Owl Eyes

Owl Eyes

I stare at the canvas, egg shell white. The whites if its eyes are accusatory and unimpressed.  The blank page is judging me.  I look down at the brush hanging listlessly at my side; I think it is depressed. The air feels blue and looks cool.  How long have I been standing here?  I back away from the judgmental eyes of the blank canvas and turn to the vast room for aid.  I am standing in the loft portion of my converted horse barn, able to oversee almost every square foot of my open-concept dwelling.  There was a time when I loved the barn, would watch the eerie wave of a windmill army through the loft window.  But not today, today I am frozen.  I am slushing through blue ice, so cold it is numbing my mind.
I float to bathroom and stare at the girl in the mirror, uncertain of her intent.  She is tan skinned with high cheekbones and straight black hair.  The mirror-me makes me think of my mother, to whom I owe my Choctaw looks.  I remember the last conversation we had on the phone.  How many days have passed since then?  I am losing my ability to track the time.  I drop my gaze to the bottle filled with little grey-blue pills.  Like a pile of pillbugs.  Roly polies, I used to call them.  How many days since my last dose?  How long until the gray and the monotone and nothing ends?  Soon.  Soon I will be able to paint again.  I am moving away from the bathroom now, back to the loft where afternoon light drenches and room and sticks to the surfaces.  I sit on the small second-hand couch facing the window.  I wait, I rest my head against the sly softness of the couch. I’m sinking now, sinking into a warm cup of tea. 



The small room, more window than wall, now smells foreign and new.  I reopen my eyes, assessing the change.  The rubicund sun still filters in, fills the room electrically, but slowly.  Like creamy static.    It is now dusk.  A candy apple sun is hanging in the sky, dipping ever so slowly, as though too ripe for its willowy branch fraction by fraction, the twig bends toward the Earth.  I stare at the prism hanging in the window like a trap, shattering light around the room, leaving broken bits of sun on walls and bookshelves and wooden floor.  Firecracker-colored light sharply ricochets wall to wall.  Glistening ruby drops of color drip and pool, collecting in bloody puddles of maroon light.  I am hungry for the color, thirsty for light like a root.
The room is conspiring; I can feel it whisper like a peppermint breeze against my skin. The red, it flakes, fluttering back and forth, like a fall leaf from a barren branch, rock-a-bye rose petals settling in my hands.  Finger and thumb, I lift a shard of ruby light to taste, consume.  It tastes hot, like cinnamon. I let my eyes drop closed as the red light slithers down my throat to glow beneath my skin. 
The darker the room glows, the sharper the static grows. The air tingles now.  I’m driven to my feet, red energy pulsing through my veins.  I have fingernails the color of a fast car and a flush beneath my skin.  The window is darker, and my reflection shows my flaming hair.  It’s flickering, licking at my jaw and burning.  My lips smile in my reflection, red and wet as the welling bead of a cut.  The thump, thump, thump music of the heart is rocking me, making the world surge beneath my feet.  The thick pounding music compels me to dance.  I learn the steps by following the footprints on the hardwood floor, falling from one glistening print to the next.  I move as though through water, with heavy limbs.  I wonder at their lassitude. I am as graceful as violence.
Every dance needs a partner.  A figure, a vaguely crimson shadow bows so gentlemanly from the waist with a flourish.  No one can dance the way a shadow can. I am bewitched, aflame.  I follow my scarlet shadow-man in a waltz.  Swirling and churning, stirring the red light into the blackness of a quiet house at night.  My blood rushes as we spin on pink sands, twirl, twist, touch. The deepest red now drips in from the windows like wine, the last of dusk’s light nearly sucked from it. A dip from my glimmer of a date, a brush of gossamer lips, and then…
I fall into the world.  The warm tea bath is gone and the room is cool with the arrival of the night.  The light has gone.  The crystal sleeps, hanging from its window perch like a bat.  With red gloss on my nails and the taste of a cinnamon kiss on my lips, I rise.  No more procrastination, no more feeling the molasses of time run through my fingers, I move.  Dancing wistfully to the music of a red dream, I paint.  The paintbrush is an extension of myself, organically fused and emitting the red pieces of my soul onto canvas. I paint in the hues of a Lithium vacation.  I revel in the sharp waves of clarity.  I can taste the air and I know what the world wants to tell me.  I move so swiftly and efficiently that I know what’s going to happen next, just barely. 
