This was for Jelly and Jabber's grammar contest. The title, "Du Og Meg", is from an Of Montreal song. It's Norwegian for "You and I". I wrote this very quickly, which means it most likely needs buttloads of work (hopefully not with grammar though! ^_^
_____
The paint came out of the tube in thick globs, the brick red color falling onto the palette in its respective circlet. Meg rested on her elbow on the floor of her apartment, mixing her colors, the canvas at her feet as white as a Kleenex.
Her apartment was lined with her paintings, the canvases and the cardboard covering the bare plasterboard wall. Between the canvases there were only a few pieces of furniture, and then the creaking wooden boards of the floor, splattered with dried droplets of every color. Crumpled up sheets sat in the corner of every small room, caked with colors that blended to brown, black, and dark blue. The air smelled like chemicals, acrid scents tickling the nose, the heavy fumes of paint enveloped over everything that occupied the room.
Home acerbic home, she mused.
The apartment wasn’t in the best building, or in the best part of town. Her wallet sat on the flimsy kitchen table, a room over, a single dollar crinkled inside of it; as an artist, she tried to squeeze a life out of the smallest units of money. She was lucky to possess the things she did, and it was not surprising if she lost them.
Meg sniffed, scratching at her head and turning from the palette. The blank canvas was a gaping mouth at her feet, meaning to swallow her up. Beside it, leaning against the coffee table, were two paintings spotted with mangled hues and shapes that bent over each other, all of the paint twisting and forming nothing that meant anything to her. They looked horrendous; they weren’t anything she intended them to be.
She had an electric storm of thoughts in her head, emotions that dripped from the crevices of her brain and seemed to stain the whole of her, yet she couldn’t get them to come out of her hands to be vented upon a canvas. Unable to be released from her, they solidified inside her mind and made her feel heavy, clogged up all of her mental processes.
She had stopped answering her phone. Occasionally it trilled and begged for her to lay her hand upon it, but she resisted. She couldn’t bear to speak to her mother anymore. The woman was stretched thin, now nothing but strained wires, her fabric splitting and curling as one blow hit her after another. Her mother was composed of depression and nothing else; she walked with it, she used it to eat, she used to it breathe, and it was what helped her get into bed.
There was nothing more Meg could say to her. The woman had acquired her last stroke of misery when Meg’s older brother was arrested the week before, and now she couldn’t be comforted. Not when her husband was long gone, locked away in penitentiary, having brutally raped a little sprig of beauty picked up at a bar, solidly convicted and sentenced for a significant block of years.
Meg had long ago accepted the creature her father was. She moved through a cathartic period and now she couldn’t find herself to care about him. But now her little brother, Mike, was most likely off to the same place. Several accounts of robbery, breaking and entering.
She could only think of the little boy he had once been. When they used to unravel bed sheets from the closet and drape them over the dining room table to make tents. When they would make up games on the trampoline in the backyard, doing backflips and bringing their bouncing balls onto the hot knitted cloth, watching them fly up toward the sky as they jumped. Her brother giggling, running inside when the sun had them sweating and soaked, standing on his tiptoes to reach the lemonade on the counter.
But they had grown up, and now he was only ruining himself. Now he was off to court and sentences and then she wouldn’t see him; her sweet memory of him would be blocked by this new frightening image.
She was frustrated with her family, with her finances. It was all too big for her. She couldn’t take her tiny stained hands and hold everyone together, she couldn’t sell her paintings, and now she couldn’t even paint. Not even when she had so much to express, when she felt anxiety devouring her nerve endings.
All she wanted was to get it out of her. Throw her anger and grief into a tangible outlet, so she could hold it before her and slowly, but eventually, get over it.
Meg dipped her fingers into the yellow paint on her palette. She rubbed her fingertips together, watching the gleaming color seep between her fingers and stain her fingerprints the color of sunshine.
There was nothing stable in her life. Even her talent, her passion, wavered in and out like an old lightbulb. Something especially unsettling when it was her source of income.
Standing up, Meg cradled the palette in her arms. It was balanced on the palm of her hand as she walked into her little rusting kitchen, sauntering to the sink and lowering the circlet into the stained steel bowl. The faucet, cranked full blast, washed away all the mixed paint, the bowl turning blood red and a clotted purple.
She turned on her most recent paintings next. Her bathtub was filled to the brim, flecks of water raining down everywhere as she let the canvases drop into the clear bath, the liquid enveloping them and dragging them down, soaking into the cloth pores. The water washed a pale gray color.
