The water engulfed us—black and soft
as the night, the ripples conjured up by
a faint breeze brushing against our skin
and distorting the reflection of the stars
high above. The smell of damp soil and
dying flowers hung in the air, weighed us
down, and carried us down the river while
above us the ghosts of sunflowers loomed
with weeping heads.
The sunflowers loomed tall and weeping
against the light that wilted in the sky. He
dipped his brush in the black paint and
watched it leave a smear on the palette. His
gaze was somewhere far away; lost between
the sunflower stalks far beyond the large
canvas he had placed on the grass.
We reached for the stars knowing full well
that they were unreachable, feeling the
shivers of time echo through the dark, dark
of the sky, dark of water that pulled us down,
dark mind that spread its thoughts like tentacles,
like roots. Listen!
“Listen!” he whispered and paused. He traced
the outline of the sunflowers that were growing
on the canvas with his eyes—black and dull where
the paint had already dried, glistening where it was
fresh. But there was nothing to listen to. The evening
was quiet. It smelled of burned grass and dust. There
was no wind in the trees. No birds were singing. Even
the house behind him sat silently in its place as if
abandoned. “Listen!” he whispered and his voice
was like a sound in space. The paintbrush slipped
from his hand and landed on the ground. He did not
pick it up but dipped his fingers in the paint.
The sunflowers bowed their heads softly and murmured—
“Listen!”—closer than the stars, and yet unreachable. And so,
we held onto their mirror image in the water instead, grasped
wavering stems and leaves warped in shadow.
“Listen!” we whispered, our voices weaving in and out of the
sky, getting caught in droplets of water, the currents of the
stream, digging deep into the riverbank.
His hands were blackened, paint spread up to the wrists, the
elbows. Like a sleepwalker, a mad fever raging in his eyes, he
smudged shapes and scratched patterns into the paint.
“For the stars we reach—” Darkness dripped from his eyes.
“Unreachable—” It rained on the canvas, pooling, reaching like
tentacles, like roots.
“All around—” The paint on his skin bled into the paint on the canvas.
“Our voices. Unreachable. All around—” And as the day bled into
the dark, the painter bled into his painting.
We were weightless; ageless; timeless— tethering between the
vastness of the sky and the ever-changing confines of water tracing
the riverbed. As above, so below, the empty shells of sunflowers
float alongside us.
Written by Merle Emrich.
Cover photo by Kilian Peschel.