..if it's purple, this must be erotica

In Wisconsin, if you win a girl a giant, purple rhinoceros,

she puts out.  --Michael Kelso, “That ‘70s Show”

It was just a purple bra that fit perfectly.  It was not unspoken commitment.  It was not a pledge to love until he no longer felt love.  It was not even a knowing glance.  It was just a purple bra that fit perfectly.

It cost $5 less because he was on the Victoria's Secret mailing list and received a coupon that would expire soon.  He usually bought their sweet scented lotions with the racy names, but she told him the heavy scent congested her sinuses. In truth, she did not want to smell like all his other lovers, all those women whose feet and hands and backs and more he massaged like prayer ritual. 

So he went to their shoppe in the mall, where in wild caveman fantasies he delighted and disrobed the pink-cheeked virgins and the red hot mamas, where he threw them wet and ready atop big round mounds of panties--skimpy brazilian thongs, playful polka dot bikinis, hipsters covered in red Corvettes, and conservative white briefs announcing "Luscious" and "Lovely" and "Lucky" like new days of an erotic week.  In his imagination, he took a young clerk's reluctant curiosity behind the hot pink Victorian cash register on the hot pink Victorian carpet.  In his imagination, he easily unlocked their sweet secrets behind easy dressing room drapes, sliding so easily apart, for him.

And he bought her--the recent lover-- a purple bra that fit perfectly.

He attached lusty post it notes to it.  She didn't recall if the sticky yellow memos proclaimed his love.  She knew they didn't whisper fidelity, because he had promised always to be fickle.  His quick scribbles probably appreciated her softness, snaring her affections like the purple bra that circled her roundness so perfectly. 

Hey. Did everything just taste purple for a second? --Fry, Futurama

From Indian summer to winter solstice, she stretched her self before him and invited his kisses upon her life.  She let him lick the lusciousness of her body, from purple toenails to juicy purple core. Everything in Life appeared precious purple through her rosy eyes.

Then one day after he applauded her puffy purple sweater, he reminded her how he hungered for other colors.  

So she left him.  Speedily she filled four ugly brown paper bags with all the things which she he had carried there, things which he insisted had brought him joy. She removed every hint of her every having been there.  


Except one.  


She left behind the purple bra that fit so perfectly it made her cry.  She slid it under his pillow where they had often tucked her saucy panties for his private pleasure. 

The woman who was the happy girl with the beautiful purple bedroom wanted no purple in her life.  She wondered why lilacs and violets and irises instead were not red and pink and orange.  She cursed the healing benefits of dark grapes, swore merlot and cabernet bitter and staining.  She warned that deadly passion is purple, that Batman’s joking arch villain is purple, that the ghastly peripatetic dinosaur Barney is purple.

She prayed for the blackness on her bruised heart to fade fast through that cruel color into blue, then green, then yellow, then to disappear into the pink radiance of her playful spirit, before it was tempted again by a purple bra that fit perfectly. She wanted the color expunged, purged, banned.

Then she remembered The Color Purple and Whoopie Goldberg’s battered and unfalteringly sunny Shug who proclaimed, “I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it.” 

And she smiled and decided to paint her toenails purple.

DeNeice Kenehan is a hedonist, a romantic, a singer, a photographer,  a decent cook, and an occasional raconteur.