The wisps of unraveling paint coming from the canvas caused a twisting feeling in her chest, like her heart was being pinched and plucked. She stood over the tub, destructive, thinking of her little brother’s round face, her mother’s lilting voice on the phone, begging of her, “What did I do wrong? What did I do?”
She felt it was time to do something normal. Mass art destruction wasn’t making her feel well off, or any closer to being on the same level of all the simple, quiet creatures of her apartment building.
Taking her plastic laundry hamper, Meg dragged it across her home, catching articles of laundry and casting them in. Her muscles were taut with stress, her shoulders humming with fatigue, but she needed to focus on laundry and nothing else, or else she would destroy more of her art, or call her mother, or turn on herself in some way.
Downstairs in the washing room, she slithered her hand all around her pocket but found no second quarter to complete the required change needed to activate the washer. She exhaled, trying to maintain her composure; there was always a coin or two lost under the vending machine in the front hallway. She headed down the small set of stairs that connected the washing room with the front of the building.
The rows of sweets and junk food blended with her reflection on the glass. Carefully, she dropped down to her knees, placing her cheek to the cold tiles of the floor. The space underneath the vending machine was a dank underworld of dustballs; in the far back, leaning against the back wall was a quarter, strung up amongst cobwebs and dead flies.
Meg drew in her breath, inching her hand underneath the machine, her fingers crawling along the tiles and through the dust. She managed to reach the coin and withdrew her arm, clumps of dust bunnies coming along with it, a dead spider stringing far behind Washington.
Cringing, she slid the quarter along the sides of the vending machine, knocking off the dust and curling corpse of a spider. She sat up with her triumphant find, misjudging her movements and whacking her head on the doorframe beside the machine. She let out a whimper, struggling to her feet and balling her fist over the coin.
Back to the washing room. A throb was beginning to pulsate on the back of her head, and her eyes were tearing up involuntarily. She fingered the quarter, rolling it around between her fingers as she reached her hamper and the washer. Jamming the money into the slot, she listened to the clinks as her fee registered through and the dials on the washing machine became accessible.
After dispensing her laundry into the mouth of the machine, she spun the dial and listened with disbelief as the unit roared and sputtered; her laundry flipped around inside, then fell out of its dance to lie still at the bottom of the chamber.
A cry of frustration escaped her. She felt the tears becoming more voluntary at each passing moment; she whacked her sneaker into the side of the washer, but it only hissed at her and made a few more wheezing noises before falling into silence.
“Why does nothing work?” she gasped out, pacing for a moment in front of the machine, her hands balled up at her hips. Her patience for life in general was wearing thin, and she heard the seams rip as it was stretched and yanked by circumstance.
She turned the dial, the machine clicking and huffing. Her clothes flopped around once and then the turning stopped again.
A thought entered her head. She couldn’t even do the laundry. Everything in her life was out of order.
She kicked her empty laundry hamper in an explosion of aggravation. The flimsy thing smacked into the washer, cracking when it did, letting out a loud snapping sound. She stared at its wobbling plastic frame, barely able to catch her breath.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” The voice came from the doorway of the washing room. “Do you need some help?”
Meg was startled by the new presence, since her miniature tantrum was personal and not expecting an audience. She turned from her cracked hamper to the person addressing her.
It was a young man, a member of the same unfortunate generation as her, buttoned up in a striped shirt and dress pants. He carried his own hamper piled to the brim with laundry, and his head was tilted atop the crumpled pants and shirts, his expression searching for explanation or any response at all.
She recognized him as the building proprietor’s son. He lived in his own place on the third floor; he looked nothing like the little Greek woman who ran the place, though he had the same wild bush of brown hair, as thick as brushwood.
“I, uh,” she mumbled, tucking her hair behind her ears, looking helplessly at her surroundings. “I’m just frustrated right now.”
“Yeah, I get ya,” he said, walking over to her and looking at the defunct washer. Putting down his hamper, he reached into his pants’ pocket and pulled out a plastic bag of quarters. “Here, I’ll pay for a new machine for you. This washing room is ridiculous; I don’t why my ma doesn’t listen to all the complaints and do something about it.”
“Yeah,” she laughed, her voice sounding rasped and thin. She pulled out all of her clothes in a clump, shoving them into a new washer as the proprietor’s son slipped two quarters into the slot. She was exasperated, but found herself appreciative for the help. Crouched down by the washer chamber, she peered up at him over the machine’s door. He was even attractive from that angle. Embarrassment washed over her as she realized what a fool she had made of herself with her kicking spectacle.
