I really like how this one turned out. Although perhaps I can make a confession: I wrote first two scenes back in the summer and then abandoned them. I'd been thinking about the story lately so I decided to pick it for this week. Those two scenes are fairly heavily edited as well. I don't *think* this constitutes cheating :P

How do I measure a successful story? If I can reread something I've written and it doesn't make me cringe I'm happy with it. This one, No Particular Intimacy and the Bigfoot story are three so far that are the least cringe-y for me.

Also, this one is a fair big larger than the rest, weighing in at over four thousand words. If that's too long to read on screen, let me know and perhaps in the future I can break it into pieces or provide a PDF version or such.

---

The Painted Sky

1.

A little boy, Darren, sits his chair, shifting and adjusting. Getting the lay of the land. The chair is brand new, made of orange-tinted plastic and is inflatable. He'd watched his father fill it in the garage, hunched over using the bike pump. He never liked the whooshing hiss of the air going in, the metallic puffs of the pump's shaft as it went up and down so he'd stood there, middle fingers stopping his ears and his elbows splayed out to the side. For a while he flapped his arms, wondering if it would be awkward for a creature with wings that grew out of its head to fly. It probably would be; he'd never seen an animal like that, in real life, in books or on his computer. He'd followed his father up the stairs, which were too narrow and the inflatable chair had scraped along the wall. Another sound he didn't like at all but he didn't plug his ears. He needed one hand for the bannister and he liked to trace the other along the wall, his fingertips running along the almost smooth surface and occasionally catching on the little bumpy imperfections in the plaster. This time he'd tried to run his fingers where the plastic had been, to sooth the well, which must be even more upset than he is. The chair is replacing the one he'd broken recently. Like a jellyfish, this chair had no skeleton and would presumably be harder to break.

He bounces in the chair and the plastic bobs for a few seconds before coming to rest again. He bounces again. Thinks there's probably something profound in how the bouncing slowly comes to halt after you start its motion. He should think about that more but realizes this chair is more like his father's easy chair. The old chair was a wooden, folding one with a straight, hard back that kept you looking forward. In the new chair he could loll his head backwards and stare upwards. He looks at the ceiling, painted a deep blue, mostly. But on one side of his room grey, stormy clouds lurch toward the centre where, surrounding the light fixture, is a blazing orange-yellow sun. His older sister Anna painted the mural for him. He didn't ask her to; it would never have occurred to him to try to recreate his very own little sky inside his room. He just came home from school one day and it was done. He'd walked into his room, wondering at the smell and just dropped his backpack full of his notebooks and pens, sunk to his knees and was absolutely transfixed. He stared until his neck began to get sore. He thought it might be nice to see some birds flying around in his sky but he was too shy to ask for them to be added.

The little boy likes the feel of the plastic on his skin. It is cool to the touch and he pulls off his shirt and pants so he can feel more of it all at once. He wonders, though, if the plastic might be too hot in the summer and if his skin will stick to it, like it sometimes does to the car seat. He doesn't much care for that. He does like how if you squeeze hard you can squish the air inside around, compressing one part of the chair and the rest stiffens up. When you let go the chair springs back to its natural shape. His dad put the chair too far away from his desk so he grips the side armrests and with grunt, jerks himself and the chair forward. A couple more bounces like that and he's close enough. He knows he could have just stood up and dragged it closer but he also knows the easy way isn't always the best way. He settles into the chair again with the satisfaction of someone who's overcome difficult odds and prevailed. But the chair is also too low, really, to use his computer. He can't see the entire screen and would have to reach up the hit the keys. He pulls the laptop down onto his lap but power cord on the desk knocks over a speaker, a glass and a bunch of his action figures. A toy truck rolls off the desk and clatters to the floor. He's just got comfortable again when the door to his room opens.

"What was all that noise? And - Jesus - why are you sitting in your underwear? Get your clothes on. Company's going to be here soon."

2.

"I hear they laid off more engineers."

"Where did you hear that?"

"Saw it on the news."