Just a week ago the canvas had been as white as crisp apple flesh and the time left until deadline shorter than a dragonfly life.  And a single lifetime is not enough.  Not when there are cotton teeth and fog eyes to see through and a monotonous mind and emotions with a slope of zero.  I had made the choice.  Good girls eat their pill bugs and think in shades of grey and sleep at night.  But the shadow man cannot hide forever.  Sometimes he needs to dance.
The picture is forming in front of my clearer-than-ice eyes and I do not think it into existence.  The painting already exists, just not yet on the canvas.  That is where the brush comes in, pirouetting in arcs and whirlpools.  I can focus with the single-mindedness of a hound on the hunt, but the back of my mind does calculus and interior design and knows the laughably simple solution to world hunger.  The swoosh, scratch, hush of horsehair on paper lulls me like a hammock and I guess I  paint more and pack up and hopefully lock the front door because now I am driving.
I prefer the back roads, dragging out the four hour trip from my southern Indiana town to Nashville.  The day is oddly warm for early spring and the wind is sharp.  The open windows and roof of the Wrangler make my hair dance like fire.  The black strands cut the sun like butter.  Unraveled VHS tape glitters and whips on the side of the road, shimmering somehow beautifully and refusing to be ignored.  I wonder what story it holds and whether it’s lost now or just a different kind of alive.  The wind shoves the car to the left, flirting with the center line, but I push back and the Earth and I play tug of war.  The canvas in the passenger seat is loosely covered with a white sheet, but I see flashes of color exposed at the corners when the sheet is pulled away. The hints are seductive and pink, a maidens ankle beneath ivory petticoats.  I don’t remember the painting.  Only colors and ideas.  But I never look, not until I get there.  Not until I say goodbye, otherwise I may never make it.  If you look at what you’ve created, you begin to see yourself in it.  You see parts of yourself and parts that are completely new possibilities.  You see futures and maybes and you fall in love, sometimes you even give it a name.  Then how can you let it go?
The air and the colors are so crystalline sharp that I can see every leaf on the far off trees and hear the soft rustle of the grass growing.  The wind assaults a diamond-shaped road sign; it whips its head back and forth, back and forth. Shaking its head no, no, no.  But who would listen to a sign?  As the trees and farmhouses and corn fields blur past me, I sneak peeks in the review mirror.  I expect the scenes to have 2-dimensional cardboard backs.  The world is a popup book façade.  A giant Midwestern diorama.  I am a little ragdoll girl with breadstick dough arm driving in a plastic car.  I am the only one in the world.
I make the drive without really thinking about it.  I am a homing pigeon, bouncing back and forth between my two points on the earth.  I stop for gas in a dusty town, throwing the car into park and leaping onto the warm pavement.  A dirt-smudged man smoking near the propane exchange follows me with his eyes as I near the station doors.  I flash him a smile, gathering my hair at the nape of my neck until I escape the wind.  I intend only to pay for fuel, but my empty stomach reacts to the rows of candy and chips. 
I stand in front of the Technicolor array of boxes, weighing the pros and cons of a foot-long taffy versus chocolate covered peanuts, hearing my mother in my head, Are you eating well? I reach out to grab both and notice a child standing very close to me, gazing intently up at my face.  She is probably only five years old, but I am very short and only a head taller.  Her hand is suspended in midair and she wears a frightened expression as though caught.
“Uh, hi?”  I collect the candy to my chest. 
“Hi.”  Her eyes are wide and round.  “You have feathers on you.”
“What?  Oh, yeah.”  I brush at the downy feathers that routinely escape my couch pillows and pin themselves deeply into my clothing.
“Can I touch your hair?”  Her hand is still suspended between us.
“Um, yeah, sure.”  I sort of lean towards her, unsure how one should act when about to be petted.
“It’s soft.  You’re pretty.  Like Pocahontas.” She leans closer.
All the energy, the clarity, the creativity seems to be sapped out of me by this wondering little girl.  Suddenly I am at a loss for words, rendered awkward and uncomfortable by the attention and her intense stare.  She is not like the man outside; she is looking in my eyes.  Through my eyes.  At my soul.  She is swimming through the tumultuous ocean of my mind, she knows I am not well, she knows about the pill bugs wiggling in the jar at home, she knows that I am not fit.  Not fit for driving, fit for conversations, not stable enough for children.  She—
She is just a little girl.  She is smiling now and I see a single tooth missing from the front of her mouth.  Maybe she is older than five.  When do they lose teeth? 
