The Farmer’s Almanac

The Drought

        “Today, I will make art.”

            The painter stood ten feet away, paintbrush in hand, scrutinizing the white canvas. He was waiting for something, anything to inspire him. He tried squatting into a half lunge in hopes that the flow of blood would spawn an idea.

         “Perhaps I should push my dirty laundry into a smaller mess.”

         “And maybe sweep the floors.”

         “Is that the pencil I lost?”

         “Now I’m hungry.”

         “This couch would look better in the corner, no?”

The painter was thirty-nine years old with no wife and no child. The only painting he ever sold was from two years ago of a cornucopia of used napkins. A patron had bought it for twenty-five hundred dollars to furnish the empty wall facing north of his dining room.

The painter aspired to produce more than just household wall decor. His work was meant to line gallery walls and transcend the ages of history. He worked on many pieces in the next few years, but finished none. Nothing held his attention for long enough. No, nothing was substantial or powerful enough to hold his attention. Now, he struggled to find even a starting point.

After hours of cleaning and rearranging his studio, the painter found himself in the same stance as earlier, paintbrush in hand and a bare canvas.  In a spur of the moment, he smeared a stroke of black pigment across the untainted surface. 

“It must be removed.”

But the black tar left smudges as he desperately tried to scrub it off. Defeated, he threw his paintbrush on the ground and fell to his knees.

The Seed

           The Brush & Stroke Company around the corner only sold pre-stretched canvas in all the wrong sizes. The painter grumbled over the fact that he would have to walk across town to buy raw materials that could build a surface large enough for his aspirations.

As if the summer heat was not enough to mutilate the commute, the Main Street had been blocked off due to an accident. He would have to take a longer, more roundabout route through the park and cursed at the fools who were so blind as to walk into disaster. As the painter returned to his studio, he struggled to rest the roll of canvas and wooden frames on his shoulders while staggering through winding pathways.

At first he didn’t see her. He had stumbled over an uneven edge of a curb and had to pause to maintain balance. When the poles steadied, he looked up to see a sapling that had fallen on her knees a few feet ahead of him. He saw her twisted stem and how she tried to hide her face behind the petals of her hair, too timid to ask for help.  But even in her folded pose, the painter could see the tender softness of her naïveté that could be captured with cream pastel washes and blooming accents.

            “Miss?”

The young woman flinched at the sudden sound of his voice but hesitated to unravel from her shielding leaves.

            “Please, no need to be afraid. You see I am a painter. And I have been searching for so long, for something as beautiful as you to render in painting.”

Slowly, she peaked a glance up towards him with her round eyes.

            “Me?”

The Harvest

            The painter took the young woman to a coffee shop before bringing her back to his studio. Although she was nervous to open up, he eventually learned that her name was Marigold, that she had eleven sisters, and that she had fallen earlier while riding with a man with whom she shared a bicycle. He had been pedaling so fast that he did not notice when Marigold was swept away by the wind, tumbling off her seat. 

Marigold found herself drawing closer and closer to this peculiar man. She knew better than to follow a stranger to his home. Her mother had told her stories. Of course, that was before a brute had pulverized mother’s head and hastily buried her in shallow soil. It wasn’t long before her body was found but no one could recognize her from her beaten face.

It was his hands that persuaded Marigold to trust him. They danced in the surrounding air to illustrate his thoughts and painted pictures by kissing paper. It was his gentle fingers that planted Marigold on the windowsill, patting down blankets and pillows around her so that she would be comfortable.

“The light is best over here,” the painter said as he pulled back the curtain and watered her skin with sun. “Perfect.”

Marigold sat there for the next autumn months as the painter painted her everyday. He painted her even as she slept. Sometimes, she looked so delicate, so fragile, that only the curl of her body rooted in her blankets could anchor her from blowing away. When the sun rose, it would illuminate her skin so that he could see the veins that wrapped around her wrists and lips and weaved across her arms. She would let out a little sigh, barely audible, just before she peeled open her eyes to the new morning.

One night, she forced herself to stay awake and watch the painter work. Among her sisters, she wasn’t the tallest, or the brightest, or the prettiest. But this man thought she was the most beautiful thing in the world and called her his muse. She let a strap of her slip fall from her shoulder. She didn’t know why she wanted so badly for the painter to touch with his fingertips what he painted on canvas.

         “Please, stop for a bit.”

         “And come sit with me.”

         “I want to know you.”

         “Not as just a painter, but also a lover.”

         “To me, you are what gives me life.”

