AllFreeNovel
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Aknock on the door breaks me from my creative trance, and blinking away the confusion, I put my brush down to answer it.
“Coming!” I yell after the second knock. I wipe my messy hand on my art smock and pull the door open.
“Tonio!” I greet, moving aside to let the kid enter. “You’re back so early. Weren’t the lines long?”
Antonio shakes his head. “Not really. Dinner time just started, you know. The restaurants were still a bit empty,” he informs, handing me the plastic bag of food.
The smell of vegetable soup and another serving ofcacio e pepewafts through the air. I hum in delight as I walk to the kitchen to place the food on the counter.
“Thanks again for this,” I tell Antonio, reaching into my shorts for some money. “Here’s today’s tip.”
“Awesome! You’re the best, Ren,” he cheers, pocketing the one-euro coin.
I’m glad he isn’t the type to demand so much. Antonio’s father raised him right, which is something I’m happy and thankful for.
“Are you going to eat now?” he asks me, placing his hands behind his back as he roams around the cramped space. “Man, you really have to sell these paintings, Ren. What’s the point of keeping them around anyway?”
“Well, for starters, they hold a lot of sentimental value.”
“What does that mean?” he inquires, tilting his head to one side.
“It means they mean a lot to me.” I walk up to him and begin going through each canvas. “Do you want to see some of them?”
“Oh, yes! You draw really well!”
“That’s just the product of practice, Tonio. You can be an artist, too, if you’d like,” I say, fondly smiling at the kid. I pull one canvas out from the rack beside my couch and hold it up, Antonio looking at it with awe.
“What’s it called?”
“I honestly have noidea,” I admit. “Whenever I paint, I paint whatever feels right until I get the desired result.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I have a lot of feelings to convey, and I…don’t have anyone to share these feelings or memories with.”
“Hm, being an adult must be hard,” Antonio muses, taking a canvas and giving it to me.
“That’s my dad’s town,” I say, laughing at his innocence. “Here, this is the plaza on top, and these are the stairs and the alleyways,” I tell him as I point to each area in the painting.
“You’re right! That’s amazing, Ren. You draw more things than people, though.” He takes another canvas and holds it up, his face twisting as he tries to make sense of it. “And you like drawing muddles of colors too.”
“In my opinion, they’re easier to draw than people or landscapes,” I tell him. Then in a quieter voice, I explain, “I drew this when Dad died. I was confused about my feelings, and I couldn’t think straight.Thishappens to be the result. Something abstract and unexplainable.”
“This mess really matter to you?” Antonio asks curiously. “I don’t understand.”
I hum, thinking of a way to explain it better.
“Well, let me ask you this: If you receive a gift, or if you create something because of your own decision, you’d want to keep it close to you, right?”
Antonio’s eyebrows furrow, then realization dawns on his face. “Yeah! Because it’s mine!”
I laugh, relieved he was getting what I mean. “Then that’s exactly how I feel about these pieces here.” I take the one with muddled colors, remembering the painful days after my dad died. “For example, this piece is dedicated to my father and his memory.
“This piece here.” I take the landscape painting of his town from the couch. “It’s dedicated to my dad’s town. He helped me paint this when we went there for vacation, and I wanted to enclose the memory in a painting.”
“What about this one?” he asks, excitedly pulling a medium-sized canvas out. The portrait bears the image of my mother, but in place of a face were her favorite flowers.
“That’s the piece my dad dedicated to my mother. He, too, liked painting memories and feelings…because he loved her.”
