WHITE PAINT by Annie Neugebauer

A story published in ‘Cemetery Dance Magazine’ #78 (2023) HERE

Reviewed as part of my ‘Dessemination’ project HERE

My previous reviews of this author: HERE

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“elbows locked”

This is a telling post-prison story where a man, upon his release, therapeutically tries to create a tabula rasa for his life, until  he is haunted by someone with a girlish pink ribbon at the packaging works where he worked, disrupting the purity of the eponymous paint he places on the walls of his emptied living quarters if not with my personally perceived assonance of the author’s name as a snow bower, in fact his very flesh is infected by the paint itself that only his misunderstood slapstick past could paste over? A powerful probationary portrait of this man that I timed as being read by me for thankfully longer than 4 minutes 33 seconds but also making me wish to re-read the world’s first published blank story that was never blank enough….