(25) Jay Hodgkins: The Murals
White
Jeans and grey sweatshirt covered in an oily rainbow of splotches, Lily stepped back to assess her newest creation, paintbrush in hand.
She was unsure of how this Egg had turned out. Her mother Monica had no doubt she was in the presence of genius. She had watched her daughter’s skills grow over the years. She had witnessed her talent, but this mural was special. It surpassed being a simple expression of a child’s creativity. This was art. Its creator, a prodigy, spreading more light than this bleak, abandoned world deserved.
Evidence of Lily’s progression was all around them. To pass the lonely hours, Monica began bringing Lily outside to paint the clinically white Eggs lining the streets of their neighborhood when she was only 2 years old. The ones nearest their old brownstone were hardly more than wild watercolor scribbles. Red and green and blue and purple; brown where all the colors bled together. The kind of thing, in a different time, a child might’ve splashed on construction paper. A drawing Monica would have affixed to the refrigerator with a magnet after carefully writing “To Daddy from Lily” on the corner, that is if Lily’s father would have stuck around.
To walk from their brownstone was to travel through time, from past to present. Eggs mercifully disguised by Lily’s murals advanced from watercolor expressions of her unbridled energy to rudimentary shapes to crude animals, figures, and landscapes. Finally, reaching the Eggs she had painted last year and this, after her 12th birthday, when she told her mother she wanted to paint exclusively in oil, the murals became beautiful to more than just an adoring mother. They were beacons of hope and life in a place with neither. Anyone’s heart would be lifted by the imagination of this child, scenes from all around the world in times past reproduced flawlessly, with Lily’s trademark touch of the dreamy surreal added, something more easily felt than described. A shame there was no one around to have their hearts lifted.
“What do you think?” Lily said.
“I love it, my little flower. It is remarkable,” Monica said.
“You always say that.”
“It’s always true.” In days past, it was a lie. Today, it is not. Lily had surpassed her mother as an artist, and Monica could not be more proud. She thought of her old gallery in the arts district, how her work gained enough of a following among social elites to pay the bills and take the occasional vacation, even after Daniel lost his job.
Lily is ready for Daniel’s Egg, Monica thought. She knows where it is, even though she’s not supposed to. Only The Company is supposed to have that information. It could create problems, but Monica resolved to take Lily there tomorrow.
Blue
“I’ve been out of work for two years, Monica. No one is hiring. There aren’t any businesses to hire anyone, other than The Company. And they only want me for one thing.” Daniel was shouting. He didn’t mean to. This wasn’t Monica’s fault. But his guilt and shame and anger needed an outlet, and she was the only one he had.
“I’m pregnant, Daniel. How could you even consider it?”
Daniel waved her off, like the brush of his hand could paint over facts the same way Monica’s brush painted the scenes of fantasy worlds that whisked her patrons away to better, happier places.
“Lily, Daniel. Your daughter Lily is coming. Don’t you want to be there for her? Don’t you think she needs her father? Don’t you want to meet her?”
“No,” Daniel said. He regretted it immediately, but he couldn’t deny it was true. This world had failed. There was no point to it anymore. Everyone just lived online anyway, and those who didn’t were as miserable as him. At least he was considering the nonviolent route. There were so many family murder-suicides, the news wasn’t even reporting them all anymore.
He hung his head so that his long bangs fell over his eyes and protected him from the force of Monica’s heartbreak. She knew the answer was true, too, observing it in his shape and color more than heeding his words. What she saw was more reliable than what he said; the subtle fibers of his body, the texture of his energy. Daniel swept his hair back from his face and walked out the front door, grabbing his coat as he exited into the cold blue air of another bleak, never-ending dusk.
Red
Monica and Lily stepped outside the brownstone into a day that almost passed as pleasant. The sky was its lightest shade of grey, almost white. The harsh winds were still for once. The Eggs covered by Lily’s painting were vibrant, twinkling even, in the pale rays of morning light.
It was a coincidence they lived on Pollock Street. It wasn’t even named for the artist, though it was fitting given the erratic, slapdash aesthetic of Lily’s toddler years.
“These Eggs are SO embarrassing, Mom. Can I repaint them, PLEASE?” She held up her old shoebox of oil paints and brushes as if she couldn’t wait to start.
“Absolutely not, my little flower. These are the dearest ones to me. They remind me of when you were little and so sweet and you didn’t suffer from tween mood swings.”
“Ugh,” Lily groaned, but her smile betrayed her feelings. She loved that her mother loved all of her art without judgment. It made her feel safe.
They walked past the stretch of Eggs Monica grouped in her mind as Lily’s Family Period. Her creations were as much therapy as they were a creative outlet or a channel to expel energy. For the rest of Pollock Street, before they turned right two blocks down, for the length of perhaps 100 Eggs, which took more than a year to paint, they passed one mural after another of a child, a woman, and a man. Sometimes there was a dog. Sometimes the man changed, from the Cool Dad of Lily’s sweetest dreams to a man with something cruel and unknowable about him. The latter was closer to the truth, Monica thought.