All four of them sit in the dining room in stiff, tall-backed wooden chairs. After spending the afternoon in what felt like a giant pile of Jello - although maybe slightly stale Jello where it's beginning to form that crust - the little boy is finding it hard to settle down. Holding his posture so straight is making his back and shoulders ache. The adults - Grandmother is over for dinner this evening - aren't looking at each other. They all seem to be staring at the same point, dead in the centre of the table. It could be that they're looking for the bowl of plastic fruit that's usually there but is gone today. It always disappears when Grandmother is over for her monthly visit. Her inspections, his father calls the visits. The boy thinks he can see a faint outline, a ghost of where the bowl usually sits on the table. But maybe he doesn't. Maybe he just expects it to be there.

Father picks up his knife and slices through the hunk of meat on his plate, making a screech when he accidentally drags the serrated blade across the porcelain. The boy jumps at the sound but the grown-ups just keep staring. His mother maybe winces a bit. The boy's plate is made of a green plastic that is sort of see-through. On the inside of it are tiny bubbles. When his plate is empty he likes to hold it up to the light coming through the kitchen windows, to see how different the world looks through the tinted plastic. He once got the plate out of the cupboard and walked through the house with the plate in front of his face, but stopped when he tripped over a stool. Father jams his fork through the little island of meat, now separated from the larger continent. He chews deliberately for a while before swallowing and answering Grandmother.

"I won't be affected. The cost-cutting measures are in new projects and R&D. I maintain the older systems."

"They have to keep those running," adds mother.

"It'd have been nice if Anna could have joined us tonight." He smooshes the mashed potatoes and carrots around on his plate with his fork until mother shoots him a glance.

"Don't play with your food."

"Anna likes mashed potatoes. They're her favourite. Even more than french fries."

Grandmother's voice is like a spanking, sharp and clipped. "You can bet that's just where they're starting. After they lay off the kids they'll start going after those of you with seniority."

"I don't think we need to be worried. It won't come to that. They say the economy will be picking up later in the year."

"Would your employment insurance even cover all your bills? I know what you're like. You've got no savings. Not many positions for an engineer your age."

"I could get a job if we really needed." His mother's voice is soft and quiet. She talks different when Grandmother is over. "Part time. I haven't been in the workforce in a long while but I could clean or do office work. Darren is older now and doesn't need as much looking after."

"Anna could move back. She has a job and she would help out. If she'd come tonight she would have helped with the dishes after supper."

"Stop kicking your chair. You want to break that one, too?"

The little boy realizes then that he's been banging his heels against the legs of his chair, alternating in staccato between his left and right, in time with the seconds hand of the clock over the sink and windows that look out into the backyard. The clock is identical to the one in his classroom. Plain white face with black numerals and hands. In the middle of the face there are three letters: IBM. His computer has those same three letters and he used to think maybe the clock and the computer belonged to someone else and those were their initials.

He moves his eyes down from the clock and through the window sees his old swing set. Just two swings hanging from a bar on chains. The chains are now a reddish-brown colour and one of the plastic seats forms the base of a large cobweb. The other day when he was outside in the yard he saw that the web had caught a bunch of small leaves and other debris. He tried to pick out some of the flotsam but stopped when it started to tear at the fabric of the web.

"I haven't played on the swings since Anna went away. She used to push me on them."

"Stop being silly and finish your supper. You've homework to do."

3.

The little boy takes the bus to school each weekday morning; not one of those yellow school buses, but a regular bus that everyone rides on. Until this year his mother or father would drive him to school, but in September they explained to him that he was old enough to go by himself. Each morning his mother leaves two small piles of coins on the little table by their front door - one for the morning and another for the afternoon. The boy puts the coins for the morning bus ride in his left pants packet and the other in his right to keep them from getting mixed together. He'd mixed them on his first day and had a panic attack at the bus stop. The driver had to count out the coins for him while he hyperventilated. He's been fine since then, though. He enjoys the bus because of all the different people on it. Bigger children and old people. Mothers carrying babies. Darren often stares at them because he finds babies so peculiar. He's been told over and over that he used to be one. A baby, that is. But it's a concept he has trouble coming to terms with. He doesn't remember being that small, being unable to walk. Pooping his pants all the time. He doesn't think his parents are lying to him, but he can't quite come to believe them either.

