Fiction 3: The Painter

The phone rang. She stopped what she was doing and, barely looking away, she reached for her phone and answered.
"Hello?" she said, pressing the phone between her ear and her shoulder, freeing up both hands again.
"What are you doing?" said a man's voice.
"I'm painting." she said.
"You're always painting." he said, sounding annoyed.
"So what?" she said, irritated, but attempting to hide it.
"Did you clean the house?" he demanded.
"Yes" she lied, glancing up briefly, looking around the living room, feeling guilty.
"Well it better be clean when I get home. I land at 11:30 and I'm not checking any bags, so you can pick me up curbside by 11:45."
"Okay." she said, sounding monotone.
"Well, I'm going out to dinner now. I'll see you tomorrow." he said.
"Okay, have fun." she said, sounding depressed.
"Bye." he said.
"Bye."

The next morning, she forced herself out of bed early after a late night of painting. She moved her finished painting from the living room to her room with all of her stuff. She looked at it for one brief moment, feeling a sense of completion. Then she ran around the house, putting things away, cleaning, dusting, scrubbing, wiping and vacuuming. She kept glancing nervously at the clock, working faster each time. She was hot and sweating when she jumped in the shower quickly before running out the door to drive to the airport.
She lived at her boyfriend's house in the redwoods. As she drove through the magnificent, ancient trees she admired the dappled sun patches they created on the road. They created peace, she could feel it. They made life bearable. Sometimes, she would even thank them, under her breath. She turned on the CD player in her car and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of Moon started playing. Her muscles relaxed.

"Breathe, breathe in the air
Don't be afraid to care
Leave but don't leave me
Look around and chose your own ground
For long you live and high you fly
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be"
She raced through the mountain roads, leaning into the turns with precision. This was her fun, driving this road. She knew every bump, turn, climb and descent. The road was clear and empty of other drivers and she could bustle down it undisturbed. As she descended into the flat, dry valley, she noticed, with dismay, the brown layer of smog that hovered. It seemed to disappear from sight once she was in it, speeding down highway.
After an hour's drive, she arrived at the entrance to the airport and navigated with experience to the curbside pickup area. He was already standing there waiting in his blue jeans, shiny loafers and over-priced shirt when she pulled up.
"Your late. I've been waiting almost ten minutes." he said sounding very annoyed.
"I got stuck behind a slow driver." she lied.
"Hmpf." he said.
She popped the trunk and he deposited in it his carry on bag and then climbed into the passenger side with his laptop. He buckled his seat belt and as she pulled away he turned off her CD and switched to the radio.
"Listening to Dark Side of the Moon again?" he said, sounding mildly disgusted.
"Yes." she said, sounding monotone. They had an agreement that she would not play Pink Floyd in the house while he was home. But they had never discussed what she was allowed to play in her own car when she came to drive him home from the airport.
"I'm so glad to be home." he said. "I've got a lot I want to do around the house. Did you start any of the laundry?"
"No." she said.
"Are you working this weekend?" he asked.
"Yes." she said.
"Will you be home by six o'clock on Sunday so you can drive me to the airport? My flight is at 8:10."
"Yes, I should be." she said slowly.
"You should be or you will?" he demanded.
"I'll be home." she said, sounding depressed. "Where are you going next week?" she asked.
"I'm going to Colorado Springs. I'm scheduled to be there for a month. I'm going for two weeks and then I'll come home for a weekend, then I'll go back for two more weeks." he said.
"Okay." she said. "So you won't be home next weekend?" she asked, secretly hopeful.
"That's what I just said." he said.
She was quiet.
"Okay. So check this out." his tone of voice suddenly changing to mild excitement, "I was at dinner last night and I swear the woman at the table next to me was Sharon Stone." he continued on with his story and she stopped listening.
They got to the house and he went immediately in to unpack. Then he walked quickly around the house inspecting the cleaning job she had done. She felt dread in her stomach.
"There's dust on top of the refrigerator." he said, with disgust. "If you aren't going to do a good job, then you are going to pay to have maids come."
She didn't say anything, but pulled out paper towels and cleaner and then climbed on a chair to dust the top of the refrigerator.
"These chairs aren't for standing on!" He said angrily as he watched her clean.
"Sorry." she said, trying to sound sorry. Then she put the chair away. "I have to get ready to go to work."
He continued to inspect the house as she changed for work and gathered her things. Then she heard him, from across the house say, "What the hell is this?"
She walked quickly, the voice was coming from her room, where she kept all of her stuff. When she got there he was looking at her newly completed painting, sitting on the easel.
"What is this?" he said again, sounding indignant.
"Its a painting!" she said, with some exasperation.
He was not one to say anything defensive, being offensive was his game. Other people might have replied with, "I know its a painting, but what is it a painting of?" But not him, instead he rolled his eyes with disgust.
"Why did you paint a picture of a YARD APE with its parents?" he said as he pointed his finger toward an area of the painting. She looked from him to her painting,  feeling a little confused and defensive. She saw where his finger was pointing.
"Its not a yard ape!" she said angrily.
"You better not be thinking of wanting to have kids. You know they will wreck your life. Kids suck." he said.
"Just because I paint a picture of a little girl does not mean I want to have kids!" she said.
"Then why did you paint it?" he said, challenging her.
"I paint what I see in my mind! There isn't necessarily an explanation behind it!"
"I don't believe that." he said, shaking his head with disgust. "That little girl is supposed to be your daughter, she even looks like you!"
"Fine. Don't believe me." she said, bitterly. He left the room. She sighed a long sigh, her breath gently blowing from the room his lingering negativity.
She looked at her painting again, sadly. Moving closer to it, she examined the bare, early-winter trees, the two adults, the little girl with the pink winter coat. She focused on the girl, like searching a face for the emotions hidden behind it. "She doesn't just look like me, " she whispered to herself, "She was me."