“There,” he said, stepping back. He looked down at her, his eyes crinkling as he observed, and she felt her skin prickle and pale at what he might be thinking. “You know, you don’t look so good. I’ll get you a water, okay?”
“Oh, no-”
“You’re Megen from the fifth floor, right?” She nodded, feeling like a bobblehead, and he grinned and explained himself. “My ma said something about you. You’re the artist.”
“Well, sort of,” she fumbled out, clutching her one arm and pinching at her skin. “I try to make a living as one, and it works out as well as you can imagine.”
He smiled at her; his teeth were as white as her blank canvases. She smiled back, lips pressed tight, knowing of the coffee stains. “Actually, most call me Meg,” she amended, nodding her head flippantly.
“I’m Theo,” he said, his hand reaching out and enveloping hers. She stared down as they shook, surprised at the heartiness of his introduction. “I’ll go get that water now, alright? You’ll be here?”
“Oh! I’m really fine,” she tried to explain, but he was already heading out the door.
She shuffled around the washer and turned it on; biting at her nails, she quietly exited the washing room. She lowered herself onto the steps in the front hallway, aghast with herself. She had not met anyone new in a long time. She found herself grasping for what to say or how to act. The last few days had been entirely composed of her own worries, her own problems doing acrobats in her mind; interacting with others and forgetting those things were a sudden task.
Theo entered the hallway a moment later, bringing the bottled water to her on the staircase. He sat beside her as she twisted the cap open and took a swig, the cold water making her tongue come alive and her face cool off.
“There. Is that better?” he asked, leaning against the wall, his arms wrapping underneath his knees. He smelled like paper. “You looked pretty pale and manic back there.”
“Mmhmm.” She took another drink, enjoying the fresh taste.
He was quiet for a moment. “Y’know, you look like an artist,” he said then, his face cast with amusement and even a flash of mischief.
She laughed into the bottle, looking at him out of the corner of her eyes. “Oh? So I look exhausted, poor, and haughty?”
“No, not what I meant,” he laughed. “I mean, you look interesting.”
Meg twisted the cap back onto the bottle and gave him a sharp look, one eyebrow arched. “Wouldn’t you like to know? Smashing laundry hampers is only one talent of mine.”
“And here I was thinking that you did that so deftly that you couldn’t possibly possess any other skills.” He seemed as young as her, yet laugh lines streaked around his eyes as he grinned. “Y’know, you and I aren’t so different. I’m a writer.”
“Oh? What kind of writer?”
“Well, I’m a journalist.” He shrugged with his hands. “I’d rather be a more artistic sort of writer, if you know what I mean, but my manuscripts really don’t catch on as hotly as my news articles do. Such is my talent.”
“I know how that is,” she said, her eyes wide as she nodded.
“So,” he spoke up again as he watched her. “Do you need anything else? You looked so unbearably stressed out back there it made me unnerved to see. I don’t want you pulling all of your hair out, now.”
She already appreciated the fifty cents and the water he had given to her. Her little brother’s face flashed before her eyes, strained a horrid purple color, dressed in a gray suit in a courtroom. A realization of what she needed came to her.
“I just need to forget,” she said, her voice solemn. She expected him to inch away – after all, people generally didn’t seek conversation in someone with a hassled demeanor. But he rested his chin in his hands, looking more into their dialogue than out.
“You probably usually paint when something’s bothering you. Why not do that? An artist’s anguish is a canvas’s weight to bear.”
“I tried. I just can’t get anything to come out. All my most recent paintings look like shit,” she murmured, curling one strand of red hair around her finger, scrutinizing the split ends. “I threw them all in the bathtub.”
“That’s some serious frustration. Once, after typing up a rather horrendous fiction, I printed it all out and burned it over the stove. The backspace button wasn’t enough to wipe away my dissatisfaction.”
She found herself smiling at this. “So maybe you do understand. I would think it would be easier to be a writer. Your tools are so much simpler.”
His mouth opened in mock fury, and he shook his head in a wild gesture of protest. “No, no, no, Miss Meg. You have your brushes and paints and whatever, but I’m working with the entire English language. Every single word, I wonder, does it complement the next? Every single sentence is something that can be reworked and constructed a hundred different ways, but I have to find the right way to phrase it. Not saying that what you do isn’t difficult, of course. Any art is something to master.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied, feeling awful to have bashed his work. He was truly being sweet toward her, and she didn’t want to undermine him. “I didn’t mean it as a bad thing. I don’t know, I’m too frustrated to be talking to another human being right now.”
