text: The intrusive squeaks of the usher's shoes preceded his hushed whisper. "The museum will be closing in just 5 minutes, sir." The usher managed to blend his white uniform into the faux marble floor as he backed away on the pads of his feet. He joined the other ushers in the center of the museum’s lobby, placing a five-dollar bill in the head usher's hand. "He's never leaving." His eyes still looking sideways at the mysterious man. The quick rustle of sleeves as they made their bets barely reached the ears of the man before the painting, who was thinking about his father. He had spent his life looking up at paintings like this. They had been his babysitters whenever his mom had to work and his makeshift father. His actual father, the painter, had done very little parenting after conception. His mother never really let him leave. She used any way she had to keep him around until all she had was the hope that his paintings would serve his role for the both of them well enough. It was the only art the man had seen until he was twenty-one, besides his forced recreations. "Raph," she would say, the same way she probably had said his father's name, as if tasking him with the same one was not enough. "Do you see these strokes? These ones . . . here, just above the water." She would pull his hands to some 'Raph' painting that she had hidden away when his father had left and he would read its texture like braille. It was every conversation he and his father would never have. His mother's words were brushstrokes. She would pause before she spoke, setting her tongue on the back of her teeth. A wry smile would pull at her thinned face like a stretched canvas. Then, she would speak in the language of paintings. She could never describe the sun as anything but cadmium yellow and every solid thing was texture built up into three-dimensional existence. No one ever quite understood the way she spoke like her son. Things were not bad and good, but warm and cool and only people who knew how much she missed the winters in Trondheim could tell that cool meant positive. She had no time for grass that was not the deepest emerald green or water that could not be painted in the most royal blues. She had fallen in love with his father's blue and white representations of spring by the time they had met. Her arm was inked in the colors he would use the most. He would know to make chamomile and honey when she would dot her forearm with the constellation he had claimed that he saw in her eyes. His words had been deft and disarming. He would pull her in with the lasso of his charm. She had not seen him since the third month of pregnancy. When she talked in the language of paintings, she always talked of his father. It surrounded them as substantially as the walls of the apartment that his paintings hung on. "Feel the texture, Raph," she would say with closed eyes. Eventually, he would close his too and each bump would pop up in the darkness of his mind's eye like a syllable. 'How are you, son?' they would say. 'Are you eating . . . and are you happy . . . and do you have my eyes and are you like me?' He could never answer. He did not know his father's eyes, but his mother told them that his eyes were the same. Just like the name. She was convinced he had his father's hands too. His crayons were replaced with charcoal and paintbrushes. They lay around the apartment instead of toys. She would lay canvasses before him with an expectant eye and a clear commandment, recreate his father’s paintings. Every step was a dance around half-used tubes of paint and unfinished canvases. His hands would cramp around paintbrushes and wooden frames as he drew the canvasses tightly across them. The acrid scent of paint clung to the walls and wafted out in faint-inducing waves. Sleeping became easy. They would escape during golden hour to walk along the nearby rivers, watching how the light came down in streams. The grass and water would languidly dance with the sunlight in a clinging wedding waltz. His mother would stand behind him and her hands would lightly cover his ears. She would lift her hands slightly, speaking in soft croissant-tones that crisped at the end of each word. "Let it pause. The water stop. The sunlight freeze." She would put her hands back over his ears, tighter. He saw the world as colors built up around him like paper-mache. When he closed his eyes to his room's broken shutters and the street lamps beyond, his eyelids flashed with veins of vermillion that mixed with viridian green to make the chromatic black that brought him into his dreams like magic. There, he would take bricks from the apartment and break them open, dipping a wet paintbrush before dragging it thickly across a piece of paper that would appear in the air before him. He would tap the edge of the brush onto the thick sheet while he looked around the apartment for more layers of color to peel and use. The faucet would suddenly turn on and then go silent. The water had frozen in place so that he could grab it like wool and wrap it around his brush, flicking it towards the canvas that caught it with a wet thud. His mother once found a painting of his own. He had called it 'The Shutters' in tiny handwriting on the back of the canvas. He had written his name the same way in the lower right corner. It looked like it was hiding away behind the trees he had painted growing out of the apartment shutters