“My Mom is waiting for me.  I have to go now. Bye, bye.”  She backs away from me as though reluctant, waving with one hand, the other making a fist.  Before leaving the store she steals another glance my way, grinning.  Peeking from her closed fist I see a tiny white feather.



There are about two hours left to my drive.  My skin is still buzzing, reveling in its freedom, and my mind is still twirling circles, but I am subdued now by memory after memory, unraveling like the shimmering VHS tape. Scenes play out before me, like shadow puppets on the windshield.  I see a day when I was very young like that little girl, sitting outside of our tiny house near Hoosier National Forest.  The house was small and the paint peeling, but the flowerbeds protected it like a moat, spilling over with red and orange; snapdragons lashing at the sidewalk.  I see myself, small and tan, mixing hose water with smashed sidewalk chalk in an emptied ice cream bucket, making my own palette of colors to match the hues of my mother’s flower bed.  I am shiny and soft in this day before the pill bugs and the endless ups and downs.  In this single scrap of film freezing time before my father stopped being amused by my mother and realized he was never getting that picket fence.  Now, he has long since remarried and moved to Vermont.  My mother is still in that little house, busy painting and planting and weaving and creating, allowing me glimpses of my own erratic future. 
I think of the last conversation I have had with my father, just days before.  He calls every day Saturday now and he says the same things.  “Well it really is beautiful up here right now.  You should come stay with us, just for a while.”
“ Dad, I can’t.  What about the barn?  What about Claude?”  This a flimsy excuse and he knows it.  The snooty tomcat lived in my barn before it was even converted, he doesn’t need me to care for him.  He just allows me to live in his barn.
“Just until you get on your feet, get your dosage figured out and stabilized. Tab would love to have you, she wants to spend more time with you.”
His wife, Tabitha, blonde and pantsuit wearing.  Practical like my father.  Not inwardly focused and ever-changing like the shifting sands of my mother.  Like me.  “No thanks, Dad, I’m doing fine.  I’m twenty-one, I can handle living on my own.”  I would focus on keeping my voice steady, I am steady, I am stable, I am grey.
“I just know how hard things have been since—you, know, lately.” 
End of memory.  I guess that’s when I had stopped listening.  It has been months since I’d lost her.  She had barely been there at all, but I’d already touched her through my skin and sung to her.  I’d already painted her as a real person.  I’d lost her at only twelve weeks, when she was only two inches of life like a shrimp. But on canvas and in my mind there was peachy skin and gray owl eyes.  When I lost her things were up and down and red and grey.  They upped my prescription, stabilize, the said.  At what point does grief become unhealthy?  I imagine scientists pouring my grief into a beaker, a milky, thick grey liquid.  It pools over the top of the beaker and drips down the side, but they pour until it’s gone.  Then they shake their heads in disproval.  Too much, they say.

 

It is growing dark again now as coffee-colored light spills all over the Earth.  As the cityscape nears it is perfectly silhouetted against a rosy sky. I pull into a lot outside of a high end apartment complex, energy tickling my bones and singing my skin.  I park the jeep with a jolt and hop out, forgetting that I have long since discarded my shoes and feeling the impact zing up from the arch of my feet to my spine.  I dance around to the passenger door and gingerly lift out the sheet-swathed painting.  The air is thick and sweet and feels southern on my tongue.  I take the stairs two at a time to the trendy apartment upstairs.  I reach the familiar industrial-looking door and rap, tap, tap.  I yell, “Gabriel!”  Gabriel swings the door wide and nods a gesture for me to come in.  I am entering the wolf’s den carrying a slab of red meat.
The Bible named an angel after Gabriel for a reason.  He is beautiful.  A predatory demi-god in paint smattered jeans.
“Did you bring me a present, Love?”  He asks me.  I cross the cold tile to place the canvas on an empty easel.   
“You’re going to love this one, Gabe.  Eat it up with your fingers and ask for more,” I say, suddenly filled with confidence.  But I haven’t seen it finished with these eyes yet.  This is where it gets hard.  This is where I open up the chest and see the heart beating. 
“You’ve never disappointed, Ivy.”  He uncrosses his arms and straightens out of his recline against the stone fireplace, stalking across the room to me and eyeing me beneath thick brows.  “Let’s see what you’ve brought me.”