She gathered herself up, about to stand, but he held out his hand.
“No, wait. Maybe you’re trying too hard. Maybe you need to think less, and then act.”
Her body relaxed a little. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re thinking too much about what you’re trying to paint. Carefully constructing it, when that’s not what the situation calls for. Maybe if your thoughts are chaotic, you just need to let some colors fly out.”
She slowly stood, leaning herself against the wall, her feet sliding out in front of her.
“Like, when a writer is upset,” he tried to explain more. “And he writes this long winded story or letter about it. Without thinking it through, just letting the words fly. Maybe that’s what you need to do with your art.”
She chewed on her lower lip, realizing what he meant.
“Have you ever thrown paint?” he asked.
A smile bloomed on her face, and she felt a childish joy flood her.
He took her hand, an extremely forward gesture but one that she accepted. There was something lovingly boyish about him and she sensed no harm. Their footsteps up the stairs echoed in the narrow, musty stairwell, disturbing the cobwebs high up in the corners. Moths scattered around the lights, disturbed by their flight to the fifth floor.
Her apartment door whined as she opened it. She left it open as they walked inside, and she felt a momentary shame for the mess and lack of real furniture. It passed though as the art all around her reminded her of her goal.
The large pails of paint were in her closet, the small space reeking of turpentine. Theo wrinkled his nose but helped her with the pails, lugging them out into the living room. Every color stained their fingertips. Next was the white sheet, tacked to the wall behind the expansive canvas. She pinned it to the plasterboard, feeling as if she could fall into the white.
There was an immature desire to their actions as they pried the lids off the pails, meaning to destroy the crisp white canvas surface, yet create something out of her frustration and his understanding for it. The thick smell of paint devoured the apartment, even after Meg opened a window to let the dusk air battle the chemicals.
She could taste her expressions on her tongue, and every color had its own flavor: how sweet pink was, like star fruit, and red was as salty as blood, as thick. She dipped her hands into the blue, the color dripping from her rising hands, and she streaked it across the canvas. The electric blue cut through the white, flecks sucking into the cloth pores, the white inhaling the offensive color.
Theo said he had a better way. He picked up the pail of pastel green, swinging it forward, blobs of green reaching out and catching the canvas like grasping fingers. The two of them beamed as the color snaked downward, seeming to be alive and mobile.
The paintbrushes were all on her coffee table and she scooped them up, brandishing them like glorious weapons, picking out the largest ones to do her heart-filled vanquishing. The bristles of the brush soaked up the violent red color and she streaked it across the canvas, her mind filling with images.
Her mother’s voice choked over the phoneline. A whirl of lipstick red.
Daddy in an orange jumper, vowing, “I didn’t do anything wrong.” Orange circles, swallowing black.
Little brother Mike with his eyes swollen over. Purple scratching into the canvas, bubbling and cascading over the rest of the colors.
The energy drained out of her, sucked into the art, and she knelt before her work, her hands black and brown with the riotous mixture of colors. Theo knelt down beside her, staring at the flecked and whipped painting before them, feral and looming, haunting with its wild disarray. A halo of admiration around him, he looked to Meg.
Bliss made her face glow, a smudge of violet on her chin; she observed her work with a satisfaction that seemed too brilliant for a human being.
“Are you free tomorrow?” he asked, hesitant to take her from her happy place.
Her head turned sharply toward him, but she nodded.
“Want to go out for coffee around lunchtime?”
Her nodding slowed; a smile teased at the corners of her mouth. “Of course.”
He left then. She felt like dancing as her door shut, and her bare feet padded on the wooden floor as she escaped to the window. She stuck her head outside into the brisk air, breathing in the luscious fresh night, letting it awake her from her trance.
She had been feeling so lost, scrambled to bits, and then there he was, with a conversation that seemed more real than any she had carried on over the past few months. Her lungs expanded, she felt her heart patter – she hadn’t ever felt so human.
And she would see him tomorrow. She had never been more excited about talking to another person. The whirling feeling of hormones in her veins made her giddy and she collapsed onto a pillow, her fingers curling into the fabric.
It felt like a salve to finally forget, to let her worries flake off like snow.
There was nothing like falling.
Better go with the easy route so it gets done faster!
