Clouds and Canvasses

She's a lovely canvas, isn't she?

Those words utter from mouth to mouth. I keep my head down, feet moving from one cobblestone to another.

“Look up,” says Aunt Maple.

And I do. And I see clouds. The sky is always the same. I am terrified of falling in.

“Okay. That’s enough.” Aunt Maple pokes me in the shoulder as two German shoulders pass by. The market is filthy with noise, but I hear them. I understand every single word. And I feel as if I could never inhale again.

Aunt Maple asks, “Do you like my tree?” She'd suddenly switched to French.

“What?" I ask in French. My pronunciation sounded wrong, and it left an embarrassing silence. "Um. Yes. Yes, I like your tree."

She sighed dramatically. The conversation slips back to German. “A shame I can’t see it. All the red leaves look so nice when red.” Her bangles chime restlessly.

“Would you like to be able to see it?” I return to German.

“Yes. And..I never really wanted to bring this up but you speak more German than French now. As in, so when you write, it's German." She squints at the shopping list in my basket.

A pause.

“Uh, Yes.” And I pretended to admire the blue bannered stalls.

French is home. German is- well- not home. As for shame- Shame is never changing.

What would grand-mère say, if she knew I’d drifted too far from home? And what of the books I read? They are all German. Should I burn them? I heard fear singes all things. I wouldn’t be shocked if I did burn them.

“Oh look,” Aunt Maple gasps. “Delphine is selling her canvases again! Buy some, Gabrielle. I haven't painted in years.”

I hesitate. In front of Madame Delphine’s store, a few paces ahead, were the aunts who know about my French lapses. They were my friends' mothers, the shallow, unimaginative and gossiping type.

I reached into my purse. "Here, I'll give you the money."

“Oh, don’t. The coins will just fall-”

“Why must you buy canvasses anyway? You’re dead.” It's her fault I speak more German than French anyway.

“Right.” She gapes. This season her hair is wildfire. I can see my reflection when I stare into her green eyes, and I also see what's behind her. Rainbow crowds, melting into stores. She's translucent now. She's like a mythical thing. I try to catch all her the details of her face and crimson dress before a man crashes through her. She wavers and fades into the sidewalk dust, disappeared.

At Delphine’s stall, the aunts spot me.

They splatter blood red paint, ugly grey skies, purple bruises, mud coloured brown into my skin.

She'sa lovely canvas, isn't she? They must think.

......

Aunt Maple is there at the front when I arrive home. “I saw it! My tree! Oh, it is just beautiful. I mean, very flattering-” She shook her hands and her bracelets, the ones I bought for her last year, before she caught her cold, made jingles from a Christmas melody.

Before I enter the house, I translate the things I want to tell grand-mère. (There was no more bread at the bread store. The canvas is for me to paint. I want to paint rain.) Quietly, I beg for my pronunciations to be right. For my words to not slur against my sentence when I say it aloud later.

“Goodbye,” Aunt Maple bids. Her tree looms tall near our windows.

She never follows me in. Grand-mère has never seen her ghost.

The house is bathed in the smell of fresh baked bread when I enter. Pollen-like sunbeams sprinkle the curtains. I could see the last of Aunt’s written ink words, her charcoal-marked hands on old parchment. The things she left behind when she died, I will always keep.

Just as I turn the corner, I spot a curl of white fluff around my feet.

The clouds swallowed my legs. Quietly, I was lifted up in the air. Not flying but floating. Getting closer and closer to the ceiling. My heart hammers faster and faster. The neighbours could hear it.

My basket and canvas falls to the ground with a loud thud.

I wade my arms and bring myself to the window. I open it. This is it. This is it.

“Gabrielle!” The voice is a fist that comes down on the walls. But I can hardly hear the sound. I hardly want to listen.

Grand-mère yells something. That is when she unleashes a rope. It presses hard into my arms and around my waist, scratching my flesh raw, like some pig on a farm. She pulls me down. I start begging and begging and- please, just let me go- but how can grand-mère listen? Her face, a blur in my vision- a reflection in fast current water.

“I need you here,” those are her words before she cuts the rope and unties me. “Or do you not want to be here?”

My eyes lock with hers. I am tempted to tell her no. But is that really my answer? Do I want to leave? Do I want to go?

“Come. I need help with dinner.” Hoarse voice, sharp and horrid.

I pick up the groceries and follow grand-mère to the kitchen. As she tells what to do, I stare at the table and wonder what I'd just done.

