I’m getting dressed to face the day and Kallan leaps into the room and throws herself up onto the bed, “Maj is being cruel and unusual again.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
Kallan kneels on the bed to look out the window, “Something about how her sister talks too much and sings too much and makes too much noise and is too exasperating and frustrating and despicable and asking to be murdalized.” Kallan turns to me and ticks off her words on her fingers, “Maj is being all dramatic about how she is despairing and desolate and depressed about her sibling situation.” A giggle, “She is all adoring of the D words this morning.”
“Those sound like her vocabulary words for school . . . nice of you to give her the opportunity to use them all in one conversation.”
“Right?” Kallan flops down on the bed, “I was just trying to tell her about the bees that were hanging out on our front steps stretching their stingers being all manly and threatening about how they were going to impale us and she got all ferocious about how I was being inappropriate.”
I run the brush through my hair, “You advised her on the threat of manly impaling stingers?”
“Exactly . . . she went insane.”
“So stay here where you are safe, then.”
Sweeping her hair back from her face, Kallan bounces on the bed, “Oh, guess what?”
“What?”
“I have a good idea for a story, but I am too lazy to write it. You should write it and then just talk about how I inspired you.”
“Silly you. What’s the story?”
She sits up and folds her legs in a pretzel, “OK, so there’s this man who is an artist and he draws pictures of people. He draws them in pencil so he can erase when he makes a mistake, but the paper is creamy white and thick and dents beneath the point of his pencil. You know the paper I am talking about?”
“Yes.”
“OK, so he has an eraser, a good eraser, but because the paper dents beneath his drawings, his mistakes are always visible if you look closely. People always tell him he is a genius, but all he can see are the empty dents of the pencil’s mistaken paths. His pictures hang in art galleries and people buy them, but the artist guy can’t stop thinking of the evidence of his mistakes.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“So his wife tells him to stop worrying so much and take out the trash and feed the dog. His children tell him to stop slumping in a chair and come play with them. His friends tell him he is a genius and he needs to be grateful for his talents. He hears them, but he can’t make their words count.”
“OK.”
Kallan shakes her head, “Oh wait . . . I was supposed to tell you that the part of the drawings he always has trouble with are the hands. People always say that hands are the hardest thing to draw, right?”
“Yes, that’s what people say.”
“So this artist man can’t stop worrying about how he can’t draw hands, and the worrying makes the drawing even more difficult. There is more erasing and there are more dents in the paper and the man starts to go crazy. He feels like his own hands are mocking him . . . he stares at his own hands as he tries to draw hands and he just gets so angry with his failures he cannot stand it.”
“And then what happens?”
“He stops being an artist. He sits at his desk and he just stares at his hands, turning them this way and that, trying to understand the magic.”
“The magic?”
“Yes, he draws faces and shoulders and feet and necks perfectly, but there is a hostile secretive magic to the hands.”
“A hostile secretive magic? Seriously?”
“What?”
“Never mind . . . go on.”
“OK, so years pass. His wife brings him food and drink; his children sit next to him and read or do their homework; his friends leave messages. He cannot see anything but his hands.” Kallan turns her hands in the air above her face, “Like this he turns them, except when he’s sleeping, for years. His wife has to get a job as a construction worker and his children grow up and move away and he sits there, trying to understand hands.”
“Is that the end of the story?”
Kallan sighs, “At the end of the story, I will say THE END. So listen, years pass and then one day, he suddenly leans to pull open the drawer of his desk and he pulls out a sheet of creamy thick white paper and a sharpened pencil. On this paper he draws his own hands. He draws them perfectly. No mistakes, no hesitation, no erasing required. Perfectly.”
“OK.”
“And so then he is an artist again, except now he draws only hands. Perfect every time, perfect like no one else has ever been perfect, but only hands. At first, everyone is all happy he is doing art again, but then they get annoyed. People get bored with him and his art . . . they do not want to pose for hand drawings. They do not want to hang his drawings on their walls. They do not want to buy his artwork. He doesn’t care . . . he draws hands constantly . . . he is so good at it, he doesn’t even need the person to pose for the drawing. One look at someone’s hands, and he can draw them perfectly.”
“Where is this story going, exactly?”
“Hold on, Mom. Just listen. So he spends the rest of his life drawing hands. His wife dies and his children never visit and his friends fade away. His house is filled with pictures of hands . . . thousands and thousands of perfect drawings of hands. The drawings hang on the walls and pile up on his counters and slip beneath his feet as he makes his way to pour himself coffee. It’s basically like that Hoarders TV show except the only thing he is collecting are his perfect drawings of hands.”
“That’s quite an image.”
“All of these drawings of hands, and no pair of hands drawn twice. Every day he wanders the world and draws the hands of the people he sees, and every night he comes home and adds the hands to his collection.”
“Sweetie, we have to get going.”
“Wait! It’s almost done. OK, so then the man dies, leaving a house filled with drawn hands behind. When he dies, a weird thing happens . . . all of the people in his town start to feel empty inside . . . like nothing matters and will never matter again. Like they have died, but they are still living. As the days pass, the feeling spreads beyond the small town . . . it spreads to everyone who ever came in contact with the artist. This feeling of emptiness spreads to every person whose hands he ever drew.”
I sit on the bed beside Kallan, “And then what happens?”
“All the empty people are pulled to the artist’s house. What’s that word for when you feel forced to do something?”
“Compelled?”
“Yes, the house compels them. When they arrive, the door is open and the windows are open and there is a wind that arrives from nowhere and it blows the drawings out into the street and out into the fields and out over the heads of the empty people. The empty people grab for the fluttering creamy sheets of paper and they stare at the perfectly drawn hands.”
“And?”
“The people realize that the artist took their filling when he drew their hands. Their souls have been captured and pressed into the thick paper with perfect unhesitating pencil lines.”
“So do they get their filling back? I love that, by the way . . . filling. Do they get it back?”
“No, because it turns out that even though the people know that their souls have been taken, they have no way to figure out whose soul is whose. Hands have hostile secretive magic, and so even though the drawings are perfect, there is no way to match up the soul-filled hands with the empty people who once owned them. The souls are adrift, and the people are empty and sad.”
I lean to kiss Kallan’s head.
She looks up at me, “The empty people stand there in an unraked yard of souls, and then one of the empty people sits down. He sits down and he starts staring at his hands, turning them this way and that, trying to understand the magic. One by one, all of the thousands of empty people sit down and do the same.”
“The end?”
Kallan is thoughtful, “How long can you go without food and water before you die? Say you were going to just sit and stare at your hands until you died . . . a few days?”
“Maybe.”
“OK, because that’s the end of the story . . . when the last empty person folds over in the unraked yard of souls and dies.”
I stare at Kallan.
She smiles and hops from the bed, “THE END.”
I watch her as she races from the room and goes in noisy search of her sister, “Maj! I feel a sneeze coming on! Bend over so I can sneeze it down your butt crack. My gift to you . . . a reverse fart!”
AAAAAAHHHHH CHOOOOOO!
And then all hell breaks loose.
The end.
