The uneven wooden floorboards creak as I follow my hand along the wall, walking unsteadily across the old familiar hallway, where my childhood summers were spent chasing frantically after imaginary monsters and naming myself a hero after taking the victory after a tough fight. A musty smell remains lingered in each room except one; the reading room.
While a fresh warm breeze drifted through the wide open windows, letting a light shine deeply onto the glistening floors, I would sit in an energetic bundle at my grandfather’s feet, quiet yet eager. My grandfather was a man of little wonders. Together we spent days sharing the crayon drawings from my sketchbook, while I listened intently to each poetic detail of his stories, recorded with blotchy ink scribbles in his tea and dirt stained notebook.
My string of thoughts is broken by the chirp of a dunlin outside and instantly the silence and warm air is gone, as I realize that I had wandered into the images of my mind once again. The dunlin which brought me back was grandfather’s most prized subject. From memory its skinny black beak protruding its brown and white softly feathered body sounded common at first, but when grandfather named the birds, he made them sound extraordinary. Although I can only recognize it from its distinct call, I feel its presence on the window ledge beside me as it peers, cocking its head from side to side.
Now, as my feet edge towards the upright easel, I knock over a jar filled with murky water in which I use to wash frayed paint brushes, and it seeps into the unsmooth carpet, and my head begins to wander, but this time to war. The carpet beneath me feels sodden, and transforms itself into the slush of mud. The sweet chirps I hear become louder and are twisted into the sounds of battle cry and gunfire. The bitter, pungent smell of turpentine is replaced by the smell of blood, of brown rotting corpses flung across the narrow path, and the smoky haze of newly lit gunpowder. Flashes of faces I met, people I accompanied, and unnamed figures who I will never know, stream like a winding river in my endless mind, and my brushstrokes become heavy and distracted, creating violent lashes of jagged colour across my clean canvas. Over and over my hand refuses to stop, as it clenches the palette knife and continues to thicken layer upon layer until the texture is coarse when my fingertips accidentally sense the cool touch of wet paint.
Then my mind switches black. The consequences of the war have turned my world into darkness, but once in a while my worn brush touches the canvas allowing the frames in my mind to come to life, and to be hung up on my wall next to the rest of them.