The Erosion

            The painter didn’t know when Marigold became ordinary. The glow that once illuminated her soft curves turned into a urine yellow that stung his eyes. Her sweet scent began to stink and gave him headaches. He had grown tired of looking at her.

            “I’m cold,” whispered Marigold.

            For the first time in months, the painter laid down his brush to sit and rub his temples.

            “I’m thirsty.”

The weather was growing colder and Marigold found it more difficult to sit next to the thin glass window that separated her from the chill. Still, she bared more skin to the painter, hoping that he would see her as a woman.

But he had been entirely consumed in his work, trying to capture her figure with a brushstroke, match her color with mixed paints, and consequently, forgetting that she was a living being that needed food, water, warmth, and love. Before, he would walk over to her to caress her cheeks in his palms and admire her beauty. Now, he walked over to reposition her limbs, muttering under his breath that they had moved.

            “Is there anything else you want? I’ll go out to buy them.”

            “Take me with you?”

            “It’s better if you stay here.”

He ended up in a bar. Perhaps it was to escape the monotony of painting the same subject for months or from hearing how alcohol inspired the mind of struggling artists. When the bartender asked him what he wanted, he couldn't name a drink.

            “Something strong.”

The bartender slid him a shot of what looked like turpentine. The painter brought the drink to his mouth, the alcohol’s fumes stinging his nostrils and its taste only slightly better because it numbed his lips and tongue after burning past them.

            “I see you’re not much of a drinker.”

Her voice penetrated his mind like velvet honey, slow, thick, and intoxicatingly sweet. Through his already unfocused vision, the painter could see the woman who now sat next to him and how her red dress Rose dangerously close to the tops of her legs that wrapped around her chair like vines.

What they said next he couldn’t remember. But at some point he had made it across town to her apartment and found his head in between her bush. She enticed him, pricking him ever so slightly to tease him. She would discover the untouched parts of his body and bare skin, prick it, and quickly pull away, leaving him begging for more. He gasped as her thorns tightened around him.

         “Plant your hand there.”

         “Another one here.”

         “I need your love.”

         “Need your touch.”

         “Touch me.”

 Their fingers and limbs entwined as they moved together, desperately removing any space in between them so that their bare bodies could feel one another. She bit him and then kissed him. A trail of blood trickled from where she last tasted him.

The Frost

            The painter staggered up his building stairs and fumbled impatiently for his keys. He had forgotten how long he had last used them. For days, maybe even weeks, he drank himself until he was numb. And each night he found himself back in the temptress’ bed, gulping greedily for her scarlet fumes. But three nights ago, she stopped her evening sprees to the bar and her apartment was locked. He drank even more to forget the urgency for which he desired her. Then he overheard some men saying that she was last seen coiled around the body of a steel tycoon with a diamond rock that threatened to snap the twig fingers it sat upon.

            “Useless.”

 He referred both to the woman and the key as he tried to shove it into its keyhole. When it found its place, he threw his shoulder into the stiff door to force it open. Immediately, a rotten stench drove up and wedged itself into his nostrils.

Scanning the room, he saw that there was dust everywhere, so much that it was hard to breathe without choking. When he coughed, wisps of frozen breath appeared in front of him, carrying away the heat from his body. He noticed that his palette had remained untouched, but its paints had dried into thousands of ridges and creases. The jar of liquid turpentine was now a rock of ice and the tips of his brushes were crusted with hardened paint.

            “How could she leave this place a dump? For god sake’s she could have at least opened a window.”

He staggered to the windowsill, wanting to throw the entire glass pane on its hinge. It was as if the room had trapped all the air from the summer and autumn months and let it marinate into a stinky stew. He needed air.

At first he didn’t see her. He first saw the foggy sunlight that strained to peak its way through the grimy and frosted glass. He traced the light’s weak trail that brightened only a corner of the window seat and cushions. And then he saw how it caught the lumps of her shriveled dead body, it’s skin loose and wrinkled, sagging down to the tips of her fingers and toes, and rolling over itself. Flies flew in and out of the mouths of her body and her hair had fallen into an ashen clump by her corpse. All her color had rotted away in decay.

But it was the smell that made him turn away. It scratched and poured salt into the soft flesh of his nose. When he breathed through his mouth, he could taste the rot.

Slowly, he trudged back to his canvas, hoping to see Marigold as he once saw her. Instead, he saw the reds and yellows that weren’t yet blended, the details that were still missing, and the naked strips of unpainted canvas.

He fell to the ground on his knees and cried over his unfinished work.