Hands, Eyes, Feet by Annabel Moir Smith

Frederic was learning how to live in the nothing. The world was tactile, it was the thudding of bare feet on hardwood floors and the sprinkle of misty rain on skin, and it was olfactory, chicken cooking on the stove, peonies, paint thinner. The sounds of his parents murmuring at night and his own name in the news on TV were muffled and far away. There was pain still in his eyes and head, pain that ebbed and flowed, but in his pain-free moments Frederic was the happiest he had been in years.

In the afternoons mother took him on long walks. They went often to the harbor, where she’d taken him in a stroller when he was still a toddler to watch the boats come in, and mother tried to get him to remember what he had once seen. “Remember the fish,” she said. “Remember the people.” And Frederic, sitting on a stone bench and smelling the pungent fusion of exhaust and sea salt, would think of fish gleaming like precious metals packed screaming into nets and people sea-battered, starving, drowning, people ground into chum, and his hands would itch at his sides and the eye, inside him, would shudder and twitch.

On Frederic’s birthday the curator came by the house. Mother and father sang while Frederic blew a gusting breath over the candles, one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight, and father clapped Frederic’s small hand in his rough one when he extinguished them all. The sharp knock at the door drained the room of air and mother stood slowly to answer it.

“Mr. Castellanos,” she said, “what a surprise!”

In the nothing father rose halfway out of his chair as the curator swept into the room with his baseball cap pressed to his heart. The curator saw Frederic, sitting in front of his cake with his bandaged eyes, and stopped short. “So this is my genius,” said the curator. “My little martyr. Happy birthday, Frederic.”

“Thank you, Mr. Castellanos,” Frederic said.

The curator sat down. He had come to offer his support to the family in their trying times, he said, and, as a careful afterthought, he had come with an opportunity. “I’m sure you know that Frederic’s little accident has made him once again the biggest name in the contemporary art world,” the curator said. “I’ve come here directly from the MOMA, where hordes of people are lining up to see his murals. Hordes. It is busier, even, than his first exhibition when he was, how old? Five? You remember.” He pinched Frederic’s cheek. “What could be more exciting than a child genius but a tortured child genius? Your son is Jesus. He has died and been resurrected.”

“I didn’t die,” said Frederic. “I made myself blind.”

The curator laughed and instructed father to begin cutting the birthday cake. His scent was heavy and garlicky. “Do you realize what you have here? This boy is a legend. Anything he creates after this, any art of his, is imbued with the stars.” He tousled Frederic’s hair.

“I don’t think Frederic will be wanting to make any new art for a while,” mother said. Frederic sat stock-still and pressed his eyes shut against the nothing.

“He should,” the curator said. “If he knows what he is.”

They sat quietly and finished their cake. The curator’s chair scraped on the dining room floor as he stood to say his goodbyes, pressing a whiskery kiss to Frederic’s forehead. “Happiest of birthdays,” he said, and swept out of the room as he had swept in. The garlic smell lingered when he was gone, mingling with the waxy odor of melted candle and the cloying taste of birthday cake in Frederic’s mouth. He excused himself and went up to his room.

Frederic sat on his bed and looked out the window at nothing. He remembered his mural, the one they called Pisces, the scattering of scenes that the eye inside him had shown him on his walks with mother to the harbor, that the eye had stayed his hand as he’d painted and seen into existence. The scent of blood and fish had stood strong in his nostrils as he painted the white wall of the living room, the graffiti that his parents had grounded him for until the whispered word “genius” began to crop up in their whispered conversations when they thought he was asleep.

It had been months since Frederic had painted, years since he had painted and enjoyed it. If the curator was right, Frederic was squandering something. Happy he had been, sure. But time was marching on. He was eight now, and soon would be too old to be anything new.

“Maybe I’m too smart to be happy,” Frederic said aloud. He got on his knees and felt around in the dust under his bed the paper and box of pens he had stashed there when he poured the bleach in his eyes. In his field of vision there was nothing, and nothing there ever would be.

Annabel Moir Smith

Image by Joophotos from Pixabay – chocolate cake with eight candles.