from his bedroom. Her voice immediately ascended to a hiss. "Do you know how expensive the canvasses are! The paint!" She had looked from him to the painting and back. He searched desperately in her eyes, through to the Cygnus constellation. The small points of light he only really saw when she looked at his father's original paintings. He only saw the same shadow he felt rising in himself. The painting made a warbled sound as she threw it into the corner of the room. He was the reflection that would never live up to the original. "Come," she had said to the long silent apartment. "Let's draw the cliffs again." A lamp appeared one day in the corner of the room, its sodium glow echoed the sun's as they worked into the night. He fell asleep with a brush in his hand and his school’s phone number ringing incessantly and ignored from Caller ID. The walls grew dark with jagged pencil marks and charcoal smears. He stained his bedding with the charcoal that crawled up his arms like vines. In the silent moments when his mother left the room, he would close his eyes and feel the dark marks sliding up to squeeze his heart. He could paint faster without her over his shoulder. Every time she returned, he would have to wait while she stared into the threads of his attempts. The paintings were her idols and he was the priest. She would look worriedly at him as he painted, watching the works that should have haunted her come back to life. He often wondered if they did haunt her as they haunted him. He could tell by touch alone how his lines were different than the originals, even if his mother could not see it as she stated longingly into them. He tried not to stare. When he did, he disappeared into the finished paintings. He would finish whatever paintings his mother had chosen and then become enveloped in them. He would climb the beige cliffs to find his father at the top, painting the water and the people below. He would snap out of this reverie before he could sit down with him. He could not imagine what he would say to him. The paintings hung next to the originals along the exposed brick walls. The most sacred hung above his mother's bed. She would wake up to them like holy images. Before she did, he would steal away to sneaky corners of the apartment whenever he could, sketching and smearing the pencil into shadow with his fingers. The graphite trapping the flecks of French ultramarine that had caught underneath his fingernails in the day and fell away in the night. He heard a sharp noise in the dark apartment. He squinted into the shadowy corner. He closed his eyes, breathing deeply to steady his hand before he returned to his piece. As the light before his eyelids shifted into black, he fell through that terrible memory, darkened by the unkind tint of memory. He opened his eyes again in the museum to a cliff painting. His fingers itch just a bit at the thought of the hours they had been covered in paint, trying to recreate the exact painting in front of him. The whispers of the ushers behind him did not bother him. They could not recognize his name from the sign on the central columns that held the roof of the museum up. It had been his wife’s insistence to design the museum when they had come to his firm. Returning to his past had not been easy, especially when he had seen the request for an alcove dedicated to his father’s works. When he had left his mother, many years ago, he had left her staring at the paintings. It did not matter if they were his or his father's, she stared at them in the same broken and lonely way. He had spent years never living up to his dad's image and now he was leaving just the same. It still felt strange, looking at the painting in what felt like a similarly broken way. He had left painting for architecture. He could break open the models in ways he never could with paintings, and the textures had none of his father in them. He never forgot the unspoken words though. His hands would sometimes cramp at the feel of a pencil and the smell of paint as he would pass by the art building on campus would leave him in a fog all day. The conversations echoed in the back of his head sometimes. *'How are you, son?'* Even now, dried, the paint in front of him carried over like a cloud. He could see his dad hunched over, whipping the texture of the water into a frenzy that must have echoed the one inside his head as he moved and moved and moved. The ferocity of fighting against nature to capture its light and colors, and letting a little bit of your fury bleed in. The image was still fresh in his mind, the paint still wet that he could imagine the tinted fumes leaking whenever he would breathe out. He had met his father a week ago. It had been strange, walking up to an apartment much like the one he had grown up in. In his mother's echoing rants, she had blown his father up into a titan spilling paint with perfect brushstrokes from the staircase of an opulent mansion. Instead, he was a small man-made smaller by hunching over canvasses for a lifetime. His eyes drew closed sharply at the ends from inspecting minuscule details that would cast shadows on the people who stood below his works. He had known those symptoms well and would have known it much better had he not left his mother and that life behind him. "Hello?" He had said huskily. His voice felt like a dry brush against his eardrums. His hair was thin and gray, flared