A Magenta House

Content warning: Death

Icarus – he with wings of wax and feathers, who flew too close to the sun, and came crashing down.

My boy is wild.

He is creative and hasty and brilliant. He has hands of sandpaper, rough and calloused from his years spent amongst the trees. He would swing from tendril branches, and I would hold my breath, enraptured as he landed with the ease of the squirrels beside him. 

There was little he did not attempt to climb as a child, nothing he believed he could not best. Our white stairwell quickly became pasted in chocolate finger smudges, in sticky apple juice stains, in the roadmap of his mind-mapped adventures. And when he became too big for the stairwell, he would insist on helping his father with painting the house.

Over the years our little corner of the world became known around the village as Metamorphosis, and my boy would smile as he leapt up the ladder and slashed another coat of vibrant colour onto the slats.

One year, after my mother passed away, my boy was steadfast in draping our home in the darkest black he could attain. It was peculiar. The whole neighbourhood seemed to know, simply by the ever-present blackness, the inkblot tainting the picture-perfect village, they all knew something terrible had happened, and they offered to help.

But my boy is stubborn, and he hid himself away in his own obsidian camber, climbing that internal mountain we were all struggling to grasp. He trudged on and still offered to cook meals when I was too tired to try, when I fell into that coal pit and couldn’t fathom a way out. 

My boy did not stop, and only once he could see the light flicker in my own eyes did he take out his paintbrush, grab his father, and paint the house the most gauche magenta I had ever seen.

Only once we all stepped outside to bask in the hideousness of it, the both of them dappled in flecks of pink and wetness from the oncoming rainfall, only then did we look to each other and smile again.

I got the call about his fall a month later. 

My boy had been feeling impulsive, they said. He went back to that park we always went to when he was a child, and he climbed that same tree higher and higher than he ever had before. But his body was bigger, and his muscles were weaker from a year tucked away in sorrow, and the branches had strength of smoke and mirrors. 

A broken arm, two cracked ribs and a sprained ankle. 

He never climbed trees after that. 

Tantalus – he with the luxuries of the gods, who gave these delights to those unworthy, and was perpetually punished.

         My boy is ambitious.

         He is intelligent and determined and hopeful. He has an iron stomach, built up from years eating whatever came his way. From his father’s foolhardy adventure into a culinary career that lasted all of five minutes, to my own inescapable lack of satisfaction with the routine. We all craved that which was new and exciting and delicious, and soon enough our taste buds would wither at the same sensations that glittered them before.

         There was this insane rule at his high school, one I never thought to complain about at the time but now fills me with regret. Any student that could not afford a school meal was required to bring in their own lunch from home. 

         Seems simple and fair? 

         I suppose that’s what most of us busy, willingly ignorant parents accepted. I suppose we chose to view the bells, whistles and dazzling lies veiled in fine print, when my boy saw the child who could not afford either. Who came to school each day and left at the end, belly empty and echoing.

         Johnny, was his name, this child of hollow caverns. 

         My husband and I never met Johnny, but he knew us the same way my boy grew to develop an iron stomach. For one day, my boy declared he'd had enough of the school food and requested home meals, and for the next two years we unwittingly fed young Johnny.

         Perhaps I should have paid more attention, but the years were filled in growing debt and a shrinking economy and the sinking feeling that we were all on the precipice of something far worse. From here, from this viewpoint years on, I can see the picture so clearly. I can see my boy scoffing down dinners as though he could breathe them into him. I can see him creeping about the house at night to collect snacks from our cupboard. I can see myself and his father accepting and accepting and knowing that he’s a growing teenage boy with an iron stomach and I couldn’t see that soon he began to lose weight, stopped painting the house, began to move slower but with more purpose, the way someone runs in a dream.

         The school expelled him once they found out about the four other children he had been feeding, smuggling food in and hiding it away in his locker and a storage closet no one used. 

         I can see the picture so clearly now, the landscape of my boy’s beating heart illuminating through the governed curtain of onyx. That school should have been sued. But I was so angry, so furious at my boy for hurting himself, for hurting his future, for not coming to us first.

