TITLE: An Unstill Life

NAME: Mik

E-MAIL: ccmcdoc@hotmail.com

CATEGORY: None

RATING: None

SUMMARY: Details

ARCHIVE: This story belongs to Yja. Ask her.

FEEDBACK: Feedback? Well, yes, if you insist.

TIMESPAN/SPOILER WARNING: None

KEYWORDS: Paint

DISCLAIMER: This isn't slash. It's not even about X Files. It's about what we see when we look through someone else's eyes. Yja asked me to be inspired by one of her paintings. That was hard. I'm inspired by all of her paintings. So I took bits of a few of my favourites and am inviting you to spend the day with me, as I wander through her amazing talents. If you don't know my friend, Yja, and her gifts, come round to her LiveJournal (maybeatdawn) and look at some of her work. Bon appetit.

Author's notes: This story was commissioned by Yja, who made a donation to the Red Cross Katrina Disaster Relief Fund. Thank you.

An Unstill Life, by Mik

Paint on canvas.

It's a remarkable medium. Imagine, if you will, a centrifuge of glossy white, and one drop of lapis falling into the centre. Suddenly, there is magic. For a moment, it's a jewel; a sapphire shimmering on a bed of satin, and then, in a blink, whirls of colour spread out into the whiteness, and you're looking down on a dancer, her long skirt spreading and swirling and spinning around her. And in another blink, she is gone, and there is nothing but a well of the palest of blue before you.

Now take that blue, on the tip of a sable brush, and draw a lazy line along a canvas and you have a horizon, and all the hopes and promises ahead. Add dots of green, and black and brown below it, and you've stumbled into a faerie forest: cool, clean, protecting. Meander among the dots and dabs and strokes, and you can almost hear that crystal brook, smell the dark wet earth of the bank, feel the velvet like moss carpeting your path. The tiniest touches of purple and white are violets and myrtle. You think you see a sparkle from the corner of your eye, you might have heard a sprite's laugh or caught the flutter of wings, or is it only the sunlight, dappling leaves, playing tricks on you?

Follow the brook over smooth, brown-to-green stones, along an almost black shore, and emerge from the forest into a field of wheat, lines of greyish yellow swaying in a breeze. You can hear that cackling whisper as the wind moves the shafts, bending them forward and back in rhythmic waves. It glows with the sun's light, it glistens with the farmer's sweat. It's a scene of great bounty, security; a good harvest means a warm, safe winter. On a low hilltop, as if standing sentry, are the stark lines of the thresher, the blades steely and newly sharpened. And just over the rise, the hill is staked out in precise rows, dark green leaves clinging to black sticks, pregnant with purple fruit. Prosperity and contentment in every shape and hue. The air is as ripe as the grapes with the sweetness of the harvest and wildflowers and warm, late summer afternoons.

A travelling carnival arrives to celebrate the reaping season. Brilliant primary colours in strong simple shapes, candy cane coloured tents, circles of blue, green, yellow floating upward like balloons released from a child's hand. Graceful swirls of pink and gold ballon around rich brown oblongs of dancing bears, and land, arabesque upon the striking black strokes of charging steeds. Dots of red are candy apples, and fluffy bits of blue are the candy floss sold by vendors in striped carts. One can hear the calliope and barely restrain an urge to race across the field of wheat in time to see sad faced clowns in a cardboard fire engine race around a ring of paper flames to rescue an orange haired damsel from a house of shoe box bricks, or to watch lithe lines in sparkling gold defy gravity to spin, twirl, and swing from silvery cords.

Or perhaps you'd rather set sail on an ocean of glass smooth green, marled with white foam, and skewed triangles of white sails. For opposite the hill where the grapes grow, and the harvester waits, and the children laugh at bears and dogs and clowns, the shore spreads its softly yellowed arms and welcomes you to the sea. Blue boats dart among the mists, and grey gulls cry and swoop and steal and a semi circle of blue grey streaks are the pod of dolphins playing between the boats. Breaking the water with a sound so joyous it must be laughter, and plunging beneath the surface again. The sun makes diamonds on the glassy water, and the water brings those diamonds back to the yellow shore where children build castles made of sand and dreams and red plastic buckets.

There. In the corner: that black, threatening sky, and a broken spear of blue white. Lightning. And suddenly the pale grey-yellow gives up abruptly to ochres; red and yellow, hot and violent. All other colours melt and burn away, destroyed. The cool, lush greens of the forest are marked with blackness, the violets and myrtle become ash. The brook sizzles and steams and stops on the glowing stones. The wheat bends, breaks, dies in a hiss of protest. The grapes swell, burst and vanish. The carnival tent of red and white becomes an unsteady pyre of red and orange. Dark blue shapes of men in dirty overalls yell for water. Children cry and animals keen. Boats on the water sway to and fro, anxious and helpless, pulling close to shore and hurtling away again. The blackness looms above the jagged lines of flame, smoke billowing out to cover, choke, silence. Brown loops and arches bend in grief, stretch up, hands outreached, crying for help, asking God why? Why?

The blackness softens to a dull grey, and spills over the heated colours of destruction. Rain, a pale version of the glass green of sea, washes away the smoke, the soot, the fear. Wet, cool salvation that quenches the fire, and comforts the land. Greens and blues and silvers, muddied with ash, flow over the charred landscape, whispering promises of survival and renewal. Ash will feed the soil, and next year's crops will be more abundant. Flowers will grow where buildings fell, and trees will recover and grow taller, and more dense.

Night is passing, and off in the distant horizon there is a line of pale blue.

Paint on canvas. It can capture the reality that the eye sees, that the mind records, and it can set free all that the heart hopes and believes.