In the early morning, the English fog rolls over and between the stalks of wheat as the snow lay in clumps on the still, cold, and hard April ground. The gray skeletal trees never sway, but whisper to each other and to the spaces between themselves as the sun rises, and along with it the stray footsteps and the gentle breath of humans. The world wakes purely and slowly, but in the dim hush of mornings, silence catches in cobwebs upon the ground and the frozen moss against the foot of the trees. Twigs snap as birds land, when suddenly they stop their whistling, to listen, and to watch, The painter.
The painter, young yet wise (I will not attempt to age him, for he was too beautiful to do so to), stood on a paint-flecked and dented ladder, leaning over as far as his legs would allow him to touch a piece of snow with his paintbrush. He was painting the snow, and hung his body from above it, perhaps, because he didn't want to apply too much pressure, or perhaps, he wanted to give his piece some room to exist when it finished, and not to overcrowd it. I could tell that it wasn't quite finished. The paint was just a black and brown and yellow and green (the colors mixing so that they weren't so obvious as I am naming them), and though they took on a general form together, I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out what it was supposed to be, the painting. Nor could I figure out why he was painting snow, but I didn't ask that question until I had thought about it all later, much later, in the day.
He wore a bright blue shirt, The Painter, with dark suspenders and a light-brown cap. His shoes were surprisingly clean (with every excited lift from his tiptoes they, the shoes, shone in the sun like they were freshly waxed with every rabbity motion), and his icy-gray eyes shone with a deep intelligence for shape and matter of the mathematical yet organic kind, and seemed to work meticulously two steps ahead of his hands. His cheeks were purple from the cold, and his breath came in tiny whips from the corner of his mouth, which held three extra brushes, each tipped with different colored paints; yellow, green, black. He held the brush with the brown paint in his hand.
He finished his dabbing of brown atop the white mound, and stood, slowly, slowly, the boards of the ladder giving the smallest 'creek', and, hand-on-hip, standing on the last step of his ladder, he waited and watched. At first, the lump of brown didn't do anything more than sit there, making the white snow look very much undesirable to step on or in by accident. But, after a few moments, a change of the wind, and a quick intake and slow exhale from the painter, and the vaguely-shaped painting came to life. A small brown rabbit formed from the frozen rain, and stood in place of where the paint once lay. The painter let out a little relieved and almost silent chuckle as the rabbit got its wits about it. Then, before anyone could even compliment its coat or its perfectly adorable little whiskers and its perfectly alert ears, the rabbit was gone, bounding through the thicket.
The painter smiled loudly now, if smiles can even make sounds, but his seemed to. It was a bit like music. He quite proud of himself, and rightly so, for it was quite a feat to bring a rabbit to life, or anything to life for that matter, out if a rather ugly blob of paint and some snow. The painter then drew a long and heavy sniff that was more like a sigh, and began to climb down his ladder, which was only really about four steps high but that he made look like it was fourteen. He stopped suddenly, I never really knew why. My mother said I was quieter than dust, though most people would have used a mouse as an example. But, somehow, he thought to look to his left, and saw me.
I was only seven or eight then. Either I was seven and was going to turn eight, or I was eight but still thought and acted like I was seven. Those sorts of things happen with birthdays, you know. It only gets more convoluted as you get older, or so I've been told. I'm only one-and-twenty-years as I write this, so I can't be sure until I get there, myself. But whatever my age, seven or eight or eighty, I doubt I would have reacted any differently than I did. Standing there, the two us perfect strangers, him on his ladder and me wrapped up in an old quilt my grandmother had made me, barefoot in the cold and brown grass, I did the only thing a level-headed a human could possible do. I asked him if he could do it again.
The painter paused then, looking at me like a cat that had just been caught stealing from the butter dish, and his eyes traveled from me, to his paintbrushes and back to me, again, and again, making at least three rounds before he stopped, finally, on me.
Seemingly shaking himself and getting the idea, the painter smiled a nervous smile, which was still a beautiful thing to see, as beautiful people who are so on the inside will be on the outside, no matter what they do, nodded his head, and took one of the paintbrushes from the corner of his mouth. With a flick of his wrist, the black paint changed to a blue paint, that brilliant shade of blue that everyone agrees is brilliant, and he gestured for me to come closer.
When I did, he had me hold open my hand, and he began to paint, right over the tops of my cold fingers. First came the new creatures vague body, then two long sheets of blue spanning the width of my hands, the head, a small cone that stuck out from the head, which was a sweet yellow, and finally, using the same brown brush he had for the rabbit, he gave the shape two small eyes.
One, two, three seconds passed. I held my breath in wait, so much so that I started to feel those little tingles of sleep at the back of my head. The painter waited too, watching. He looked like he had about a thousand anxious tingles in his head. His eyes shifted here, there, back, forth over the paint, checking and double checking his work, I suppose, just in case this would be the one time he did something wrong and the magic of it all wouldn't show.
Then, in a blink, flutter! hop! and churrup! The bird spring to life in my hands! It stared at me with innocent, brown eyes. The kind of brown that moves like fur, and it was no wonder. It was a young bird, and I suppose curious youth knows another when it sees it, even if it hadn't existed before a few second prior. It stood on shaky little legs, and stared up at me, and then to the painter, and let out a little peep that sounded simultaneously confused and indignant, like a baby, really. Even though the bird was an adult. The body hardly matters when the mind is new. A baby is a baby.
I was astounded! This bird, the rabbit, brought of out nothing! Or, maybe it was something, the snow or the warmth from my hands, that mixed with the magic that was the painter and his paints, and made something beautiful. Maybe it was the combined effort of life that existed and life that longed to exist and that pleaded its wishes through the painter, who brought the new things and creatures here. I was a brave girl, still am, and thought, 'why not ask him how it all works?'. But, just as I turned my head, the gentle blue bird still sitting in my hands, he was gone. All of his brushes and paints and even the ladder were all gone, the last glimpse I got of him was his brown cap and bright blue shirt disappearing behind a door made of a pure and still, gray English sky.