Next to the last Egg at the corner of Pollock, where they turned onto Red Road, there was a utility box that managed energy input-output and food supply to every Egg on the block. A short food line ran above ground directly from the Egg to the utility box. In the mural covering this Egg, Lily painted her father throwing a tennis ball through the air while Monica stood next to him smiling. The forever young Lily’s painted hand wrapped around the food line where it connected to the Egg. This line, Lily painted as a dog leash that led to the utility box, where it attached to the collar of the big red dog from the children’s books, which was leaping in the act of catching the tennis ball.
That painting was the one when Monica realized her daughter saw the world in angles and dimensions Monica could not see.
“Mom!” Lily said as they rounded the corner onto Red Road. Monica knew that tone. It meant danger. She followed Lily’s wide-eyed gaze across the cracked and cratered asphalt of the empty street. There was an old man admiring one of Lily’s Egg murals. It must have been one from when she was 8 or 9 years old. It was as bright and beautiful and hopeful as the man was threadbare and grim. His long, grey beard dripped over an olive green jacket buttoned up to his chin. He hacked and coughed and blew his red bulb nose into a matching wool hat that he’d taken off to soak in the weak sunlight on his bald head.
Lily and Monica stood as still as possible, as still as the Eggs that surrounded them on the sidewalk, as if they were Eggs themselves as if the weeds struggling out of the cracks would grow around their ankles and anchor them to their place on Red Road forever. And yet, it didn’t surprise them when the man noticed their presence. It was so rare to share the air with another human being, the energy between bodies crackled like static electricity.
He swiveled to look behind him, and after searching up and down the road, his eyes fell on them. He looked startled at first, frozen, then he smiled. He was smiling at Lily, Monica could feel it, and she didn’t like it.
“Hey, you’re the one who painted all these Eggs,” the old man said. Great, Monica thought, he’s been watching us.
“Let’s go,” Monica whispered as she wrapped her arm around Lily’s shoulder and pulled her in close. She considered steering them back to their brownstone, where she’d lock the door and pull out the shotgun from the cavity hidden under the floorboards, but her plan for the day was too important.
Today was too perfect. Lily was ready. It had to be today.
She could feel the man watching them as they walked away, and she jumped when she heard him call after them. “Maybe you could do my daughter’s someday,” he said. Monica turned her head and was relieved to see he wasn’t following them. She picked up her pace, shoveling Lily along so quickly that the young girl had to trot to keep up, rattling her paints and brushes in the shoe box as she went.
Yellow
Monica resented having to clean house on mornings after working long evenings at the gallery, all while carrying around an increasingly large object in her uterus. Daniel should have been taking care of his pregnant wife; with no job, he should have been doing all the cooking and cleaning. But he was too proud.
She resented it until she found the pamphlet from The Company in the dresser under his socks, and the receipt from his order tucked inside. Everything about him was listed on the receipt. His name, Social Security Number, age, height, weight, blood type, allergies, dietary restrictions, and the information for a bank account that Monica had never seen before. Jesus Christ, she thought money had been a little tight, but she let Daniel keep the books so he could feel useful.
“What the fuck is this, Daniel?”
If Daniel was surprised to see Monica brandishing the pamphlet in one hand while she held her oversized pregnant belly in the other, he didn’t show it.
“Don’t freak out, Monica. You just have to put a deposit in for the Egg and installation. Once everything is all hooked up, The Company starts monthly payments. You and Lily will be taken care of.”
“Lily doesn’t need money. She needs a father.” Monica was hysterical. Daniel kept bringing it up, more and more since the Eggs had started appearing on the streets right outside their doorstep instead of just lined up along interstates and major transmission lines, but she didn’t think he’d go through with it. Not really.
“A father provides for his child,” Daniel said. He, on the other hand, was calm, icy even. Like he was already gone. In a way, he was. “Lily will be in the VR scenario I chose. She’ll be 12. It’s a perfect age. Still innocent, but old enough to have interests and a mind of her own.”
“That’s not Lily, you coward. Lily is right here.” Monica crumpled the pamphlet and let it fall to the floor as she caressed her stomach, which jumped with unhappy kicks and gyrations from the baby girl within.
“You could go with me. They make them for families.”
Monica walked out of the room to their bedroom and locked the door. When she returned, Daniel was gone, as was the crumpled pamphlet from the floor.
Black
“What about this one? The light here is nice.”
“No, not that one either, my little flower.”
“But we’ve passed a hundred perfectly good Eggs already,” Lily protested. “And do you have to call me little flower? I’m 12.”
