Charmaine Was Shy

Art Paine usually works from slides, taken on Fuji Velvia film rated at ISO 40. With Nikon cameras. Velvia film is noted for distorted and saturated colors. Art says that when he's in the Bahamas, even without the Kalik Beer, he sees through Velvia Eyes.
One day when he was in Exuma Art's wonderful friend Chris Kettel lent him a car, an old Geo Tracker on its last legs. A clever native mechanic had completely bypassed the central computer in the car and rigged it to run a few months longer, on a Volkswagen distributor. The brakes were bad but Exuma has no hills and less traffic. On the last day before he had to meet the American Eagle flight back to Miami, Art went alone in the Tracker to his favorite place, his EMDR "safe place", the most beautiful deserted beach on Earth, "Pretty Molly Bay."
There he met two children from Forbes Hill, who were hooking coconuts.
Art instantly saw a photo op and asked them what they were doing. "Hookin Nut!, mister!" (You fool, can't you SEE???) They were asked to maybe demonstrate hooking nuts. The older and taller of the two reached way up into a palm with a contrived pole and jiggled loose a hairy brown coconut that came crashing down. Then Charmaine (who was shy) busted loose the outer shell with unrestrained child violence. Then came every parent's nightmare. Charmaine calmly took in hand a four-foot Machete, with her other tiny little hand quavering upon the shiny, impossibly green inner nut. Swoop, swish, hack!!!! Down she comes in a high and sweeping arc with the horrible sword and WHACK, slices clean off the end of the nut a confident few millimeters from the vital pitiful thumb. And says, "Try sum, Misteer Paine, try de sweeeet coco-fruit-meelk!!!
Then Rebecca and Charmaine stood sweetly in the fresh warm late afternoon breeze blowing across from Deadman's Cay and Long Island and had their pictures taken, eventually to become a painting in a studio of that man who lost all his color and turned away shaken, who fumbled the coconut still not recovered, as he drank its milk. Who couldn't wait to get back to a phone and call home and check that his own children were not in their own Northern way taking chances, with their thumbs, with strangers, with the chance of spoiled milk too long out of the refrigerator.
For his own reasons, Art Paine loves "Charmaine Was Shy" best out of his few unsold paintings. It hangs in his dining room, still for sale, amazingly. In time it will be someone else's Pretty Molly Bay. Somebody's safe place.