Here at CR we’ll occasionally “lose” a volunteer. We do our best to ensure that these incidents occur infrequently, but when you have a staff directly exposed to as much incomprehensibly good literature as we do, someone is bound to cut ties with reality now and again. Sadly, this was the case with Katherine Zlabek. One day she was busily working on a blog post about Aimee Bender’s “The Color Master” from issue 7.1. Then she was gone. After a couple of weeks, we got worried and formed a search party. We found her downtown, at the corner of Vine and Central Parkway, dressed in a bathrobe with construction-paper stars glued to it, mixing road salt, cigarette ash, and rainwater with a mortar and pestle in an effort to re-create the color of pigeons. We were concerned not only for Kathy’s safety but also about the question of legal liability. So we gently coaxed her into the CR van, drove her back to campus, and locked her in our storeroom. We later learned that Kathy’s psychic break indeed resulted from reading “The Color Master.” The world Bender created in the story was so convincing, Kathy just entered in. The following is our transcription of what Kathy said through the keyhole of the storeroom door.
Katherine Zlabek: A person should be careful after reading Bender’s work. In it, reality is altered, perceptions are enhanced—effects that do not disappear when the book is set down: The angle of the kitchen floor might be off, the light switch slightly to the right of where it was only that morning. At the bar, do not mention the fate of the boy with the clothes iron for a head, nor the tribe of potato children traipsing past a cornfield—this is a good way to lose your car keys to a concerned friend.
Still, the benefits far outweigh the risks.
“The Color Master” is Bender’s prelude to Perrault’s fairy tale “Donkeyskin.” The essential fairy tale elements are preserved: royalty with outlandish requests (such as a pair of shoes the color of rock so that one could appear, “from a distance, as a pair of floating ankles”), communication via messenger pigeon, the trope of the Chosen One. But in Bender’s contemporary telling, the Chosen One feels “both moved and shitty” upon hearing she is going to be the new Color Master. Because the old Color Master is dying, and really, couldn’t her decision “just as easily have been the result of a fever”?
On its most basic level, the story can be read as a fairy tale for artists, inspiring creators to a higher goal than getting the color/word/shape right. Great art is rarely, if ever, only formally correct—a concept that Patty, the Color Master’s successor, struggles with as much as any apprentice. When she creates a dress the color of the moon, she is keenly aware of her limitations: “Like, the king and princess wouldn’t collapse in awe, but they would be pleased, maybe even a little stirred.” The story emphasizes the breaking down of what seems obvious (such as a color, gray) and its reconstruction through experimentation, a process that reveals depth and nuance . . . and possibility. (To make the moon dress more silvery, Patty uses opal dust as well as particles of the Color Master’s hair.) Bender has once again succeeded in writing a story that is instantly familiar to its reader, not because of any successful set formal elements, but rather for how true her experiment rings.
