It didn’t take long for Sherry and Donald to feel disdain for their new child. Of course, some accidents aren’t all that happy, but they’d spent the better part of a year feigning smiles and touching hands in an attempt to manifest the joy they so clearly lacked.

When the day finally arrived, any onlooker would have guessed them to be exemplary in their preparedness, but then again, the clothes we wear so often hide the demons beneath.

Baby showers and doting family had left their former office a picturesque nursery, and the gorgeous child wanted for nothing in her new home. Jane, they called her. Jane – a name dragged out of Donald’s family tree – some distant Aunt he’d never met, an inoffensive name for an otherwise inoffensive new person.

At age ten, Jane was obsessed with drawing – whenever the chance came, she would steal away to that former-nersury with the library-like wallpaper and churn out something fresh – a rainbow, much like the ones she’d occasionally spy out her bedroom window – a dog, rather a puppy – bearing a striking resemblance to the adorable fluff that walked by most mornings, tethered to that man with the ridiculous scarf collection. She tried to fashion a facsimile of the man, but she always came out disappointed. He never seemed to wear the same scarf twice. Or, at least, it seemed that way, since each accessory was so outlandish she immediately forgot about the one from the day before.

Her drawings were nothing special, merely her enthusiasm, and yet, her passionate declarations of each depiction’s completion always seemed to fall on deaf ears. Sure, the stereotypical collage had accumulated on the refrigerator, but it seemed most days that she was the only one around to see it.

Her father, despite having sacrificed his work space to shelter her, had simply relegated himself to the garage, where he had a more popular refrigerator of his own, though its contents were less nutritious and more, shall we say, intoxicating.

Jane was applying a pink colored pencil to an above-average rendition of the evening sky when her over-application of elbow grease caused the tip to snap. She froze; the involuntary snatching of her pencil sharpener didn’t articulate itself, and it seemed for an instant that she had forgotten how to handle this affair.

She stood, and for what might have been an hour, she glanced around her bedroom at the piles of love-drawn leaflets that prevented her room from housing any visible decoration. She felt her neck tighten, and looked down to discover today’s masterpiece had transformed into an off-white snowball.

Horrified, she tried to under her mistake, rescue her creation, and return to her blissful state of flow, but it was too late.

When she unfurled the drawing, what had just moments before borne a striking resemblance to her suburban abode had taken on a life of its own. Swimming across the ocean of creases was a streak of red and yellow, the pinks and purples of a serene sunset kowtowing to a supernatural flame, eating its way across the sky, licking the crafted shingles of her penciled roof.

Jane stared, lost in a vision of unbridled rage, ripping and tearing her house away, all the while her trembling hands gripped tightly to the sides of her now-animate object.

With widened eyes, she fought her tumbling stomach and forced her gaze up to the rest of her room.

“How…” she whispered, while the roaring flame, that had seemed an impossible dream, snaked its way through all of her beloved leaves of paper.

Sketches she’d crafted with love had all but vanished, and as she flipped through page after page of forgotten memory, all she saw was fire. The friendly neighbor with the fanciful scarves how wore only red, his inner-devil unleashed with fire, his adorable mutt an impoverished vagrant, hot with hatred, a memory clad in ire. Her perfect rainbow, carefully etched with lines matched to color, leapt across the page, a brimstone collection of suppressed frustration, no longer the idyll she recalled, but the anguish she had never expressed.

Jane, lost, confused, bewildered, screamed through her disorientation, and the drawings that had come to define her had turned her inside out.

She’d no idea how long she spent alone amidst the mess, but there came a RAP on the door that shook her into sobriety.

“What’s all that noise about? I’m trying to get some work done!”

The quiet that followed was the most deafening roar of all.