You are special.
Right now, you are in the middle of the living room with your hands out in front of you like a conjurer. Just above your brow is a cloud about the size of a rabbit, raining miniature rain onto a potted lemon tree. A black sheet hangs from the ceiling behind you and scrolls under your feet. It is coarse and sodden with rain. Your feet, too. Holding this pose is painful, but you do it anyway for your father. Your neck and shoulders ache and that familiar sharp bloom of sparks, of a hand gone numb, is back. But you must stay focused. Be still.
You are your father’s favorite subject. You were a subject before you could walk. The uncanny prints of a child producing miniature clouds sell like hot cakes at fairs and gas stations all over the Midwest and make your father just enough money to afford the oils and canvas and printing fees. But it is the commercial jobs that earn him a living. Spray guns, ventilators and satin-finish eggshell are Monday through Friday. This latest portrait could change all of that. It could be a showstopper.
The sun radiates over your father’s shoulder onto the easel like a spotlight, illuminating ancient dust above, waves of hair that could be your mother’s. It’s a dramatic illumination: the deep, crow-black shadows in the background, contrasted by the bright, angelic subject summoning rain onto lemons in the foreground. The raindrops clinging to the rinds are bright and phosphoric. The cloud, a near-black. The subject, bored.
So baroque yet so surreal, critics would say. Perhaps they will comment on the inspiring use of light, the emphatic, no, deft chiaroscuro. But your father’s aim is more specific than that. His vision is more tenebrous, more Caravaggio, more dramatic than just simple deep shading for the sake of depth of field. He thinks this portrait could make him into something more than just a sideshow amongst the beer-can artist at the fairs. He may be hailed as the surrealist Rembrandt of Michigan. Perhaps he could sell more than just postcards and 10x12s, earn an honorary degree from Western or be invited to shows in high-rise New York or the Tate Modern. It could wretch him out of the gaff tape scrum and suffocating fumes of another credit union. Out of this sad cabin, north of town. Perhaps even your mother will come back. Perhaps.
It has been ten days and oil has yet to touch more than just swatches and thumbnails. A house is only as strong as its foundation. His eyes dart from subject—you—to the parchment laid in his lap. He crosshatches your cheeks with charcoal in rough, staccato strokes, lifting the portrait to the light every so often to check his work. Satin-finish eggshell forever ornaments his curly black hair (it’s where you get your curls). Satin-finish eggshell hazes his jeans and even his bare feet. Satin-finish eggshell is his scent, his aura. You can’t remember a time when he wasn’t pocked with paint. He works in near silence. Never speaks. Music is distracting. Kids are distracting. You find his new mustache distracting. It seems to be an extension of his wispy nose hairs.
Look away. Don’t laugh. Don’t look him in the eye. He hates that. You don’t want to agitate him. He moves like the weather in November. Mercurial, cold. Warm when you don’t expect it. You never know what father you will get.
Producing clouds—controlling clouds—requires deep focus. Keep watching the dust dance in the light like krill. Imagine you’re at the bottom of the ocean, the cloud a turtle. Ignore the pain in your shoulders and feet.
The feeling has always been ineffable, this making of clouds. You tried to explain it to your mother when you were eight. She was looking out the window when she asked about it. You told her that you could sense the clouds in the room like fish tugging at a line, and you just need to pull them into view.
Like this, you said, lifting your hands overhead. A small loaf of a cloud appeared. She smiled.
It kind of itches. Stings sometimes. Like static, you said.
You’re losing the cloud. Concentrate. There’s a meaty scar on your lower lip from biting it. Tongue the scar tissue and stay grounded. Listen deeply to what’s around you. You can’t lose this rabbit-sized cloud. Your father is so happy with this one. He said it is perfect. Focus on the pencil strokes, the ticks of rain on the lemon leaves. On the texture of the black sheet below you. Your feet. The fan whirring in the other room. The clicks of juncos outside. The brawl of grackles and blue jays. The crying of gulls overhead.
The gulls are inland. Storm is coming. Or is it you? Sometimes you can’t tell the difference. The birds make you restless.
Behind your ear is a tickle, an itch. You swear it’s a spider. A thick one, like the ones that splay your windowsill at night. Wait for a break in the glances from your father before moving to check. You don’t want to upset him.
Minutes pass before your father finally huffs, looks away, and bends to swap his charcoal pencil for a tortillon. He pushes up his glasses and tugs at his mustache. As he rubs his eyes, reach to inspect your nape.