Fiction 2: The Undoing of Imagination

She was walking with her parents out of the house. As the oldest of many children it was a rare thing to be alone with just one of her parents, but to be alone with both, was truly remarkable. They were different too, she noticed. They seemed entirely focused on her, not lost in their own thoughts and worries. This was about her. She wasn't concerned, just taken aback by the unusualness of the situation. It was a normal Sunday afternoon in late autumn and a friend of her parents had come over after church. The friend stayed with the younger children and the three of them, mother, father and oldest child, slipped out of the house.
At just eight years old, she was an unusually perceptive, smart girl, innocent, well-behaved, responsible, quiet and sensitive with an occasional outburst of spunk.  She felt a sense of warmth from her parents that day, as she waited patiently to understand what this outing was about. They walked away from the house and down another road and they stopped at the edge of the woods. The woods were the playground of the many neighborhood children. They had crusaded into the woods to the big rock by the creek. In the summers they would swing on the tire swing and splash in the water. They would hunt salamanders and crayfish. They would pretend they were explorers and walk deeper and deeper into the woods until they came out by the back road well behind their neighborhood. They lived in imaginary worlds and they invented games and names and play for hours and hours. When you walked into the woods, it was like walking into a magical time and place. But on the edge of woods, near the tallest trees that marked the entrance, they stopped.
She looked up at her parents and they looked down at her. Her mom started, "Christmas is coming up." she said in a serious tone. Christmas, she loved Christmas like any kid. Last Christmas she remembered being so excited on Christmas Eve she could barely contain herself. She had smiled non-stop and clenched and unclenched all her muscles in extreme excitement. She remembered thinking she had never been so excited in her entire life.
Her mother started again, saying gently, "We wanted to tell you that …" she paused, "there is no Santa Claus." She looked at both her parents very briefly and then down at her feet. Her cold hands clenched deep in the pockets of her light pink winter coat. A weight three times heavier than herself descended upon her, first, her head, clouding her thoughts, then down her throat, clamping her voice, into her chest, squeezing her heart, and then stopping, with a heavy pain, at her stomach. She was unknowingly holding her breath, and when she softly let it go, it was more than just her breath that left her. She was shocked, surprised, but she knew it was true. She had never allowed herself even a moment to consider the taunts and snide comments of the other children about the existence of Santa Claus. She had been a true believer to her very core, with every particle in her body defiant to the idea that the fairy tale heroes such as Santa Claus, were not real. Even as she knew it was so amazing, so magical, that it was teetering on the edge of unbelievable, she had believed.
Only a few moments had passed when she looked up at her parents again and said, "What about the toothfairy?"
"No." her mother said gently, sorrowfully. The girl had expected this answer, yet still had a shred or two of hope.
"And the Easter Bunny?"
"No." her mother said again.
She looked down at her feet again. That was all of them, all of them she had believed in and all of them were not real. An indescribable sense of sorrow and loss filled her.
She could feel them, her parents, not just their gaze of concern, but their love, too. She sensed that this was not easy for them and that they knew it was not easy for her. She sensed that they knew this was not trivial. And because she could sense this, she knew this was real, this is how it really is. There was no such thing as magic and wildly unbelievable things that filled you with hope that life really was more amazing than we could ever imagine. Life was not what you can imagine, Life was just reality. This realization rested upon her small, eight year-old body like a heavy blanket. Her shoulder sagged a bit from its weight.
"Okay." she said sorrowfully, bravely, but sounding defeated. She looked up her parents again. They each hugged her warmly and then turned to head back toward the house. They started, one step ahead of her as she paused, looking around her for the first time since hearing the truth. It was a rather cold, drab day. The sky was gray, the grass had faded in color and the leaves were all gone from the trees. She looked into the woods and frowned slightly. But as she turned around to leave, something caught her eye. There on the ground, near the tallest tree, was a beautiful, blue feather.  She bent down to look at it and found it so magnificent, that she briefly felt a tiny amount of awe. Then she picked it up and put it in the deep pocket of her light pink winter coat. She took four hurried steps and caught up with her parents, and began to pepper them with the logistical questions about how they pulled off Santa Claus, each answer, one by one, undoing her childhood imagination.