“You’ll always be my little flower, dear. We’re almost there. Be patient.” Monica took the shoebox of paint and brushes from Lily to make the long walk to downtown a little more bearable.
When they arrived, Monica had to take a deep breath to compose herself. She had only come here once before, years ago, to scream at the thing and beat it with a steel pipe, but she got scared off by The Company’s drones circling overhead. Her whole body trembled and the tears were at the brink of bursting the dams of her eyelids. Her lips were dry, mouth like the thick paste formed in the potholes when yesterday’s rain-soaked into the deposits of ash and old garbage.
Lily looked at her mother, scanning her from head to toe, taking in her shape and color. “This is his Egg, isn’t it? Father’s?”
Monica closed her wet eyes and nodded yes. She had built this moment up much differently in her mind. She had imagined offering words as beautiful as her daughter’s murals to ease Lily’s distress. Instead, it was Lily who consoled Monica. She was relieved by her daughter’s mercy; that she didn’t have to explain.
Eyes still shut, Monica felt Lily take the shoebox from her and heard the light rustling as she set it down on the sidewalk and began to choose her colors and brushes.
Monica kept her eyes closed and could see Daniel inside the Egg. She imagined him in there, prostrate and dressed in The Company’s plain white uniform for “guests.” You coward, she thought for the millionth time, imagining him in there with the food and shit and piss lines hooked up to the ports they had drilled into his flesh. How comfortable he would be in the recycled heat from his body that also sent power onto the grid. How hollow that existence must be, connected to all the other cowards too weak for the real world, living a virtual life in exchange for having his actual life sucked out of him for The Company’s gain. She imagined following the food and shit and piss lines from the ports in his body to the shell of the Egg and back out into the cold, dull, miserable, empty world he left behind for her and Lily.
But when she opened her eyes, she saw that the world was turning into something greater. Rich, saturated colors were coming alive on Daniel’s Egg, taking shape as Lily conducted magic through her paintbrush.
As Lily mixed a vibrant pink onto her palette next to a series of syrupy reds and oranges, Monica gasped. She saw what her daughter intended. Incredible, beautiful. This would be her daughter’s finest mural yet. But Lily paused.
“What is it, my little flower?”
“I think I need to finish this one alone. Do you mind giving me a little space? Maybe an hour or two?”
Monica hesitated. What about the man they saw? They hadn’t come that far. But here, in downtown, The Company secured the streets with drones. There was no threat.
“I’ll go get us lunch and a coffee from the auto fulfillment center,” Monica said.
“I want mine black.”
“Black?” Monica raised an eyebrow. “No sweetener or cream powder?”
“No thanks. I’m not a kid anymore, Mom.”
She’s become such a serious child, Monica thought. No surprise, in this place. But there was something about her seriousness, just like Daniel’s. Even in his absence, she was like him.
An hour was all Monica could bear to leave her child alone, but when she rounded the corner from the auto fulfillment center with coffees in hand and lunch in a bag draped over her forearm, she thought she had made a wrong turn. She didn’t see the Egg, the beautiful kaleidoscope of reds, oranges, and pinks over tropical blues and greens from the picture Monica kept hidden in her dresser at home; the picture of Daniel and Monica on their honeymoon.
After a hummingbird-in-flight flutter of the heart, Monica saw Lily sitting on the curb. Adrenaline and relief flooded through her body at the same time, competing for space in her bloodstream and nervous system. Monica’s daughter was staring into a black nothingness, dried tears staining her cheeks but jaw set high and proud, exaggerating a strength she hoped to convince herself she possessed.
The Egg was black. Completely black. Covered over in thick, tar-like black oil paint.
“What did you do?” Monica gasped.
“He didn’t want us. He didn’t want to be part of our world. Now he’s not.”
Daniel’s Egg was a void in the landscape; like the space it occupied didn’t exist. It was a wrinkle in the fabric of the real world. Monica wasn’t sure if Lily intended the other meaning her art represented, the void in Monica’s heart and in Lily’s life where Daniel was supposed to be.
“It’s perfect, my little flower. What a beautiful mind you have. A beautiful mind of your own.” Monica said, reflexively cradling the invisible hump over her flat stomach. “He knew what you’d become, and he still saw no color in the world. He chose darkness. You’ve given him exactly what he wanted.”
Jay Hodgkins' short fiction has appeared in The Legendary, Pythia Journal, Oblong Magazine and the Eunoia Review. You can read more at www.jayhodgkins.com. He has written five complete novel manuscripts and thinks two might be pretty decent. He earned a master's in creative writing with distinction from the University of Edinburgh and a bachelor's in commerce from the University of Virginia. Jay currently serves as editorial director at UVA’s Darden School of Business. Previously, he worked as lead speechwriter for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. As a journalist, he won seven awards for reporting from the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Association.