MORNING SERIAL
“YOU are a poet, Illie,” I laughed, but he did not laugh with me and he just kept saying over and over again, blue and purple and grey and silver, and it grew into a shout, and I mixed more and more and scratched down the canvas and streaked across it with different shades and different hues, and it felt exciting, the two of us in this strange embrace.
And then his shouting turned into a whip-sharp bark. “No,” he said. I stopped and turned to him, the energy pulled out of me like a cord. “You are missing what I am saying. Where is the weight? The heaviness? I cannot get that from some stripes on a white sheet.”
I looked at the canvas, and then at Illie, who was swigging once more from the now nearly-empty bottle.
“It is early days,” he said. “But I cannot know you have got the picture correct until I see the entire thing.”
Once again I looked at the canvas and then at Illie. I had been breathing heavily, excitedly, and now it was subduing back to normal.
“You want me to paint the whole thing and then you tell me if I have it right or not?” “Yes, that is correct.”
“The whole thing.”
“Yes, the entire painting.” “Of this darkness.”
“The silver, purple, blue…” “…blue, grey. Yes, I got that.” “And in the middle of it is a swing.”
He made a swinging motion with his arms.
“A swing?” I said.
“A child’s swing,” he said. “From a playground. In the middle. Well, not quite in the middle, it is a little off to the left sometimes. And as I walk up to it, it becomes more central. A little red swing under the cover of a tree. A tree with naked branches.”
“What kind of tree, Illie?” I said.
And he looked up at me from his seat on the footstool, the bottle now empty in his hand, and he shrugged, and he said, “I’ll know it when I see it.”
My hands ached, and they were scarred with deep impressions of purple and black paint.
> The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond is published by Parthian www.parthianbooks.com