far as I could tell, I had the entire rainbow. The greens, the reds, the blues, and all of their neighbours. I looked through the already-coloured pages in my colouring books for the trace of a crayon I might have used that didn’t match any of those in the box. I couldn’t find it there either.     I never found that crayon. And I never discovered what colour it was. Sometimes I imagine it must have been infrared or ultraviolet, so that the crayon was actually there but I couldn’t see it. Sometimes, when I’m blending pigments with a brush on my paint palette, or pixels with a mouse on my computer, I close my eyes for a moment and I see that lost crayon. For an instant its unrecoverable colour shimmers before my sight.        I have a name for it: infinite everyhue.