Tag: wonder

How to Paint Angels

~ Richard Schulte ~ 2 Comments

Another angel, not quite perfect. Carol snatched the canvas off the easel and balled it up hard. She flung her creation into the fireplace and watched the devouring flames turn wings black.

Like a dead weight Carol sank to the carpet, then lay on her back and shut her eyes. She tried to shut out the world.

That evening, after some television news and a bite to eat, she was compelled to place a new white canvas onto the empty easel. She stared at the blank space. She dipped her delicate brush into silver.

As usual she began with the angel wings. Her strokes were precise, slow.

The most difficult part was always the eyes. They never came out right. Angel eyes were a puzzle. She would do them last.

A knock at the door.

“Come in!”

It was her new friend Monique. “I’m sorry–I didn’t know you were busy–here’s the jacket you left in Tony’s car. I’ll leave you here to your work.”

“No! Please stay for a minute! The apartment can feel so empty. It’s nice to have some company for a change.”

“What’s this? You painted all these?”

Carol laughed. “It’s my hobby, I guess.”

“Seriously? It beats making tin foil Christmas tree ornaments, or any silly thing I’ve ever attempted. I didn’t know you were an artist! They’re absolutely beautiful!”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

“Wonder what–if they’re beautiful?”

“If they’re as perfect as angels should be.”

“They’re angels. How can they not be beautiful?” laughed Monique, wandering slowly about Carol’s small apartment, turning right and then left. She gazed with increasing wonder at a dozen silvery canvases on easels. There was such a clutter of angels that it was difficult to maneuver.

Monique looked quickly at each canvas. The heavenly paintings were exquisite but something about them was odd. They felt unnatural. Something vital seemed to be missing. And there were so many. She didn’t want to say anything. That would be impolite.

“You might have noticed that none of my angels have eyes,” Carol remarked, trying not to sound embarrassed. “Not yet.”

“Oh my gosh! I was just thinking there was something kind of strange about them. Now I see why! They’re absolutely wonderful but the faces are wrong. So you’re waiting to paint the eyes on all these? Are they difficult to do?”

“I always have trouble with my eyes.”

“Me, too,” smiled Monique. “That’s why I wear glasses.”

They both laughed.

. . .

Carol rolled in a nightmare. It was another lucid dream of Hell.

Blackness swallowed her. She was spinning, drowning in an infinite void, suffocating in ungraspable nothingness. There was no light, not a trace of substance or form.

A tomb.

In the blackness she struggled to find her hand. She was desperate to lift her hand and touch something, feel anything. She could find nothing. Spinning, spinning, she was alone, less than nothing in the consuming nothingness.

It was a Hell without flames, without demons or evil, without time, only emptiness. A devouring nightmare that had erased her entire world.

No hope.

Panicking, she strained in her mind to remember some known thing. A face, a ray of sunshine. Something in a vanished life she understood. Something near. Deep in her mind she tried to grasp at anything, a momentary spark, an atom, to cling to, to push back the black, ruthless, eternal Nothing.

Nothing.

In the blackness she caught a glimmer.

She woke.

Her dark apartment was strangely aglow. She lifted her head from her pillow. All about her were living eyes. Eyes of pure light, living light. Warm light.

Carol jumped out of bed and flipped on the cold apartment light.

She began painting eyes.

Dew on the Grass

~ Richard Schulte ~ 2 Comments

Missy smelled dew on the grass.

She smelled the damp earth and yesterday’s rain. The roots of trees, mouldering leaves.

She smelled freshly broken twigs, the scent of crisp, tart, yellow and brown autumn.

And a newly blue sky.

Simply by breathing, Missy understood everything.

A ten-mile-away fireplace, a nearby muddy puddle.

The rising warm sun, startled birds taking flight.

Bees, butterfly wings, the erosions of mountains, dandelion dust and the movement of time.

From beyond the horizon, just as clear as the smell of autumn, Missy sensed infinite things. An unending motion. The residue of untold lives.

She smelled happiness and loss and the atoms of those long-vanished.

She smelled the new moon and hidden stars.

A human pulled impatiently on her leash. Missy followed.

A Dance in the Lightning

~ Richard Schulte ~ 4 Comments

Angie was dead tired. The steep, stony hike up to the mountain’s summit had taken longer than she and her sister had planned. The air was very thin.

Karen was anxious to begin back down. “I don’t like this. Look at the clouds.”

“Let me rest for a minute,” said Angie, gazing down.

