The invasion of the lines

Let us explain the line (some exclaim I cannot draw a straight line or it is a fine line between the infinite ray and curved space) with that of Matisse the line was quick and surrounded with color. For Picasso the mind thought the line and creation of the object was in that moment of execution. The line that is on my mind at the moment is composed of my mother's blood, no, wait let me set the scene. I am young and riding beside her on a bright summer day. We are driving to grandmother's house and I am content to suck on a lollipop while staring at the passing scenery then at my mother who is wearing a white blouse stucked into a short, skirt that was black and made even blacker by the extreme whiteness of my mother's legs. Turning into the driveway I turned to grab the door handle when suddenly I was thrown back into the seat and when I turned around to face the driver's door open and mother had one leg in the car and one leg out. Her head had dropped to the steering wheel and as I watched a trickle of red begun to appear from inside her thigh. I could not turn my eyes away as the blood flowed pass the knee, down the calve to the ankle where the stream disappeared underneath the rim of her black pumps. She moved and I looked up into two dark planets orbited by white space and crisscrossed by comets of black hair.
"She's coming..." She whispered from crimson lips. "My little girl wants to go out."
A sister I though as my grandmother like an ancient god materializing out of dark clouds appeared next to my mother and lifted her from the car and onto the front porch.
I touched the pool of blood and draw a picture of a little girl on the inside of my palm. I smiled at my work as someone screamed and I accident's pressed my palms against my face. I will never forget the strange expression of my grandmother as she helped me from the car and saw that the right side of my face was smeared with my mother's blood.
More to come.

Why I draw what I draw

I was born in Alabama in the University Hospital (I had belived until recently that the hospital was Carraway Methodist but my mother corrected me by saying you didn't come out of me there!) which is in the hilly city of Birmingham. Named after Birmingham, England I suppose, the city of steel and smoke or at least it was in my youth. Actually on most days my first memories was of a bright place with streets crowded with the 1960's Fords and Chevrolets and sidewalks crisscrossed by white shirted men, tall-thin farmers in faded overalls, and women in floral patterned dresses of cotton and a few proudly shopping in polyester slacks. My mother was a tall, thin woman with a high cheeked boned face and she watched the world in fear (fear because she had been since a young girl molested by her father so that later she was to become a tense, neurotic woman) from large algae colored eyes prosceniumed with a mass of black curls controlled with half a can of hairspray.
Her talent begin as doodles whilst talking on the party-line telephone (earlier really I believe in her middle school years but this is my remembrances of her talent) quick as a flash renderings of bouffant haired women modeling puffy blouses and thin leather looking skirts. One, then two finally an entire sheet of paper was trashed with the "girls" as she called them whilst sipping ice tea and placing the sheet away someplace. I looked and looked but I never discovered a single sheet of those drawings which by the time I was in high school must have numbered in the thousands and now writing in my forties I still possess only a few drawings that I almost had to guide her hand to get her to finally do them.
All my life I have drawn (often not very good) often the impulse then the act was a retreat from harsh surroundings and it served to close down my mind to a single black line. Black, always black as the shadows and the nights where the creatures and monsters waited to suddenly ease up beside me and tear my fingers and toes off. But witches and warlocks resided in classrooms and in hospital, the beige hallways, the stainless steel reflecting the misshapenly figures on their path to sterile rooms where the love one waites bathed in the jokes of the eternal television sitcom.
I stop writing to think how to put down in words the single event that (I think, me only, talking to others seem to distill the posion from hemlock to caffeine) which was like my mother's figures coming to life and using their fabrics to block all color from my world only one hue was left- blue, the color of electricity...it continues