[LJ Idol] Season 8, Week 11, "ecosystems in acrylics"
Challenge Name and Number: #11, Open Topic
Title: ecosystems in acrylics
Word Count: 1701
Warnings (if applicable): None
Summary: For someone unable to differentiate between imagination and reality, eventually they become the same thing.
Author’s Notes: Fiction. Magical Realism. I hope you enjoy.
ecosystems in acrylics
I think it’s a spot at first, when the first stalk pokes through the front of the canvas. The green is only slightly darker than the 6935 used to paint the clover, and I’d only hung the painting the day before. The light looks odd coming through the slatted blinds, so I take them down to continue painting. Old cabins like this, they come with blinds on every window, and why I cannot guess, as it blocks the view. The entire reason people come out this far into the countryside, I was led to believe, was for the view.
The window is now bare and unveiled, and the new canvas had been primed and the palette was ready. The painting is that same view; my view, with the hill outside, where a few oak trees dot the top and wildflowers spill around the edges to flow downward like a river. The violet is 6847, the brown 6089, and the brushes load up the color eagerly. Against the wall, the lazy stalks continue to sprout, leaves curling against the landscape.
There is a letter on the table in the other room, the weekly note from my brother detailing my mother’s health. It’s never been the same since my father’s passing, but she tries to hang on and my brother does everything he can to encourage this. In the winter seasons I return to my hometown, to take care of her, while my brother stays with her in the summers. I sell my paintings in a gallery, but there’s nothing to paint in winter, not when the canvas is already white to begin with. It feels like cheating. It feels dead, and that’s a travesty.
Beside the back wall, a stack of canvases lean against each other. I’d painted the meadow outside, and while the first canvas is still matte and smooth, the last-tilted against the others, almost flat to the floor-sprouts thin, even blades of grass, growing up and out to cover the length of it.
I’d tried to paint people, but it doesn’t work, not with their long faces and slouched shoulders and hands creased with dirt, shaking and restless from staying so still. Self-portraits were worse, and I was unrecognizable crammed into an 18x24” frame. Then, I painted a tree, and it was beautiful. Everything from the roots to the fluttering leaves was vivid and alive! I imagined it, and it became real.
I wouldn’t call myself a forgetful person, but somehow the painting has escaped my notice, the one with the daffodils and the clover, and the bulbs have sprouted. The yellow looks as nice as I thought it would when I saw it in the bottle, and the upturned petals tilt themselves towards the window to catch the sun.
I try to create what I see; what I see in my mind is the most beautiful thing. I’m just trying to get it out, to let it breathe. The painting of the tree is finished, I receive another few letters, and there’s grass under my feet when I move from one room to the next, to lay my dinner out on the counter beside the unused coffeemaker or to brush my teeth over the sink, to let the foam drip over the chipped enamel.
Roses wind themselves up the legs of a table from a canvas propped against one side of it, and the thorns are sharp and hard to avoid. The canvas with the daffodils has now been poked full of holes, and vines spread across the ceiling. I finish another painting and set it aside.
No one was there to see my father die in his sleep, slipping into nonexistence without as much as a notice. The human body is so weak, so imperfect, as I am weak and imperfect. Instead of thinking about it, I’ll build two-dimensional monuments, things that can be perfect and complete and entirely self-contained, like an ecosystem in acrylics.
I see a branch twisting above the doorway, barely high enough to clear my head. I see tiny little apples dangling from it, spotted green and yellow, unripe and inedible besides. I am painting a sunset. In it things look slightly different than before, but they’re still the same images, the same products of the earth.
I receive another letter from my brother. She’s dying, the note says, come home, and I pack up the essentials and leave that night, with paint still drying on the bristles and the screen door propped open by the roots of a gigantic tree, poking through the mesh.
---
Maria looks like someone else’s mother, not mine. The rooms in her house are dark, lit only by a few low-wattage bulbs in frosted lamps, the curtains drawn close over shut windows. People scurry around the rooms with low voices-nurses, nephews, the occasional visit from the executor or the landlord-and she gestures with limp hands for her children, for the newspaper, for the medicines stacked like bricks on the bedside table.