His route to the bus stop is out his front door and across the cobblestone path through their front lawn. His game for crossing the lawn is to never put both feet on the same stone, forcing him to hop and skip his way to the sidewalk. He'll pause at the ninth stone, which rocks side-to-side if you shift your weight back and forth. He rocks there for a minute, his arms out side-to-side, imagining he was surfing or walking a tightrope. At the sidewalk he turns left and walks past six houses to the corner where the bus stop is, although he doesn't usually walk on the sidewalk. He likes to hear the swooshing sound of walking through grass so he'll often traipse across his neighbours' lawns. Except for the third house, where the man who lives there hollers at him for trespassing. He has a little sign on his lawn saying to keep off but the boy tends to ignore things like that, deciding they don't really apply to him. They apply to people who don't truly enjoy the sound of shuffling your feet through the grass. The third time he'd ever walked on that house's grass, the man shot him in the leg with a BB gun. He had a welt on his leg for days but didn't tell his parents because he thought he might get spanked for not listening the first two times. And anyhow, that man cuts his grass far too short to make really good sounds.

At the corner, at the bus stop, there's a bench he can sit while he waits. The bus he catches actually goes down his street past his house. For the first week of September, his mother waited by the front window and waved as he went by but she doesn't anymore. Most mornings, there is a woman who sits on the bench waiting for her own bus, which runs down the other street, perpendicular to boy's. The number sixteen bus. She told the boy her bus comes later than the boy's (the number fifteen) but she doesn't like to worry over missing it so she gets there early. The boy has taken to looking for her, walking up her street from around the corner to the left, in relation to the boy's house. He admires her because she walks right past the big, fat tabby that patrols that section of sidewalk. When Darren tried to explore down that way once, it had hissed and slashed at him.

One of the first times they sat together waiting for their buses, she'd offered him a mint from out of her purse. But he'd been taught long before that you weren't to accept candy or treats from adults you didn't know. She'd had a roll of mints and popped one out of the wrapping and put it in her mouth. He'd been watching her do this and when she noticed him and said, "Would like you one?"

"I'm not allowed to accept candies from old people."

"I'm not that old, am I?"

"Your hair is grey."

"This is true. And I suppose it's good that you don't take mints from strangers. But you were staring so I thought I'd offer."

"I'm not allowed to."

"Fair enough." And with that, she'd folded up the paper and tinfoil at the end of the roll and stuffed it back inside her purse.

Darren, however, had discovered a loophole to this rule: when ordering pizza or other food from restaurants, the people who delivered it were always people they didn't know, but his parents accepted their food anyhow. It's possible these people were actually friends of his parents, but they didn't treat them like friends. They didn't invite them them in for coffee or a dainty. So, he reasoned it was okay to take food from people you didn't know so long as you gave them money. This still didn't help him out at all because the only money he ever had was his fare for the bus. After weeks of their morning chats, the woman no longer really counted as a stranger but she never again offered him a mint and he thought it might be rude to ask for one. But he really wished she would offer.

Aside from the woman and the tabby, the other regulars in Darren's morning are a pair of magpies that were often around in the mornings. They'd pick at garbage on the sidewalks or on the roads, and once he'd watched them tear little strips of flesh from the body of a squirrel that had been run over by a car. He'd been horrified but wasn't able to look away as they took turns ripping little pieces off, tilt their heads back and swallow the squirrels bits in several gulps. He'd tried to eat his sandwich the same way at school, but tilting his own head back and swallowing made him choke. He didn't like the magpies at all. They had black, shiny eyes that never blinked. Some mornings, they would hop close to him as he sat on the bench and his knees would start to shake, but they always flew away when the older woman came walking down the road.

4.

"Darren, the assignment is to draw a colourful bird. With crows you only need the black pencil crayon. It's sort of missing the point."

"They aren't crows, they're magpies."