My fingers are five rattlesnake tails, maraca-shaking towards the sheet.  I take a deep breath and pull.  I expected the colors.  There is rose and burgundy.  Rouge, cherry, and maroon. It is as though I am seeing the figures for the first time.  There is a woman with willow arms clutching at the air.  Her dress is fire and her hair is like bloody rivulets.  The trees around her are like melting wax.  Just beyond the grasp of the woman’s finger is a tiny owl, round and soft.  She has baby-gray human eyes.  The eyes, it’s always those eyes that get me.  A hand reaches out toward the painting, it is mine.
“Striking as always.  Have a name?”  He leans in to examine closer, but he doesn’t see it.  Maybe he doesn’t want to recognize, or maybe he pretends not to.  We never talk about it.
“No.  Name it what you want.”  I’m turning away.  I don’t like the mirror painting in front of me; I don’t like the wolf man with gray eyes or the desperate painted woman.  I don’t like feeling the tattoo torn from my skin for someone else to wear.  I create and he takes it away.  This is our rhythm.  He is so close behind me that I can smell the familiar fabric softener and black coffee.  “You can stay a while.  It’s late.”
“I don’t know…” 
I never told him about the baby, not exactly.  I started painting women with tree roots for legs and ripened round fruit for breasts and bellies.  I painted owls with human baby eyes and used my brightest hues.  The day after, I drove to him with a painting.  I pulled off the cover and showed him my pain.  The canvas showed a naked woman with wild black hair, lying curled around herself in half of a giant cracked egg shell.  Her eyes were black pleading holes.  He knew, then, and I didn’t wait for him to speak.  I left and haven’t stayed the night since.
“Come on, Ive.  You used to stay all the time, before.  I won’t bite.”  But his teeth are saliva-shiny and pointy and I don’t believe him. “I love you this way, you know.  Free.”
Free, that’s what he calls me when I am sans-meds, synapses snapping and breathing colors.  Of course he likes me this way.  I am confident, vibrant, creative.  I bring him paintings and we dance and laugh and eat out where everyone seems to know him somehow, or we stay and cook in his glittery kitchen.  Then we go to his room with the giant bed so high that he always lifts me up easily around the waist.  It has always been this way, ever since my mother introduced us when I was seventeen and he began selling my paintings.  Gabriel is thirty-one now, ten years older than me and ten years younger than my mother.  He used to sell my mother’s paintings, but was more impressed with mine.  I try not to think about this too much. 
His hand is engulfing my shoulder and I think I can hear his pulse with my heightened senses. “Maybe I could stay for a while...” He circles around me, mouth near my ear.
“I’ve missed you, Ivy, my little wild one. It’s criminal the way they force those pills down your throat, mute you, dampen you.  My wild one should be free to run.” 
He’s back in front of me now, all joking gone from his face.  I do not think about bringing my hand to his face to run my hand along the bristles of his jaw line, jet black and thick as pelt.  He smiles from one corner of his mouth.  “I just want to paint,” I whisper.  “Why don’t they want me to be able to paint?”
“They try to stop all of us, Ive.  But we don’t need to be the way that they want us to be.  Stay here with me.”
“In your cave?  It sounds dangerous, to enter the wolf’s den all alone.  What will my grandmother think?”  He takes me by the hand leading me across the open echoing expanse of expensive tile.  All of the furnishings are white and brown and soft. 
“I bet she told you to stay on the path.  You’ve never been very obedient.”  He leads me past the heavy furry couch in front of the fireplace and to the French doors leading to the balcony.  I am startled when we step outside to find the world dark.  The air is intoxicating thick and sweet and I can hear the music of Nashville rushing in the distance. Gabriel wraps his arms around me and I think I hear a coyote howl from the nearby trees before I remember that I am not at home, but in the city.  It startles me and I push back from Gabriel and look up at his face.
“Gabe, do you think I could do it?  Figure out my dosage and get stable?  And still be able to paint?”
“You know how I prefer you, Ivy.”
“Well that’s what I want.  I want to figure it out.  I want another chance.”
Gabriel steps away from me and tilts his head slightly to one side, questioning, “A second chance at what?”
At what?  Is it possible that he truly doesn’t know?  No, he knows, I can see it in the set of his jaw, his fierce refusal to acknowledge our loss with words.  His question is a dare.  “Never mind, Gabriel.  I really do need to leave.  I’m sorry, I’m going home now.”
“Ivy, wait!”  Wolf man grabs my arm.  I flail like helpless woodland prey.  “You forgot your money.” My, what a big wallet you have!  All the better to buy you with.  He pushes a pile of folded money into my limp hand. 