“Don’t,” he says without looking.
You stop. Shudder. The rabbit-sized cloud expands by an inch, as if it were shocked, hair now standing on end. The rain tightens into a finer mist. Your father raises a brow.
Deep breath. Focus. The grackles in the yard.
The rain expands. It’s audible once again on the floor, the lemon tree.
He continues. Good job.
The rough strokes from the charcoal pencil are replaced by thrums of a tortillon. Like a beating heart on canvas, your father softens the edges of his work. The tickle persists. It moves down your back. You must not move or react. Today your father is more fervent than ever.
The thrum of the tortillon stops. Your father reaches for his palette. It is time to apply the first coat. Red, blue, yellow, smear into a piercing black. Outside, the gull screeches. The grackle barks. You imagine they are playing. Maybe they are friends. The spider is near your waist.
“Don’t.”
He stabs you a hard look. His thick glasses make his eyes look crazed, froggy. It makes you giggle. Your father, the bullfrog. You wish he’d croak.
Your rain intensifies. The cloud grows to the size of a cat—too small of a difference for your father to notice. Then, outside, a sunshower taps the window, dampens the perfect spotlight. The shadows washout, and the scene is disrupted. Storm is moving in.
“Stop that,” he says, thinking you are causing the rain outside.
You didn’t mean to do it, and you tell him. Being a cloud conjurer doesn’t mean that you can control them always. You sigh and imagine the clouds outside. Your forehead tingles, like when you stand up too quickly. The rain against the window slows. The clouds thin. The sun erupts through the curtains and the long shadows are back. A lone, fat raindrop streams down the window.
You want to tell your father that you need a break, but don’t. Focus on the wood-paneled walls, the dust, imagine music coming from the other room, a memory of your mother’s thin hands playing Liszt or Schubert with the damper pedal pressed to the floor. Always quiet. Pianissimo. “Liebestraume” or “Trout,” names you only learned after you soaked your mother’s score sheets with a sudden outburst, an indoor storm, when she finally left you and your father in her red sedan. The books flooded out of the study like a school of winged fish that night, spilling into the living room. The black piano splintered into a million white pieces by a sudden stroke of lightning. The strike left a hole in the roof that is now roughly covered by a blue tarp. You didn’t know what you were capable of. You nor your father have entered that room since. The fan still oscillating, left on to dry the carpet, but never shut off.
The music still haunts you. Like the spider, now moving, it leaves a trail of itches down your spine.
“Don’t!” shouts your father.
Ignore him. Slap at whatever is running along your skin.
You miss. The cloud shrinks to a small wisp. The miniature rain stops.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
The spider hops to the floor without a sound and whisks away. It was a cellar spider, like the ones that haunt your windowsills at night. You watch it as it scurries between your father’s bare feet, all the way to the wall, and up and up and up and up. You want to tell him about the spider but speaking never got you anywhere. Straighten your arms and enlarge the cloud back to that round rabbit before he gets angry. You don’t want that.
He wasn’t always like this. Your father was once a kind, patient man. Passionate, but far less myopic. Sundays used to be trips to the beach, a reprieve from painting. He’d drive you down to the state park and run you to the top of the big dune there. You would tire quickly in the sand, so he’d pick you up and bring you close to his chest. His whiskers would rub your neck raw as you both ran to the top of what the locals call Sugar Loaf, a mountain of a sand dune. Up there, you’d both catch your breath and watch the distant gulls teeter and ride invisible surfs. Dozens of miniature families and dogs and umbrellas on the beach were a silent film from that distance. The lake, a great organism rushing forward, washing back in deep greens, blues, and grays. You’d produce a cloud above you both to blot out the sun. When your sweat dried, you’d run and trip and race back to the base of the great dune, laughing or yelling or both. Your feet burned from the friction. You leaped great distances as if hopping off the surface of a moon and careen back into deep sand. You don’t remember when all of this stopped, when the inner light of your father began to smolder, but it seems so long ago now. It was long before your mother left. You remember long stretches when he wouldn’t leave his room. Your mother would say he was very tired from work and would bring you into her music room. You sat under the piano as she played Schubert as quiet as a ghost. You practiced making small clouds from nothing, listening to the hush of hammers on piano wire. It was hardly audible even from there. The light rain was enough to drown it out.
The spider has made it to the wood rafters. You try not to crane your head to watch it scale towards the window. It’s amazing what they are capable of. Your father has started to paint your eyes on the canvas. He seems calmer now that paint is being applied. Maybe it’s just the smell that soothes him. The hue of honey on his palette is oddly accurate to your eye color. It’s like looking at a puddle of your irises.
