Small Fry

by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

When she and I drew together, she wouldn’t let me use the black paint that came with a set, insisting that black was not a color, and that if I looked harder, I would see something else. She didn’t believe in the “bad guy” and the “good guy” in books or movies either, and became angry with me when I referred to characters that way. To me, such titles, such a color, offered relief because they seemed like ledges where one could rest.

I was aware of the tables beside us and what they could hear and what they thought and how people sat beside violence and were not really a part of it.

“She could wear a sack, a brown sack,” I heard my father say. As if beauty was measured by how strong an obstacle it had to overcome.