When grand-mère goes to sleep, I go through the cabinet in the kitchen for her old cake recipes. I make a small strawberry cake and creak up the stairs to my bed. I eat the cake and celebrate my first flight day with the moon.

I wanted it to know today was the only time my grand-mère was ever really horrible.

…

Paris was clean when I was a child. At least that was how I remembered it.

I could lie in the grass and stare at the sky.

Clouds are still tainted in the same colour of sun, blue, and all other colours. But they are not damaged, unlike the canvases I have seen before.

My parents left grand-mère here. To go there. All my friends went there.

“Grand-mère,” I remember saying as a child. “I wish we could stay here forever.”

“We can,” she said.

Aunt Maple tuts. She was alive then. “Everyone should fly, Gabrielle.”

...

The market hazes with smoke. Whether if the food is fresh enough, I don’t know, and grand-mère told me to not care. Pay if you can, and steal if you have to.

So I took food, and paintbrushes, payed for a canvas and a loaf of bread.

Aunt Maple reaches for my hand. We are heading back home.

“Isn’t it lovely?” She looks up.

The fluff above changes from a sheep, to a bear, to a lion, to a fish, to a giant baby.

They are more than just lovely.

“I could never fly, Gabrielle, I had to stay at home. Always. But things are different now, this generation."

“You should go,” she presses on, “Not everyone has this kind of choice. It will be too late soon, if you do not consider.”

…

I must admit.

I have tried, after that.

I lifted myself up, when I was in the kitchen.

I lifted myself, when I was outside.

I turned into a cloud, when grand-mère wasn’t there to see.

But the string was there every time. I had tied it around my waist, and attached it secretly to grand-mère’s wrist myself. I could not risk flying away.

Today, grand-mère sits on a stool. She reads me a fairytale story, a regurgitation I am too old for. Her fingers go to her hand without me realising. She notices the string, and loosens the knot on purpose.

And the option comes again. I'm three years older than before.

I look to her face.

She is wrinkled, fragile, and old. Her eyes are pleading. Maybe for me to stay. Maybe for me to leave. I don’t know.

She is my guardian, the person I have known all my life. To others, she is a grandmother. To me, she is a treasure- one I could not trade for anything in the world.

I look to Aunt Maple outside.

The tree branches are thin. Her favourite red leaves have fallen and crumpled on the soil below the snow.

I take the end of the rope, I tie the knot back, around my hand this time, and with the other end, I tie it around my grandmother’s hand.

I have made up my mind.

I could not leave this. Not her. Not Aunt.

Watching from afar would not be enough. Not for me.

So why do I weep at night?

…

Grand-mère’s funeral ended yesterday.

I had went to sleep early. When I woke in the evening, I ate everything grand-mère liked in the fridge so I never have to see them again. The next day, I find my bed stained in cake frosting. Then I trudge downstairs with a canvas in hand.

The stairs need fixing again. At the bottom of it, an endless void towards the kitchen.

I run the opposite direction to the door. Aunt Maple wasn’t there. Just her tree. I cant describe it without using the word frightening. And haunting.

"I thought you needed me here!”

I yell and yell until the cold wind comes and chokes me. The house holds its breath behind me. I realise certain things with a certain shiver all at the same time. Everything in the house was full of things people have left behind. Dust. Decaying things. And I.

I try to lift myself up.

I try,

And try,

And try.

But I have forgotten about the rope. It is still there, after all this time, somehow, stuck around my arm, the other end with grand-mère in her grave.

“No.” My cracked voice eventually turns sharp. Like hers. Like every canvas I ever knew.

“Stop. Stop. No!” I hopped pathetically. I dashed against the currents of the wind that was slowly turning into rain.

In my recurring dreams, this ends differently. In my dreams, I ran off a cliff and floated into the blue sky. My small house becomes smaller. I never return because there is no one waiting for me the way I had stayed.

…

“Mother,” Abigail whispers now, halfway into the sky, “Maybe I shouldn’t go.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.” I’m holding her hand, or perhaps she’s holding mine, halfway into the sky.

“You never left. You don’t know.”

“Leaving is scary, at first.” I tell my Abigail. “Be brave.”

Her eyes gaze to the house. Grand-mère and Aunt’s tree ruffle their leaves, as if waving Abigail goodbye and good luck.

My daughter nods.

“I will visit,” she reminds me.

I smile and let go.

When she goes, the sunset paints her softly. Yet she is not damaged. She is beautiful.