"Why not try to draw a macaw? I put up a poster of one on the board at the front."

"I want to draw the magpies that live on my street."

"You're doing a very nice drawing, but I want you to learn about using different colours together in the picture."

When his teacher reaches to grab his pencil crayon, Darren begins to scream.

5.

"We're going to have to take him to see someone, Tom."

"Mary, they're just going to try to prescribe him drugs. He doesn't need drugs."

Darren is sitting in the backseat of his parents car. He's sleepy after spending most of the afternoon sitting in the chair in front of the principal's office. The shoulder strap from his seatbelt is too constricting, stifling and he keeps tugging on it to try to loosen it.

His mother looks back and snaps, "You better just perfectly still until we get home. You're in enough trouble already." She looks across to his father, who is driving and says, "He bloodied Mrs. Kohinski's nose."

"It's not like he mean to. When he gets upset he thrashes a lot. Maybe she shouldn't have been so physical with him."

"Darren wasn't doing his assignment. She just tried to take a goddamn pencil crayon away. What if he'd accidentally stabbed her in the eye or something? We'd be facing a lawsuit."

"I don't want my son to go through his childhood drugged up."

"We should at least go and see what the doctors have to say."

6.

The older woman wasn't there yesterday and the little boy is beginning to worry she isn't going to show today, either. She's never missed two mornings in a row. For a few minutes, he sat on his bench, hands folded in his lap and feet swinging. He tried to resist the temptation to glance over his shoulder over and over. A watched pot never boils. But now he's standing at the corner looking down her street. The big, fat tabby sits on its haunches, slowly and carefully washing its face. Lick a paw, run the paw back over its head. It sort of looks like the boy's father combing his hair in the mornings.

"Something's happened to her, you know. She's missing."

Darren is startled by the magpie's voice. He expected them to be loud and screechy, like crows in cartoons. But the bird is speaking softly, almost a whisper. They've landed on the sidewalk, one on either side of him. It's the one on his right that's doing the talking; the one on the left is jabbing its beak into a crack in the sidewalk.

"Maybe she's sick. A tummy ache or the chicken pox. When I had the chicken pox, I had to stay home from school for a week."

The magpie makes a hissing sound that Darren thinks is maybe laughter.

"Chicken pox is for kids. And adults go to work even when they have tummy aches. Something's happened to her."

The tabby yawns and stretches and settles onto its belly. It watches the three of them, tail wagging.

"Why don't you go and check on her? Do you know where she lives?"

"She told me her house is the tenth one down."

"So go, go."

"I can't. The cat."

"We can take care of the cat for you. Fix it right up."

"How?"

"We'll need a gift, though. Bring us meat. There's some in your house. Chicken or beef or fish. Fresh."

The other magpie stops pecking at the sidewalk and says, "A bauble. A shiny bauble."

"What's a bauble?"

"Your mom has a jewelry box? Look in there."

"You want something from mother's jewelry box?"

"If you do, we'll take care of the cat."

Honking makes him jump. His bus is waiting at the stop and the bus driver shouts, "Darren, c'mon, I don't have all day!"

The magpies take flight.

"Tomorrow. Bring them. A bauble and meat."

Darren deposits his fare with a shaking hand. The bus driver tells him, "You should stay away from crows. They carry diseases."

7.

The next morning, he waits until his mother is downstairs and then walks down the hallway to his parents' bedroom, trailing his hand along the familiar texture of the wallpaper as he goes. He pauses at the doorway. He doesn't go in there very often and he holds his hand in front of him, like a mime walking into the wind. But when he hears his mother making noise in the kitchen he gulps and steps inside. He knows where her jewelry box is because sometimes he'll stand in the doorway and watch while when she gets dressed up. The carpet in his parents' room is softer and thicker than elsewhere in the house and he scuffs his feet as he goes.

The jewelry box is in a wardrobe and Darren needs to stand on his very tip-toes to get it down. He sits down on the carpet, cross-legged and picks out a gold earring, hoping it is shiny enough.

