Long time no short story!

Hello! I have a new short story, finally! It isn't much more than a monologue, but I'm pretty happy with it.  I like the mood of it, and I'm particularly fond of my Canadian artist references.  I wanted: a well-known love ballad song appropriate for piano bars, and a singer with a folk-music style appropriate to Abby's personality.  I found ones that were Canadian, and bonus - the second is a visual artist too.  Also, Gordon Harrison is cool, you should look him up. Also, Friday's Roast Beef House was a real piano bar in Ottawa until not too long ago.

I hope you enjoy this moody monologue as much as I did writing it!

(Oh and disclaimer: characters and situations depicted in this story are entirely fictional.) Except for the artists of course - and the pope, he's real! That's another thing! I joked about writing Pope Francis into my next story but then I took myself up on it.  Also, Mr. Seymour is a joke in our class; we are (most of us) writing a character named Seymour M. into our story, named after our professor.  I dropped the M because I liked Mr. Seymour better.

(P.S. No joke, I now have our National Anthem stuck in my head.  My subconscious is laughing at my desire to be explicitly Canadian in my writing.)

The Perfect Shade of Blue

“The Home of a Broken Artist.”

I took that sign off the mailbox shortly after putting it up, thinking “broken” was maybe too dramatic, and it might invite trouble from those crazy Catholics, who I suppose think it’s their “Christian duty” to befriend their lonely neighbour.  The sign sits in my living room now, the word “broken” gloating with ironic glorious-blue beauty over the excuses for art cluttered around it.  I tried making another sign – “Abby the Artist” – a legit artist! A legit delusional loser artist.  Then I gave up on signs.

From where I’m lying, I can see every inch of painted canvas in the entire room.  Next door, the Catholics are having a huge party to celebrate their new pope.  It’s as though the wall between us doesn’t even exist.  “Francis – so holy – Jesuit – so exciting – I love him!” – an awfully noisy party for one that doesn’t involve much alcohol.  But then, there are a lot of them, and they’re younger than I, so maybe I can forgive the noise.  Besides, we have a truce.  They can make noise, I can make noise.  They can “praise the almighty Jesus!” with their guitars, and I can sing along to my Joni Mitchell.  Plus, I have a piano; point for Abby! Sometimes we have noise wars.  I like to match their partying by banging on the piano, but today all I can do is bask in misery on the couch and stare at the failed artwork around me.

My cousin Kristy once asked me, at one of those horrid family gatherings where I have to endure all the “where are you working now, do you have a boyfriend yet, how is your painting going” questions, “How come artists are always depressed failures?”

“Where on earth did you get that idea?” I asked, astonished.  “Artists are rapturously happy.”

“Are you?”

“Of course, always!”

But I soon discovered what it was that made artists – and everyone – depressed: the onslaught of that terrible enemy, Life.  Now I lie on the couch in defeat listening to the sounds of talking and laughter – why are Christians always so happy?  They don’t seem to find that enemy so terrible.

“Broken.” It’s so perfectly painted, so perfectly blue.  These are all the reasons Life has made me a depressed failure:

1.       I don’t have a real job. 

Wendy’s rules the fast food world, but part-time burger flipping just doesn’t cut it for this wannabe painter-poet-songwriter university graduate.

2.       The boy I love doesn’t love me back. 

Under the deck at my parents’ old place I buried the key to the treasure chest I keep under the kitchen sink.  Locked inside that chest are all the poems and songs I wrote for Jackson McEvoy.  I may never get the key back, but the memory of it all is still here in my chest.  My heart, I mean.

3.       My parakeet is dead.

Let me reword that.  I killed my parakeet.  I’m not usually superstitious, but this is different.  I was writing a makeshift masterpiece on the inside of a cigarette box:

“An Elegy for Budgie”

(The height of my artistic achievements!  His name, I mean.)  When I wrote the poem, inspired by some alcohol-induced idea to contemplate the afterlife of a parakeet, he was as vigourously alive as ever.  Then I went to show him my poem.