I look down at it surprised, “Oh, thanks.”
“And Ivy, you can try all you want to get what you call stable.  But you know that’s not who you are. And I’ll be here when you realize that. I know who I am.”
“What is it that scares you so much, Gabriel?  Losing her or almost having her?”  There, I’ve painted the words into the air.  They are out of me now, sticking to the rails of the deck, my lips, Gabriel’s eyelashes.  They are alive and they will never truly stop existing.  I steal myself under Gabriel’s stare, holding my hand over the frantic thrum of my pulse as though he could smell the fear in my veins.
He hesitates a moment longer before dropping my arm as though it were something poisonous beneath his hands.  His back is to me and through the door before he even dismisses me. “Take care of yourself, Ivy.  I will see you again soon.” 
And for the first time, I wonder if this is true.  “Sure.”  I whisper to his back, although I know he doesn’t hear me.



I am in my jeep.  The night is deeply dark and moist like soil and I am swimming through it.  Looking for home.  The trees are shadows and the bats are out to play.  I shake my arms to free them from the concrete sleeves, but nothing helps.  They are heavy from the inside.  My bones are sinking.  The air is warm, but the wind is cold as it slaps and abuses, leaving tear streams.  The drive home takes days.  It is dawn when I sputter into my driveway.  The barn is waiting, stoic and solitary in the rising sun.  I stumble over the threshold, greeted by the smell of old tea dregs. First to the kitchen.  I slump over the counter and scatter little orange bottles until I find the right one.  I hastily swallow one tiny blue pill with a swig of tepid water.  I stagger to the living room and I crumple and fold into the couch, my fossil bones are too heavy.  Maybe the soft blue sofa will swallow me like a soft blue whale.  Maybe I will live inside its belly and watch the next dwellers of this home go about life.  They will be real people with insides and that don’t peak and poke and plummet and crash.  They won’t take monotone buzzing pills.  They will paint only on their skin where it can never be taken away.
Warm tea surrounds me.  I open my eyes to blue seas under a gray sky.  The ground beneath me is swelling and bobbing.  I am lying on my back breathing salt air.  The silver clouds look like canine profiles.  Gray mist slithers and curls up around the edges of the ship and settles, spilling out into pools of murk.  The fog is so dense that it nearly chokes me but I have no will to sit up from my prone position.  My driftwood hair is heavy and my skin is hard and smooth as shells. I rock with the oceans breath.  Something cool and tingling envelopes my hand, icy almost-fingers curling over mine.  My shadow man has come.  No dancing tonight, he lies on the moist deck next to me.  He is a black absence of light lit with a billion tiny stars.  Maybe he is a galaxy.  Or an atom or a god.  . My blood has been replaced by liquid mercury, shining and cool.  Unlike wolf men that can smell but can’t speak, my shadow man knows what I fear.  And he knows what I want though I still am not sure He uncurls my hard shell fingers, making them crack and pop.  In the palm of my hand he puts something tiny, warm, and fluttering.  I don’t know how long I lay on the deck dozing to the lull of the see before I open my hand and look inside to find a tiny gray owl the size of a walnut. 



I do not fall back into the world so much as glide.  I blink awake and find myself on the little blue couch, hands balled into fists.  My left hand holds a tiny white feather from my downy pillow.  I sit up slowly, allowing for the inevitable dull throb of headache.  The horrible deep sadness has been dampened by the magic blue candy.  I feel like Alice in Wonderland, eat this to get bigger, drink this to shrink.  Eat the blue marbles if you want to run away from the looming dark place.  Only a gently melancholy is left in its place.  A friendly, familiar emptiness.  I sigh and stare down at the tiny feather. 
The world is mostly flat and grey, but maybe if I push hard enough, I can crack the eggshell veneer of this pill bug world and see beneath.  I will be even and I will float like a ghost to the easel and see an apple-flesh white canvas.  I will squeeze the colors from tubes and lift the brush, though it weighs twenty pounds.  Dip, dip.  I will raise the brush to the paper, poised and uncertain.  I will squint my eyes in concentration and swish across the canvas.  I will paint and I will paint.  It will not be magic, it will not spill from me in an electric rush.  It will be slow and as deep as the marrow of my bones.  When I am finally finished and the sun is high at the windows, I will step back.  It will be a rather plain painting, not my best.  But it will be a start.