The Technicolor Sparrow, Literary Fiction by Lori Larson

[LoriLarson]

You remember the stains on your mother’s skin. Colors caked under her nails, streaked across her forehead and feathered into her eyebrows. You recall the dizzying smell of turpentine that clung to her clothes and how one night, while she whispered stories to you in bed, you reached up and pulled hardened specks of blue from her pale hair. 

            You stood in her studio as a very young child, four, five, maybe and watched her, hovering just out of her line of sight, and you believed the colors came from her, that they existed inside her belly and flowed through her arms and out through the skin of her palms onto the canvas. You wondered if they lived in you too, if you were magic like her. Even after you became aware of the many tubes- with names like vermillion, cobalt blue, burnt sienna- you were sure that her paintings were unlike any others and she was able to alter the very chemistry of the oils. Like Jesus turning water into wine.

 

**

 

When she painted, everything went away for her. She went into a frenzy. Years later, in a tent church with dirt floors you watched a woman speak in tongues and dance as if a ghost had crawled into her. It reminded you of your mother.  She moved like a woman possessed, her brushes singing clairvoyance onto canvas. She knew things. She heard things others couldn't hear, saw things others didn't see. You tried to understand. You tried so hard, sitting on the floor of the closet in her studio with the door cracked. Looking back you wonder what else you were supposed to be doing. There was no nanny, no one to take care of you. You remember hunger, hard and cold, in your stomach between breakfast and dinner. She never remembered lunch. She never remembered you.  Us. Charlotte would sometimes stay with you, curling her hair around a finger and sucking a thumb, reaching her legs up to move coats with her bare feet. It made you anxious, her languidness, her ability to lie there all day without looking out. She didn't seem interested. You were transfixed. Perhaps you have reason to feel neglected, to feel angry she paid you no attention. You only remember how you had to remind yourself to breathe, how you were afraid you’d would make a sound and distract her. She’d stop sometimes and look around sharply, staring occasionally at a corner or looking behind her as if someone was standing there. 

           She painted red faces and smeared grimaces screaming out from the canvas.

She painted little girls draped in trees, their legs dangling, their bodies lost in foliage. She painted stone walls in England with horses grazing in a field. Cafes in Paris. New York skyscrapers reflected in puddles. A small village in Germany with purple and green grapes hanging from vines like ornaments.

She painted a church surrounded by a spiked fence with a faceless figure in the corner leaning towards it.