Etching Our Way (Broken Tracks 1)

“Don’t be silly, it’ll go to waste here.” Standing up, she wanders into the kitchen, yet again not listening to a word I say. And she wonders why I’ve pulled away from her.

I shake my head and gather all of the bags up before making sure Clay and Izzie are wrapped up warm.

“Come and give me loves, munchkins,” she says, passing the trays of food to me and kneeling down, her arms open wide.

They both cuddle into her, wrapping their arms around her as she squeezes them and whispers something in both of their ears.

“Now you,” she smirks, standing up and holding her arms wide in the same way she did for Clay and Izzie.

I shake my head, not wanting her to touch me but she doesn’t give me a choice when she pulls the trays out of my hands and passes them to Edward before wrapping her arms around me.

I stand there stiffly, my muscles tense as she continues to hold me for what feels like hours but is only mere seconds.

“Wasn’t so bad, huh?” she says in my ear.

I grunt back, giving her a non-committal response before pulling away.

“You’re a fantastic father,” she says, cupping my cheek. “I’m so proud of you.” A lump forms in my throat as she stares into my eyes, a sadness surrounding them. “I love you.”

I swallow against her sudden words, not knowing what to say other than mumbling, “Love you too, Mom.”

The last few weeks have gone by in a blur and I’m exhausted, but in a good way. I only have Sundays off, but during the week I have toddler sessions in intervals during the day and my after-school session at four, so by the time I get home after cleaning up the studio, I’ve been dead on my feet.

But tonight, I feel like I have a new lease of life, I’m excited because it’s my first adult class since the studio opened; I can’t wait to have a relaxing session. There’s a special addition to my adult class: wine. I grin like a Cheshire cat at the thought.

Setting up the last easel in the circle I’ve created, I sit on one of the stools, waiting patiently for someone to turn up. Ten minutes later, a well-dressed man and woman walk in.

I smile at them. “Hi, my name’s Harmony. Are you here for the adult art class?”

The woman looks me up and down and the man smiles stiffly at me, looking up from his cellphone. “Yeah, my wife signed us up.”

“Ah, yes, you must be Mr. and Mrs. Hearst. Please, let me take your coats and go ahead and pick a seat,” I say, pointing to the circle of easels.

Mrs. Hearst practically throws her coat at me and teeters off on her tall heels toward a stool at the farthest side. Her husband smiles apologetically at me and hands me his coat, making his way over to join his wife.

I hang up their coats and bring them each a glass of the red wine I’ve been letting breathe for the past thirty minutes. Mrs. Hearst downright refuses a glass, turning her nose up at it, but Mr. Hearst gingerly takes it from me, placing it on the floor right away, not bothering to even take a taste.

I walk away to greet the next arrival, seething at their rudeness. You can tell they come from money, they reek of entitlement and for the first time ever, I find myself wishing for a client to never come back again.

The rest of the group are pleasant and most already know a lot about art, so I find myself coaching the Hearsts on how to draw an apple, although that wasn’t the object of why I placed a bowl of fruit in the middle. I put it there because it didn’t matter to me what I put, what I was really interested in was how they would interpret it. It goes without saying that the Hearsts didn’t get this and tried to draw a bowl of oddly shaped fruit; they had no imagination.

Apart from the odd interruptions from the Hearsts, I had a great time and I think everyone else did too. There was one painting in particular that caught my eye: the man had made a beautiful watercolor of all the different colors of the fruits and it made my own creativity rise to the surface.

After I tidy away everything and set up for tomorrow’s session, I walk up the wooden stairs to my own personal studio, sitting down at my bench and letting all of my creativity flow through me and then out of me, onto the paper.

My fingers haven’t stopped moving over the paper since I sat down; I’ve smudged the pastel chalk colors into each other until it started to resemble the scene in my head. My hand stops moving as I take in the picture in front of me, feeling overwhelmed as it all comes together.

I scrape my chair back, my heart stuttering as I realize I wasn’t sketching something random out of creativity—this is a memory.

The willow tree stares back at me—mocking me—and I watch it for a beat before picking it up and holding it out in front of me, ripping it into tiny shreds, exactly like my heart fractured into pieces that day.

Once it’s unrecognizable, I pick up the pieces in a daze and toss them into the waste paper basket in the corner of the room, my chest heaving on desperate breaths as the memory rushes through me.

The whole situation has caught me off guard and is so unexpected that it opens an old wound, one I thought I’d buried away deep into the depths of my mind and locked up tightly in a box.

Walking the same streets we used to and being on this side of the tunnel must be wreaking more havoc on my mind than I knew, it had to be if my subconscious was making me draw both from one of my best and worst memories. I thought having all those memories locked away would protect me; I couldn’t have been more wrong.

How did I not realize what I was drawing? I was so immersed in the colors and details that it didn’t cross my mind until I stood back and looked at what I’d created.