“The Home of a Prophetess-Murderess,” my mailbox sign should say.  “Poetry with the Power to Kill.”  I killed Budgie by prophecy, and now all I can do is lie here amidst shades of blue, despising myself and finishing off an entire batch of cookies.  I had actually baked the cookies for the Catholics; I had decided once and for all to actually accept their invitation, and I was even going to bring cookies.  But then my bird died.

It doesn’t matter if I eat all the cookies though, they would have baked me something if they knew Budgie was dead.  (Maybe not if they knew I was guilty though.) Except, I had intended to bring some to my neighbour on the other side, too.  The Catholics might not even eat the cookies in Lent, but Mr. Seymour would have liked some.  Oh well.

Mr. Seymour, as I called him, actually saw my sign before I took it down.  He snorted at it and said,

“Something’s wrong with this picture.”

“What.”

“Broken at twenty?”

(I’m twenty-three, actually.)

“Isn’t it the most perfect shade of blue though?” I had asked.

“If you have to decorate, put something happy or you’ll worry your neighbours,” he’d replied.  I thought he meant the Catholics, because they always think it’s their business to worry about me, but later I realized he meant himself.  He likes to keep an eye out for me too.  I think I’m his temporary replacement for his kids when they’re not visiting.

 “Broken.”  I’m a depressed failure, eh Kristy?

This time last year, I was full of life and hope, going to school, wielding my identity as an artist like a weapon, and frequenting Friday’s Roast Beef House like I lived there.  Those nights at the piano bar, I, eager, heartsick, and hopelessly obsessed, would wedge myself into the corner of a booth until I became a wall decoration, and watch him.

In my mind’s eye I see him still.  Jackson McEvoy.  Beautiful bright eyes below a mop of thick dark hair.  I am swishing my straw around in a cocktail the most luscious shade of dark pink, pretending not to notice the voice at the piano while at the same time basking in it, letting it wash over me, drinking it in.  Sometimes my eyes lift of their own accord and glance at the boy as he sings his “I’m findin’ it hard to believe we’re in heaven.”  I both want him to see me and am terrified he will.

            “Now our dreams are comin' true, through the good times and the bad…”

I take a cautious sip of pink and give up, letting my eyes stay fixed on him.  Most of the time he barely seems to care that I exist, but I know he and I are going to get married someday.  Knew. Were.

My crush was a dark shade of pink, like my drink, and I could paint it.  We had thousands of conversations together in my head, and I wrote him piles and piles of poems and songs.

All this time, and I still have to push those memories away.  I don’t understand this state of limbo.  I felt free, I was happy it was over, and I was ready to move on, and yet I must always revisit those days, and feel ashamed and cheated.  I can’t get away from it, because the memory of him is painted all over my life. 

The feeling of losing the boy you love is the colour blue.  Whether I was peacefully floating or drowning and gasping for air, I was swimming in Blue everywhere I went.  It’s all still here, my experiments in capturing a mood on a canvas.  But none of it is beautiful.

That painting over there, though – that one is beautiful.  A green-and-yellow parakeet in mid-flight, revealing the bright blue underside of his wings.  My beautiful Budgie.  I stand up and pick that painting up.  I painted it years ago, when the prime of my artistic confidence was untainted by the onslaught of Life, but it looks like I captured his spirit just before it whisked away in a burst of colour to the parakeet-afterlife.  I remove the Gordon Harrison painting my parents gave me that is hanging over the piano and replace it with Budgie’s Spirit.  Looking at it lord over the room like a true masterpiece, I realize what the problem was with what Kristy said – it was her mash-up of three completely unrelated things. Depressed. Failure. Artist.

I don’t think I’ve failed at life, I think life has failed me.  But I also think that failure is part of the recipe for success, and tomorrow can always be better.  One thing’s for sure: I was right to say artists are rapturously happy. 

The cookies are gone, but maybe there’s a bag of chips or something I can fork up – I think I’ll go to that pope party after all.  As for my art… maybe I have nothing to show for myself but a three-year-old painting of a parakeet, but hey; if anything, I’ve really mastered the colour blue.