Then you notice: the birds are silent.
Look out the window. Yes, there. The dust rising over the pines. It’s from the far end of your driveway. See the flash of a windshield in the muted sun. A car. It is slowly making its way up the driveway, appearing and disappearing amongst the trunks of trees. They are driving with hesitance it seems. Perhaps the driver is lost, looking for the main road, but found your cabin instead. Perhaps your principal has come looking for you for skipping class all this time.
“Dad,” you say. “Someone is here.”
Your father continues painting, doesn’t look back to see for himself.
“They must be lost,” he says.
You let yourself think that it could be your mother but whisk that thought away immediately. The thought is too painful to toy with. It sears. Makes you wince. What would you even say or do if she did come back? Would you run into her arms? ask her to bring you with her? or bury her with clouds, strike her with lightning?
It’s something you think about often but maybe nothing you will ever need to decide. Because when your mother finally sees the cabin through the trees as she makes her way up her old driveway, she slows to a stop. She waits for several minutes, sweating with nerves. This isn’t the first time she has attempted a return, but this is the first time that you caught her inching up the driveway. Usually, she comes by in the morning while you sleep. She can’t explain it to herself or her therapist as to why, but she must see her old home on occasion and know that she can always come back. She could. But she doesn’t. She throws the car in reverse with a clank and rolls back down the long driveway. You saw the whole thing.
Don’t think. Run.
The grackles and jays launch into the trees when you slam open the door. If you run east through the woods, you can head your mother off before she makes it to the road. Don’t listen to your father. Keep running.
Your bare feet collapse involuntarily when you hit the gravel driveway. The rocks are sharp, but your feet are numb, so you push yourself up and race across the gravel and crash through the ferns and into the leaf duff of the forest. Your cloud trails behind you without a sound. It’s grown to the size of a bear, yet it passes through the limbs of the trees with ease. Juncos drift in front of you like a wave, clicking excitedly. The ground is as soft as the dune. It’s difficult to gain purchase in this substrate of dead leaves and sand. So, run faster.
And now, yes, there is your mother. There’s her short-cropped straw hair, her slouch, her long arms. She is looking out the back window as she reverses. She can’t see you coming. If she just turned and saw you, she would surely stop. Right? You still don’t know what you will do if you catch her. Launch yourself on to the hood of the car? Run behind her and hope she stops or maybe flattens you in the process? let her live out her days in eternal, irreparable guilt?
But you are too slow. You haven’t moved like this in ages. Your lungs are bursting. You yell, but she can’t hear you. Your mother has made it to the final stretch of the driveway and has picked up speed. You feel like she is leaving you all over again.
The cloud is moving faster than you are now. It seems to have a mind of its own. It churns and grows in front of you. It’s as large as a truck and gaining. It rumbles and presses into the tops of the pines.
“What are you doing?” your father yells. He caught up with you. He grabs you and shakes you by the shoulders.
“Stop!” your father begs. To you or your mother, you can’t be sure. But then he lets you go and begins to wave his hands. He starts to jog towards the car. He hesitates. Keeps waving his arms. He isn’t sure what to do either.
You run with your father down the driveway in a last, desperate attempt. Your mother still hasn’t seen you. You both yell for her. But she doesn’t stop, she keeps backing out.
The cloud drifts above the trees, now free. A sudden wind riffles. You feel clouds gathering above you, accumulating pressure in your head, many fish biting hard all at once. You feel them roil and squirm and leave you there alone in the trees with your father and your escaping mother who has now pulled out onto the main road. She looks back and finally sees you and your father, sweaty and covered in paint and dry leaves and anguish. She meets your eyes with her own honey eyes. She looks frightened, pained, like she has no control over what she is about to do. She pumps the brakes hard, her car left crooked in the lane. Pauses. She honks the horn with her thumb—the sound, a wounded animal amongst the trees—and pulls away with a squeal of the tires.
Your father drops to his knees. It begins to rain.
You kneel in silence with him for a while. Satin-finish eggshell runs from his hair, into his eyes and onto the ground. His glasses are missing.
Your father lifts himself up off the ground, picks you up and carries you back toward the cabin. He holds you close and tight. His whiskers tickle your neck. Hard rain turns to hard ice. You both look up through the trees to a vast display of swirling gulls, to lightning splintering the sky, to your masterpiece, the dark cloudburst above.