Bright Middle
Of the Road
Weekly short stories, poems and travel writing

 

Handprint                        

1. Wasted Colours

He needed to make something good. This was what his mind kept repeating now: good for the tribe, good for his friends and family, good for himself-good for the sacred quietness of the caves. Nothing more, nothing less than this.

He was now a fair enough painter of two of the most important creatures of the Pyreneean valleys and slopes: the two that did the most to give shape and spirit to the land he knows and loves.

He’d passed through a rain of giggles and whispers, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, through the woeful attempts against his better classmates in the early years, in the face of his mighty teacher, that had struggled to smile at what he’d made and then simply couldn’t. It wasn’t in her nature to smile at a misshapen thing. Often she would simply hiss at his images, and sometimes, with grinding teeth, she would pick up the brush and cohere the unruly tangle of his colours into something alive. Into a sudden whole with nothing but a few strokes of her brush.

He had understood her from the first: had respected her, even while he hated her for it, had tried to laugh along with the rest each time. So what if he couldn't paint! A voice meant more after all.

All the same he’d enjoyed feeling the legs of a fine horse emerge suddenly out of some chance dashes of his brush, and sometimes, more purposefully, from the slownesses of his more careful colours. Limbs and moving parts would often come almost out of nowhere in spite of his care.

It was as if his hunting instincts were compressed there for a moment, translated finely into his right wrist and right hand. He wanted nothing more than to paint a thing that would let him be close for a moment to the Great Deer, the best of them, the one that could run with the life in the green. He wanted to be close to it for some moments, just sometimes, without trying to bring it down to Earth with his spear for once.

Yet all the long jogs, all the sprints, all the stealths and swiftnessness out in forest and plain couldn’t help him with the paintbrush. They only made his hand tremble, as if it didn’t even have the strength to grip even this slight stick, and the horsehair brush at its end that seemed to smile a million pitying smiles.

Thousands of days later, he now could render the two great creatures fairly well, twice out of ten quite finely. Once or twice he’d managed a deer that could leap across a twist in the wall of the cavern-once or twice he’d conjured a Great Cat that could crouch within a nook between the rocks, that could rest within the greater focus of the stone.

The old sorceress sometimes nodded in silence now at what he did. He was a better hunter, a better speaker even, than he was a painter, but the excitement of the latter was unfortunately like nothing else. It seemed his only way to get closer to the Great Deer…

2. The Soothing of the Rock

It came to that spell of days in Spring, leading up to the time when the sun was on a level with the earth. When it could look at every hour of the day, dream in harmony with the moon, remain face to face with it through every hour of the night.

Time circled back to that spell of days in which, one by one, into the darkness, alone but for a homemade lantern of wood and reed-from adolescents in the first bloom of their skill, to those elders that still lived slow and definite as stars, bent over their staffs like trees…it was the time to descend, to paint the stillness of the underground stone. To enshrine something of the best and the boldest of the life above. This was the tradition passed down since the beginning of the tribe. Its most common name was The Soothing of the Rock.

He was somewhat older now, sitting in front of the older wall. Somewhat older with each spear thrown, each deer and wild cow brought down to Earth, with each brush lifted.

He sat before the far older wall of the cave, on a rock he’d carried in, under his lantern of bunched reeds and glowing cow fat. He found himself strangely uninterested in the new pictures that ran on into the curve beside him. Before he'd always been keen to take their lead and follow. He looked instead, and for some time, at nothing but the wall.

He felt a sudden warmth and admiration, almost a love, for its patience, for its sand-white surface, for all its bound and gathered salts so still.

He didn’t notice that he was reaching for the paint pot with his right hand even as his eyes still held held the blank gaze of the wall. Didn’t notice that his right hand had become so eager it had left his eyes behind.

What woke him to them was the sound of the pair of conifer wood casks knocking against the ground like someone knocking. His neck shot them to the impact, and they saw the colour, meant for the best pictures of the season, pooling out over the stone. He felt the grits between the fixed rocks thirstily drinking them away. For a time finer even than a second, he looked. And then he did the only thing his instincts could tell him.

He put his right hand right into the paint. Staggering up from his knees, he saw the two wonderful deer on either side of the blank wall. The ones that had been recently painted over last year’s pictures that they had with winter-cold water scrubbed away in the months of cold, washed into the finest grits of the rock.

These were so fresh, so new, full of careful light.

He shut his eyes, feeling two tears blink out of the dark of the mind below them. Then he opened them, moving closer to the still wall. He continued to look at it as he had done the moment before, almost absently, and yet with a strange and absolute attention. He felt, although he knew the moment he felt it that his teacher would not forgive him, he felt an instinct that overreached his dread, immediately and completely. He knew that he could soothe and could enrich the stone with nothing but a painted hand.

The mineral silence was complete, compromising with nothing. It was good to feel it how it remained the same as he put his hand against it-how it didn’t compromise with him either-but just gathered the respect in his senses, took them into its patient hands, and began in its native voice, to speak to him.

At the farthest back of his mind, it started painting, painting pictures of The Great Deer.

But they pictures that moved, pictures that lived, worlds almost.

He could perceive, much more slowly and closely than he could in the lands above, the fearless curiosity, even with fear beside it, the light was still on in the back of the deer's eyes, and within every movement. There was a little moon of focus, something which mixed the plants moving stillnesses into its own, something which guided it through every danger and freedom, widening its eyes even through the moment of death.

Then the picture vanished back into the darkness. At the back of his mind, another took its place.

It was The Great Cat, just as steadily painted, just as slowly, just as carefully, with equal love, with equal patience. The Cat seemed equally curious and as strong as its opposite. Only its fur was like sunlight hastily scribbled and sketched, and its eyes were rounded by a sad focus of sunflowers and lightning mingled. They were as stubbornly golden as the last whispers of the sun before nightfall, staying with it, looking after it, searching for it down into midnight and beyond.

All at once, as slow as it had been just moments before, the stone dropped his mind, dropped him down plummeting, as if with the sun that fell into night, but not slowly as it does, but swift as the hoofbeats of the Deer, as the deft and deadly paw-beats of the Cat.

“ But do they rescue it?” He heard his voice whispering urgently and suddenly, pulling him back, somewhere above wherever he was. “Do they rescue it, dreaming with it through the night, and accompanying it through all the hours of the day? Do they lift it somehow, secretly, even with every beat of their hooves and paws?!”

Abruptly he couldn’t speak. The stone sank sudden teeth into his throat, bit his eyes to their widest, and then shut them into an instant sleep. He fainted away from his handprint, fell away, his spilt colours dreaming and sinking into the stone…