         But my boy is impulsive and decisive.

         He owned his actions and wore his decisions like a Saint at the cross. 

         It’s so blisteringly clear. 

         I was so endlessly angry with him because I knew my boy would throw away everything he had, give himself entirely to another in a single heartbeat, if he thought it would help.

         And I could not bear to see him fade away.

Prometheus – he with knowledge and craftmanship, who stole fire from the gods and gifted it to mortals, and was endlessly tortured.

         My boy is burning.

         He cried in my arms the day he got rejected from his safety university. I sat there with him for hours as he wept, telling him that I never did think he was suited for business school, that he was much too creative for that. 

         But it was only when his father came home from work and took him outside to sit on the porch in silence, watching the amber sky dissolve to black, only then did his tears subside.

         Eventually, my boy got up as he always does and found a job working as a local glass blower’s assistant. His days passed by in the hotshop, and soon our Metamorphisis became fixed in his last addition of emerald green. But within the beating breast of our home, colour exploded. 

         A kaleidoscope of drinkware, vases, sculpture. These pieces seemed to burst forth from him as though they were locked away, and he had finally breathed out and released his true voice. 

         For two rather uncreative people, his father and I were beyond proud, taking any chance we could to invite guests over simply so we could boast about our boy and display his visions.

         Years passed as his skill advanced and our pride blossomed to a crescendo. 

         But there’s this thing you must know about glass blowing. It’s hot. Unbearably hot. They heat up glass in these glory holes at 2,400 degrees, and shape it as it cools outside, pulling and twisting and blowing. 

         Once a desired shape is created, they rush over to the annealers, which are essentially cooling boxes for the glass – still hot but less so. 

         Now, hot glass is great for shaping, but if cooled down too fast or placed in the wrong annealer, suddenly you can be faced with rivers of cracks and ripples of breakage. 

         It takes a quick-thinking, decisive mind to blow glass, and my boy was damn good at it.

         He threw every part of himself into that heat, stealing away at the burning as it tore through him. Over time his body became a sculpture cooled too fast; his rough hands cracked, the once soft skin crinkled taut over his face and around his bright eyes like a wrinkled linen cloth. Yet as the sculpture that he was wore away in the flames, it seemed nothing could dim that fire churning within him.

         I was holding my breath waiting for the sickening smash of my boy breaking off the blowpipe. I felt it hanging over him like the sword of Damocles, a threadbare skeleton a whisper from shattering.

         But he continued to steal away at the fire as though it could feed him like we never could, and I continued to boast my pride. For even though his body was withering, he was alight like never before.

         My boy is impulsive and unshakable, and once he melded into his calling, no amount of pain could tear him away from it. 

         And I loved him for it.

Sisyphus – he who cheated death twice, who was forced to eternally push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it fall down before the top.

         My boy is stubborn.

         He is impulsive and wild and determined. He married late and elected to not have children, preferring the life he and his wife carved out for themselves alone. She was lovely, a girl of late-night chats over wine, paint splatters over her clothes, and daisy flowers in her hair. 

         She was also calm, and patient, and everything my boy was not, and she captured him in her embrace and held him close as I once had. 

         It was her who called me the day my boy finally cracked under the heat. 

         He was a quick-worker who over-worked until his back nearly gave in and the pressure on his muscles cramped and the vase he was blowing high up broke off, too cool, and cleaved through his rough skin. 

         We rushed to the hospital, and I clung to his father as we took in our bandaged boy lying there, still and asleep for the first time in years.

         His wife was softly singing to him, daisy behind her ear, brushing her soft fingers over his forehead as if willing peace into his whirring mind. She reached out and laced her fingers through my own, somehow knowing without asking. 

         It took him a month to fully recover, and she held one firm palm against his back every step of the way, a gentle reminder that she was there, that he was not alone. I suppose some part of her was pleading with him to retire, for his body was quickly deteriorating, his fingers shaking more each day. 

         But how do you tell someone to relinquish that which brings them the most joy? How do you take that joy away from them?

         What do they do afterwards?

         We said nothing, and he went back to work. 

