Flash // Painter of Decay
Hiromi’s grandfather clicked his tongue when he saw the drawing she had completed. “It’s poor,” he said, lifting his paintbrush up to point at where the outline of the apple refused to touch the apple’s stalk.
Hiromi put the drawing down on the cardboard cover of her drawing book and connected the two lines with an acute angle. She raised the drawing again, but this time, her grandfather wouldn’t even look at it.
He sighed. "The colour doesn't even fill the apple’s outline, and besides, it’s the wrong shade of green. How is the apple lit? Is it as flat as in your drawing?"
Considering her drawing with a fresh gaze, Hiromi acceded that her grandfather was right. The simple green crayon’s colour didn't fill the apple in. And as for the lighting, well, it certainly wasn’t shaded at all.
Hiromi was a kid - a kid who was not very good at drawing and colouring, true, but she wasn't stupid.
"But your drawing is also completely wrong," Hiromi said. She was hoping her father would be back from the hospital already, because she knew he'd back her up against her grandfather.
A dreadful cough left the grandfather's lungs, and he straightened his posture in response. "What do you understand? Show me."
Hiromi pointed at his painting. "Well for one, the apple is green, but you have it all black and purple and ugly. It doesn't look anything like the apple in front of you."
"Tch," the grandfather clicked his tongue again. "It's a rotting fruit. I've painted the fruit as it rots. This is what it is, even if you cannot see it yet."
"But it's clearly not rotten. It's fresh and green, and I can pick it up and eat it now if I wanted to."
Hiromi's grandfather groaned and added a few more dark, viscous strokes to the painting in front of him. Moments later, he cleared his throat and spoke. "I would say that you will understand when you are older, but even your father couldn't understand this, so I have little hope for you."
A tiny fire ignited somewhere inside Hiromi at this insult of her father. She got up from the mats, walked over to the apple, and picked it up. She turned it around in her hand, searching for wormholes, dents, or bruises. There were none - the apple looked as perfect as if it were made of polished wood.
"Put that thing down," her grandfather shouted, his spittle flying past the canvas.
Hiromi raised the apple to her teeth and took a deep bite from it - as deep as she could manage, anyway.
Her grandfather shook his reddening head, perhaps involuntarily, as he continued painting.
"See?" Hiromi held up the apple. "It's not rotten. It’s just that you don’t draw what is real. You imagined the apple was rotting, so you drew that. But it wasn't actually rotting."
"You're a fool and an idiot," her grandfather uttered through long, yellowing teeth.
Hiromi grabbed the apple’s stalk, tore it off, and flung it at her grandfather. It landed somewhere between the two of them.
"Go," Hiromi's grandfather said with a cynic’s laugh and a wave of his hand. "You can't provoke me. Even your father couldn't provoke me. And you are his daughter, tried and true."
Earlier that day, Hiromi’s father had taken her to the gallery in the back of the house. Hiromi’s feet hurt from the hike up to the house, so he’d lifted her up in his arms and shown her around the gallery. He’d pointed out the awards her grandfather had won in Portland, in Stockholm, in Phnom Penh, in Lima.
He presented each one as if it was a novel work of art, but to Hiromi, they had all been paintings of decay. Decaying fruits most often, but sometimes even rotting meat and animal carcasses. The painting of a dead rabbit in particular made Hiromi close her eyes, wriggle out of her father’s arms, and run from the gallery.
Now, even as her fingernails dug into the apple’s skin, Hiromi saw that her grandfather continued staring at the apple, his frog-like eyes and gaunt face making him look almost comic in his dedication. Eyeballs darting to his painting painting, he made a few more strokes, and then looked once again at the apple.
"You're wrong, you're all wrong," Hiromi cried out. "About the apple and about my dad and about me."
Her grandfather lifted the edge of his lip, revealing a particularly long incisor. "Do you think I called you here? I didn't even call your father here, and yet the two of you came, ruining my perfectly good afternoon. Uninvited guests."
"We wouldn't have come if grandma wasn't sick."
Hiromi's grandfather grunted, an act that shook his whole body. When he next turned away from his canvas, it was to the other side of the room. He stared at the wisterias in the garden outside and grimaced.
"Once grandma is feeling better, dad and I will go away and you can paint your horrible and disgusting rotten fruits in peace."
Paint dripped from the paintbrush, making Hiromi's grandfather looked at the floor of the room distractedly. With trembling hands, he put his easel and paintbrush down, and got up to his feet.
Hiromi put the apple down back where it originally had been - except now it had marks where her fingernails had dug in, a missing stalk, and a bite. As Hiromi started to leave the room, her grandfather called her by name, for the first time she could recall. It made her snap to attention.
“Tell me,” her grandfather asked, “What did the apple taste like?”
“It was sweet, with a little bit of bitterness to it. Like all apples, really.”
Hiromi’s grandfather held onto a wooden pillar and stared at the wisterias as they hosted flitting, teasing sparrows. He wasn’t trembling any longer.
After a while, he spoke in a creaking voice. "We should go. We should see your grandmother at the hospital."