Greyish Mauve (flash fiction)

Here’s a silly story I wrote in response to a microfiction monday prompt last month – the prompt was “paint” and because of other things I was working on at the time, I ended up using some minor knowledge of nautical camouflage for the finale. There are ways I could integrate this history better into the story, but sometimes you have to decide if a story is worth more editing work or not, and this one, I have decided is not – however, but I do think it has some funny lines, and I hope you’ll enjoy it, and for more context click on the links!

“Good news or bad news first?”

“Ummm….”

“I found enough paint. And it’s cheap.”

“Right… and what’s the bad news?”

“It’s very, very red.”

Jo Staples held her phone an arm’s length away for a moment before replying.

Their church’s membership was dwindling. Services were only held every other week. For the vast majority of the time, the building was empty and untended.
Well, of course God was always in the house, blah blah, yada yada. But unfortunately, from the more material point of view, it was empty and the building’s smooth concrete walls, which a previous volunteer covered in battleship grey, were ugly and attracted graffiti “artists.”

All right, so graffiti had a long history, but there was a time and a place, and a church wall was not the place.

The look of the neglected, vandalized church was not helped by the rusting security grills over the small dark windows. Jo volunteered to take over the grounds-keeping the day after Bozo Bob razed the old lilac hedges to the ground, because, in his opinion, lilacs were “too difficult to maintain.”
Lilac bushes required as much maintenance as Bob’s brain was evidently receiving.
If Jo had known what Bob was planning, she would have stepped in sooner. Still, she believed there was no such thing as too late, except when you were trying to catch a plane, avoid a pregnancy, or get a divorce.

Jo could and would upgrade the look of the church above it’s current “derelict factory” style. It had an interesting location, close to the edge of a small, so-far stable eastward facing cliff.

Perhaps it shouldn’t matter at all what the building looked like, as long as whatever happened inside was righteous. But it did matter. Jo might be retired from her position as the head social studies teacher at the local high school. That didn’t mean this history major, art minor graduate didn’t still have something left to give to the world. And she wouldn’t confront this ugly problem only by slopping some more of the left over grey paint from the church’s basement on the walls to cover up their latest crop of talking anatomical sketches. She could come up with something better, despite Bob’s insincere wish of “lots of luck.” Maybe she would do stripes, or a mural, or a fading effect, shading or counter-shading, she didn’t know what yet. It depended on what paint she could get within her budget.

Her sister found a deal on red paint. Was Jo going to question what God chose to send her way, if it was at a good price? She was not.

“I’ll take the paint,” she said.

The paint was the same colour as the old soviet union flag.
God might have a sense of humour, but painting a church in the colour of violent totalitarian atheism might be pushing it.

Jo needed to think. She also needed to check that the local Sea Scouts were still willing to provide painting labour in return for a lecture or three on naval history and it’s colours.
Later, sitting on her couch, Jo’s attention wandered over the framed art on the wall around the TV. Middling mountainscapes, a reproduction of the misnamed Night Watch, a bit of Honduran embroidery, a rather ugly swan and duckling original. She kept her real art collection in the back of the house and rotated this nonsense regularly with the help of the second-hand shops. There was one print to the right of the TV which was of a battleship in dazzle camouflage. Jo’s eye kept getting stuck on the strong zebra-like contrasts.
It would be amusing to paint the church in dazzle. Only she didn’t have any black paint. She only had red and grey.

What happened if you mixed the two together?

Early the next Sunday, Jo Staples watched with not entirely holy satisfaction as the newly repainted church emerged from the dawn. She hadn’t quite achieved the proper mix for Mountbatten Pink, but it was close. And Bob was going to love it.

(For more information on what dazzle camouflage looked like, you could start here – at Rare Historical Photographs.com and for a reminder they only look like they were painted only in black and white because the photographs are in black and white – see a painting of the Olympic here.) (Dazzle is still sometimes applied on boats and ships, but mostly for commemorative fun these days.)