out from his head like lightning. He could see how his every move felt like out of a painting. His every gesture felt like a measured stroke of paint. Every frame of his movement carried the briefest glitch as the painter waited for his next stance to be filled in. He looked through everything around like he was wondering which pigments made it up, even the man before him. His fingers moved in the air like he was mixing paint to make your skin tone or tapping out the dots of the constellation in your eyes. "I'm your son." He had practiced the line on his way up the stairs. "Ah," and he shuffled away. Confused, the younger Raph had followed. The floor seemed to be peeling, every step was a scrape along a flaking surface. He realized with a jolt that strung back to his childhood that they were old canvasses. There was paint and thick paper strewn about the place without a care. His mother would have fainted at the lack of respect. The older Raph scraped along the peeling surface of his work and settled into a tattered armchair. It was a red that was not even vermillion. The wallpaper around him was paintings too, dull lakes and beached whales that made eye contact with him like the old ponds and bridges never had. The older Raph tapped his brush on the canvass with color-stained fingers, not even looking at his son in the corner of the room. Finally, he flipped the brush over in his hand, using his other thick-jointed hand to squeeze cobalt blue onto the sheet. His eyes somehow closed even more as he pressed the brush down. He caked the paint into a deep ocean that took up the bottom three-quarters of the work. The painting was a portal, staring into it felt like gazing into something ancient and the void staring back. When the older Raph had looked back up from the abyss, he was alone in the room. Younger Raph still wondered why he had left. Perhaps the haunted place has been too similar to his old apartment, with the same ghosts. Different paintings but the same ghost hanging over shoulders in a way that covered the windows and blocked the light. The fan even turned slower there, as if time had stopped and the inhabitants were doomed to always paint and nothing more. Maybe he felt trapped the same way his mother had been. He still had not found her. He had hesitated to try and he regretted it now, having seen what she had been stuck onto or what had stuck into her. He imagined her lugging around the old paintings still, dotting constellations into her arms as the night rotated over and stars filled her view. Neither his father nor his mother had ever really left the other, and they had both done their best to hold him too. Raph looked into the painting of the cliffs. In the small upturn at the crest of the wave, he could feel the shake in his mother's hands as she cut his beloved purple carrots. He could see her dark eyes in the shadow of a figure walking along the shoreline. He saw her breath in the turquoise and red wind that swept through ancient rocks and into the unimaginable beyond the frame. His hand instinctively reached forward. He wanted to read her voice in the speckled beige of the sand. He stopped himself an inch away. He would never read her there. She had never tried to paint the rocks. She had only pushed him towards them. She was part of the reason that every pencil he held ached in his hand but she was the one who would forever be waiting expectantly for the next recreation of something she could not hold onto. Her hands must ache now from clenching onto nothing so hard. He looked down, worried for a moment that he would find his fingers stained blue and yellow. His eyes traced along the lines that he had memorized. There was a shuffle of feet as the ushers, banded together now, approached him. Finally, he reached the lower right corner. He had held few differences from his father. He had been pushed into his father’s style and trapped in his paintings day and night. He had managed to fight back in one way that his mother had never noticed. In his tiny writing had used a lowercase 'r', like the one on this painting. Leaving his mother had been hard, but made easier by the money this forgery had allowed him to leave for her. His mother would have never sold any of the paintings, even to feed herself. The younger Raph had not had the same devotion. It had made its way to this museum, but he had never wanted to see the cliffs again until he had tried to sit down with his father. he had avoided falling into any of his father’s paintings since had left. They only worsened in him those same feelings of inadequacy that he had carried for so long. The usher tapped his shoulder. "I'm sorry, sir. The manager says if you are not wanting to bu-" "No, no," Raph said, the words slipping out through the smile that he could not help. Owning the damn paintings that had almost owned him might have been too sweet. He walked out to a wet street, rain still sprinkling down. Home was not far away, with his wife and son waiting. An apartment mercifully containing coloring books with arcs of crayon bounding outside of the lines. The color-filled spheres that they would smash this weekend, powdering sidewalk with chalky colors he had never touched before. He closed his eyes and breathed in the smell of the rain. He paused and let the cool air wash over his face. He continued down the lamp-lit sidewalk, thinking that he might paint it one day.