When he gets downstairs, his mother snaps, "What took you so long? You're going to be late. And where's your backpack?" She rolls her eyes, "In your room? I'll go get it but I really wish you would learn to get ready all by yourself. You're not a baby anymore."

When she's gone, Darren runs to the fridge and digs out a package of chicken breasts. He peels open the plastic wrap and slips a slimy piece of meat into his coat pocket. His mother returns to find Darren standing by the door. He takes the backpack from her and she kisses him on the forehead.

"Please try to stay out of trouble today." This is what she says to him each morning now; she used to tell him to have a nice day at school.

The old woman once again isn't there and Darren gets to the stop only moments before his bus pulls up. He hastily drops the piece of chicken and the earring on the ground, wipes his hands on his pants and gets on the bus. He sits at the very back and watches out the window as the magpies tear at the chicken.

He gets off the bus after school, crosses the street and looks down the old woman's street. The magpies are nowhere to be seen but the fat tabby is there, lying in the middle of the road where the car struck it. Darren thinks it is dead, but nevertheless avoids eye contact. He walks down the sidewalk, sensing he doesn't have time to swish through peoples' lawns. And this is a new street; he doesn't have the lay of the land. He carefully counts until he's at the tenth house.

Darren walks up to the front step, tries the door and finds it locked. He looks around. There's no welcome mat to hide a key under like his grandparents do, but there are two gnomes in the flower bed.

8.

"It doesn't look like it was foul play. Probably a stroke or something. We think she must have been dead for at least two days but we'll know more when we get the coroner's report."

Darren's father stands in the old woman's front hall, his arm around his wife's shoulders.

"How did your son know Mrs. Langley?"

"I've no idea," says his father.

His mother has her head on his father's chest and she doesn't look up when she says, "I think I saw her sometimes at the bus stop in the mornings. The same time Darren takes it to school. They probably got to talking."

Darren sits on floor, his arms wrapped around his knees. He's wearing one of the police officer's hats. If he turns his head, he can see where the old woman is lying on her front, on the kitchen floor, a broken glass beside her. Two paramedics are in the kitchen, getting ready to lift her onto a gurney.

"No one reported her missing," the officer continues. "It sometimes happens with seniors. If Darren hadn't found her, she might have been lying there for weeks."

He wishes Anna were here. She would sit on the floor with him, and hold him in her arms.

4 responses to "Week #12 - The Painted Sky "

Anonymous Reader wrote: Friday, 22 Feb 2008 18:20 We know he's autistic without the bit about him getting in trouble at school.

Dana wrote: Saturday, 23 Feb 2008 06:21 Hmmm....I didn't really think of Darren as being autistic or really having any specific condition. I don't really know enough about that stuff to write about it. I wanted to portray a kid who dwells mostly in an adult world but is rather confused and bewildered by how they act.

Debs wrote: Saturday, 23 Feb 2008 06:49 Wow, really, really nice, Dana! I'm glad I waited until now so I had time to read it slowly. I can understand why Anonymous got the autistic vibe - there's a bit of that sense in the way Darren reasons to himself, and the fact that he his attentions are often object/sound oriented as opposed to being centered on people. Overall though, I don't get the sense that he's autistic or on the PDD (pervasive developmental disorder) spectrum that autism belongs to, but he doesn't seem quite normal and there's is definitely something a little off-kilter about him. Could be that he's extremely shy and withdrawn and/or has a learning disability.

Victoria wrote: Monday, 09 Mar 2009 22:50 Like or unlike some of the previous commenters, I did get the vibe that he's autistic-spectrum, but I don't feel that it's really important to label it here. I love the tone of this story, Dana - I think it's one of my favourites of yours that I've read. You've done a very moving and effective job of creating a picture of the world through this kid's eyes. I love that he knows the magpies are magpies, despite everyone else erroneously calling them crows; that he knows things that others don't precisely because he filters the world differently and is out of touch with what they want him to see, so he understands things that they don't. I also love the bit about takeout delivery people being strangers - that's brilliant, so dead-on for the way kids think about things. I'd like to come back and read this one again and see what else I see in it. Really enjoyed it.

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