Scribbles
The
back door was open and Eve slid in unnoticed.
She stood at the doorway to the kitchen and leaned softly against the
cool wood, his back to her at the table, pen in hand making fast movements
across paper. She studied him. His lean silhouette hunched and taught, as if
it was arrows and not ink that he fired out from his pen.
She often found Alex scribbling, found
him alone but for paper and his subconscious task. He should have been an artist, Eve always
said. But he inherently shrugged it
off. It was a nervous habit, not some
kind of genius, he would say.
“It’s just
something to do when I’m stressed.”
“Most of the great
artists were stressed.”
“Most of the great
artists were mad.”
She could see over
his shoulder from where she was standing, see the light from the barely pulled
curtains as it played shadows over the table.
Over a strange scene.
Ink swirled and
ran to mould the figure of a man, its body bent and curled, as if it cowered
from some unseeable force. She watched
Alex’s hand as it scribbled and scratched, watched the figure on the page as
its head slowly formed into a serpent, its mouth growing under each stroke, until
it finally reached its arm and began eating its own flesh.
Alex’s pen ran
smoothly over the creature, calmly, highlighting slowly the blood forming on
its lips. All the while a face hovered
in the corner of the paper, glowering, judging; a face that looked unsettlingly
familiar.
Eve read too much into
his scribbles she knew, as if the depth of his soul could be glimpsed in
doodles. Yet she couldn’t help but see
maternal eyes in that oddly floating head.
Alex hadn’t talked
to his mother in years, even less did he talk about her. He said he’d put it all away, laid it all to
rest, there was nothing left to say. But
Eve knew he still thought about her, knew sometimes in the way he looked at
her, as if she herself became his mother for a moment, hidden in some unknown
mannerism, lurking in a tone. Before he
would blink and the spectre would be gone.
Alex turned
suddenly and looked towards her.
“Margaret rang,”
he said, his eyes like deep brown drops, impassive, staring up at her past
squared shoulders. “She died this
morning.”
“Oh.” Eve didn’t know what to say. Words so often fall short when years of
meaning seek to be spoken. He wouldn’t
be sad that his mother was gone, she thought, the technicality of death. Hurt runs deeper than the inevitable. His mother’s death was not the pain Eve saw
looking up at her, rather it was the stark light now shining upon the life that
lead to it.
“Will you
go?” she asked, moving in from the
doorway, reaching a tentative hand to rest on his arm.
He turned from
her, his left hand tracing the length of his face, his right absentmindedly
tracing over and over the eyes of the floating image, the menacing glare.
“I guess I
should,” he said, finally placing the pen on the table, placing his hand on
hers. “Lest she haunt me in death as well.”
Claire Loader was born in New
Zealand and spent several years in China before moving to County Galway,
Ireland, where she now lives with her family.
With an obsession for all things old, and a passion for writing and
photography, she is the creator of www.allthefallingstones.com and is currently
writing a memoir. Her work has appeared in Dodging The Rain and Massacre
Magazine and is forthcoming in Pendora and Crannóg.
Tags:
Short Fiction