At first, they believed her skin was dark because God inserted too much ink when He made her, that it would fade with time and reveal she was like everyone else.

But she was alienated from the moment they figured out the color wouldn't change. Her skin was "imperfect," "tainted," "cursed." Obviously, they thought, something was wrong with her. After all, she was dark like the eyes of a wolf before it killed, like the fur of a vicious cougar, her skin tone as vast as the night sky above.

She was an outcast. A cursed child. No one wanted to even lay eyes on her for fear of her spreading her disease.

To them, she was a killer.

But she was just a girl.

She was banished from her home, cast out from those she knew and thrown away to fend for herself in a world so unforgiving.

So she took the clay from the ground, as white and "pure" as the people who had abandoned her, and ran a line down the center of her face from her forehead down her nose and ending at her bottom lip. She took more clay, the color of which was worshipped, and laced designs around her ashy skin. A porcelain-colored teardrop down her cheek, a swirl of paint around her neck. Her artwork shown on her skin in beaming contrast.

She was an empty canvas of her own creativity.

She painted herself with more, creating an inky contrast on her body, and danced in the clay, causing mismatched splatters across her legs, speckled dots up her arms like stars.

And then she stopped.

She returned to her home, where her family did not recognize her, and the people thought she was a messenger from God, the patterns on her skin indicators of the times to come, the stars across her arms specific and determined and purposeful.

But the girl knew that the paint could not stay on forever.

She left the village, knowing how the people felt, and washed herself in the creek.

The white patterns streaked the water, dripping away like beads of pearl, and the girl never returned to her home again.

For those who only accepted her with paint did not truly accept her at all.