Pictures before the fire
I sit down before the fireplace, newspaper in my lap, the frustration of work fading in the back of my brain, this chair my refuge each day as the sun sinks, my young son stretched out on the rug before the flames with pad and crayons.
No music to fill this space; his scribbling and the flames crackling on
the logs all I need.
“Let’s see what you’re drawing, Bobby” I ask my son.
He slips the paper into the brighter light for me to see, his blue eyes
glittering with firelight and excited expectation.
“Do you like it?” he asks.
I react as if I have a bone caught in my throat.
The vivid features of green-scaled creature stare back at me, a
talented rendition, but with a gruesome outlook on the world, as if reflecting
some inner turmoil, I know nothing about.
"It is, well, unusual, son,” I say.
My father was as practical as a millstone, refusing to believe airplanes
could fly until he saw one soaring across the sky, with me inheriting the same
from him.
Maybe my wife’s death left scars in Bobby. He’s acted off since then,
even though the doctors claimed he would get over it.
The picture is so vivid it could be real – just as his picture earlier showing
the body dangling from the Eiffel Tower, he no doubt got from the news, though
he says he got it out of a dream.
He’s made such claims before and I always dismiss them, depicting them
in pictures like this – if not so horrific, equally graphic, his dreams taking
him to exotic locations such as Paris we cannot afford to reach in reality.
His stories are nearly as brilliant as his drawings are, briefly drawing
me in, sometimes making me anticipate what he will say next while I transition
from work to this place.
“It’s real, Daddy,” Bobby always tells me. “I was really there.”
Most of his tales are grim, although not nearly as grim as the reality
I face each day on the sales floor and the silence of the cash registers I
suspect will lead me to bankruptcy or worse someday.
But this last picture jolts me like none of the others have.
“Yes, I like it, Bobby,” I tell him, trying not to show how startled I
am.
He goes back to drawing; I try to read but give up, wondering where Bobby’s
imagination will take him in his new drawing.
Maybe he’ll grow up to be a writer or journalist, I think, and really
get to visit those places I can’t take him to now.
“Bobby, may I see that first picture again?” I say.
The depicted creature seems to crawl off the page at me.
“What inspired this?” I asked. “Where did your dream take you to find
this?”
“To the stars, Daddy,” Bobby says.
I smile weakly and let the boy return to his second drawing.
Sometimes it is best to accept these truths and not question them,
though I don’t completely approve of where his imagination takes him.’
That's the salesman in me, needing to see the plane fly before I believe
it can.
Perhaps something closed up inside of me with my wife’s death and won’t
let me see things the way Bobby can.
Suddenly I’m scared. Suddenly, I don’t want to see what Bobby comes up
with next.
“I think it’s time for you to go to bed,” I tell him.
“But I’m not done, Daddy.”
“You can finish it tomorrow,” I tell him, and he complies, gathering up
his things, leaving me to my unread newspaper and the slowly dying flames of
the fire.
I lift up the newspaper; it is filled with news of space as well, of
new mineral discoveries on the moon, the World Earth Race scheduled to start it’s
grueling 500-orbit sprint around the planet.
Bobby’s forgotten picture of the beast stares up at me from the floor.
I shrug it off, and stare at a large photo accompanying a detailed story about
the assassination of a member of the House of Lords – and there in the corner
of the picture is the tiny figure of Bobby, standing in the shadows.
I’m so stunned I cannot breathe.
Only then do I notice details in Bobby’s picture of the creature I’d
not noticed earlier, an image of Bobby’s room with the horrible creature standing
just inside his closet door.
I leap to my feet and head to the stairs, yelling, “Bobby! Don’t go in
there…”
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