I wait outside the closed bedroom doors, staring at the clutter, clutching a glass of warm juice. Maria has no paintings on the walls here, only eleven framed photographs, of younger men and women progressing to older men and women, seated in armchairs. One of the photographs in the stairwell is of me, with my brother’s arm around my shoulder.
The door opens and closes and Thomas is there, pressing his back to the wall as he clasps his hands together. “She will need to be moved to the hospital soon,” he says. “I plan on moving into this house, afterwards. It is a good house.”
“It is.” That is a lie. There are not enough lights or bookcases, and the ceiling slopes too much, but I do not say that.
“How long will you stay?”
“As long as I need to.” I imagine many, many years after Maria is dead, Thomas will take up residence in that same bed, ailing and spent. Then I will come to stay with him, to do my duty. Then it will be my turn. What a way to live.
“Your old room?” he asks, and I nod. “You did not bring much with you.”
“There wasn’t time. I’ll go back for it all in the spring.” The mountain roads are treacherous enough when there is adequate daylight, but when the seasons changed and winter swept in they were unusable.
“Don’t worry, I’ll send my son instead, his car is larger,” he continues. “If you would like to see her now, you can. She was resting earlier, but she can manage a few minutes of conversation.”
I was not here for conversation, not exactly. I was here to watch someone die in front of me, and then again when I look in the mirrors above the sinks and the dressers. My fingers itch for a paintbrush, but I make do with the doorknob instead.
“You can’t…change it,” Thomas says. “You can’t change anything.”
“I can. I’ll prove it,” I keep repeating.
Inside, I stare at my mother’s hands, so different from how I remembered. Now, the joints were swollen, and her skin seemed to hang over her skeleton. She looks no different among the whiteness of the hospital after we’ve moved her. It’s like winter has moved inside, and we track snow from our boots onto the white linoleum floor to melt while we stand in a semicircle around her bed.
I knew exactly what would happen when I came back but it’s still hard enough to face. Maria doesn’t say anything, but her breathing is loud to compensate. I clutch at my sleeves as snow catches at the windowsills and blocks out the view of anything but what is inside the room. I want spring again.
---
Danny had been told he must return to the house in the country; some paintings had been left there, and art supplies are so expensive these days. He’ll have to pack up everything and bring it all back. It shouldn’t be too hard, they’ll fit in the trunk and backseat of his car, if he packs appropriately.
The road through the countryside is winding and crosses all manner of geographical boundaries, from silvery rivers to what the maps call mountains, and Danny’s got a map of his own, with a route marked out in red pen. He turns on each road as directed, finally ending up on a two-lane road that seems to lead to nowhere, without a house in sight.
He knew what the cottage looked like, at least in description. He had the keys and he didn’t mind the drive, not when it got him out of the house. He hopes he gets to keep a painting or two out of the deal, even if he has to settle for one of the uglier ones.
The map tells him it should only be another few miles. At last he comes to a mailbox, stationed against what must have been a dirt road, although the indentations from tire tracks have now been covered up by a light fringe of green.
The house number is correct, but he can’t see a house at all, only this tangled, overgrown mess. A few trees stand taller than any in the area, with trunks wider than the spread of his arms, the branches tangled with vines and the first signs of blossoms. Danny steps over a few shrunken apples as he walks closer, trying to see if the house is behind it.
One of the trees is propped up by a few sticks of wood, something a lighter color with a few screws sticking out the sides. There are a few more oddities-a splash of purple over a tree root and some broken glass scattered in places on either side of a tree. It’s all intertwined, and he cannot distinguish one flora from the other, when they all seem to grow from one another. Even as he watches it, the wind picks up a stray vine and flutters the leaves on the thinnest branches.
The way it moves looks almost like a breath.
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Notes: The paint colors listed are Sherwin-Williams colors (chosen because their names are just so cool!) The green is Straightforward, the purple is Ice Plant, and the brown is Grounded.
Concrit is welcome.