         He had decided, all those years ago, that this was his life, and he was never one to go back on a decision, no matter how much we held our breaths.

         I wanted to yell. My boy was never selfish, never completely oblivious. He was my boy, the same boy who painted our house a blinding magenta just to see me smile again, the same one who risked everything to ensure his friends did not go hungry.

         But he began to take things for granted, and forgot to see what he had in favour of what he decided long ago he wanted.

         It was November, very cold and foggy. The whole village seemed to be submerged in a haze, an omen of pathetic fallacy.

         They were driving home from the hotshop, and he was tired, so tired, and his hands were overworked and his muscles fatigued and his eye sight starting to blur. He shouldn’t have been driving. It was all I could think, could scream, for the weeks after. 

         He should not have been driving.

         But he wanted to, and she had a long day and preferred to rest.

         Yet as much as I grieved and screamed, no one grieved or blamed themselves like my boy. 

         He stole away into that familiar obsidian chamber, strengthened the walls and let himself burn.

         It was the breaking without the smash. 

         I wanted to comfort him, to hold him as he cried, but that was now the job of someone loved and gone. He did not cry, at least never with me. 

         His father took him outside a lot, rested a solitary hand on his shoulder, and they never spoke. I’m not sure what helped, if anything did.

         My boy was a ship adrift, and for the first time, he couldn’t seem to make a decision.

Achilles – he with no known weakness, who fought and grew to heroism, killed by a single arrow shot to his heel.

         My boy is alone.

         One day, quietly and without much fanfare, he went back to the hotshop.  

         We didn’t want to spook him, to deter him from it, so we waited until he had been back for a few months before we asked him about it.

         It’s all I have left. He said, sadness lining the contours of his voice.

         He taught a class there, and his students came back to him with vigour and passion, and he responded in kind, giving himself entirely to them and the fire. Rest and comfort became secondary needs; he slept in the heat and found comfort between the flickers of flames. 

         There was this one student, Marcia, who he taught from when she was a young teen to her mid-twenties. She was never the best, but he would boast about her the most. His most eager student, his most determined student, the one who would embrace the flames like a companion. 

         I think he saw himself in Marcia, saw that passion and drive in his youth that had faded away over time and withered in his body. 

         Marcia left him when she was awarded a glass-blowing scholarship at the Rhode Island School of Design. I never understood why, her technique was good, but her designs never had the wild colour and vibrancy I had come to know with glass.

         Part of me was worried that after his star pupil left for a life greater than he had sculpted for himself, he may crumble, but my boy was strong and unbreakable. 

         He spent a week more in the hotshop before finally retiring, assuring his father and me that he had nothing but pride and joy in his heart.

         I love my boy.

         He is stubborn and impulsive and passionate and caring. More than anything, he’s decisive, and so when he told me he was leaving glass blowing behind, I believed him and finally breathed out.

         It was July, and sweltering hot. The kind of hot I’d come to know in only in the hotshop. 

         I did not scream, neither of us did. We just fell to the too-close ground, our knees cracking against the tiles. I felt shallow, drowning with my head above the water.

         A heart attack. 

         After everything, a life spent teetering on the precipice of collapsing entirely, of giving himself completely to everyone and everything but himself. My invincible boy, with a heart bigger than could fit in his chest, stolen by an ill-placed blood clot.

There was no shatter of glass when he fell, nothing but a transparent crack cleaved through our ribcages.

         Months after, we went to clear out his home, the one he and his wife had bought together. I almost did not go, because the thought of entering without my boy being there burned like inhaling smoke.

         His home was haunting, and echoing. His obsidian chamber, his hollow chest, and we stepped right into it.

         And all over, on the walls, the shelves, the furniture, scattered like vines over a house, were hundreds of glass-blown daisies. 

         Perhaps a part of him knew, my too-knowing boy. But it doesn’t do well to think on that.

         My boy is many things, he is wild and ambitious and burning and stubborn and lonely. Now my boy is no more than myth.

         But here, in this hollow magenta-painted space I call my heart, my boy lives beyond the myth.

         My boy lives.