Silent, very far below, the familiar Earth seemed empty, unpeopled. The tan and green plains, like a rumpled quilt, stretched curving into the distance. A river one hundred miles distant made a loose thread. The world’s floor was dappled with creeping shadows.

It seemed the two sisters could reach out to touch moving white clouds.

“We better head down. Staying up here is dangerous,” warned Karen.

“Just one more minute,” begged Angie.

The shadows of scattered clouds marched across the world below. The amorphous shadows seemed like creeping ink. Up on the mountain’s high summit the atmosphere was clear and icy. The wind shivered Angie’s skin. Range upon range rose to the east, raking more boiled white clouds. The farthest peaks were minuscule and dreamlike.

Up in that heaven everything was like perfect crystal: the air, a shining glacial lake nestled straight below in a cathedral of rising granite, the sharp stone walls, panels of sky painted blue. The white clouds, now so close, seemed the only things that were alive.

They were moving, growing, indefinite, changing. Becoming deeper. Deeper. Dark.

“Come on!”

But Angie couldn’t move. The strange beauty of the darkening arrested her.

The freezing wind became razor sharp.

A shadow came.

“Hurry!” shouted Karen, running over tumbled boulders to reach a small shelter that had been built on the mountain’s summit. The shelter was made of carefully assembled stones, built by someone long ago. One who feared heaven turned dark.

Angie did not follow.

A cloud very close above blackened.  A hard rain began.  Angie stood alone, watched for the first flash of lightning.

That first revelation was a blinding, searing spear of fire. It pierced a mountain ridge just below.

The lightning flashed just a moment, a jagged burning finger, cracking open the height of heaven, transforming the rain into sparks. The booming rebound from unseen blasted stone was the voice of thundering, echoing power. A momentary awful power shaking the deepest foundations.

A second flash.  Closer.

The power descended from somewhere–from some place beyond the highest peak or reach of mind.  It was a pure light, a heedless Something, manifested from gathered blackness. A burning truth.  Then an explosion.

Another.

The white light burned in front of Angie. It was the light from an open door. Her eyes saw through for just a moment.

Then came another flash. And another. Even closer. Much closer. Exploding nearer and nearer. Angie’s sky-reaching arms waved in abandon.

She felt dizziness, danger, amazement, joy.

Angie danced in the lightning.

One Strange, Shimmering Dream

~ Richard Schulte ~ 9 Comments

Jimmy was born on a farm. As a young child he roamed the fields collecting shiny pebbles, colored leaves and other ordinary things.

When Jimmy was eight years old he had an idea. He carefully wrapped a loose bundle of dandelion fluff with old spiderwebs. He kept his small creation in a shoe box, which he hid under his bed.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Jimmy would quietly slip out from under the sheets, reach under the bed and pull out the box. Very slowly, he’d lift the lid and shine a small flashlight inside.

The delicate, ghostly threads wrapped about fluffy whiteness gently gleamed. It seemed that he had assembled a magic thing. A strange, shimmering dream.

Over many years, working on that farm, his dreams grew.

One night, at the age of 86, Jimmy suddenly sat up in bed and whispered to his wife, “I’m going outside to look at the stars.”

“Okay, dear.” She rolled over.

Jimmy walked slowly in his pajamas out the back door. He shut the door silently.

Barefoot, Jimmy walked out onto the dark, newly tilled field. There was no moon. He reached down and crumbled some Earth in one hand. His barn was black under twinkling stars.

He disappeared into the barn.

A few minutes later, the large barn doors swung open.

And slowly up, up, up rose something weightless and strange–an enormous milky cloud, indistinct, streaked with ghostly threads, like a nebula in the dark sky, faintly shimmering amid the many bright stars–rising up, up.

Dandelion fluff and old spiderwebs float easily. Seeds are meant to fly. Carefully made webs bind living things to the air.

Jimmy watched from the center of his finished creation. Higher and higher he rose, above the barn and dark fields, above his tiny farmhouse, now vanishing far below. The farmhouse vanished.

Riding among the stars, Jimmy ascended.

Night deepened. The stars multiplied. He revolved slowly among them, his shimmering dream-thing reflecting twinkling light, propelled like a raft in a sparkling stream. Quietly, Jimmy watched.

When he looked over his shoulder, he noticed that the Earth could now easily fit into the palm of one hand. The Earth had become a round blue eye. Then it winked shut.

And the dazzling stars grew thick and close, as if they could be easily touched. Jimmy reached out one hand. Motes of light gathered together, withdrew, and the galaxy once so impossibly large became suddenly tiny, and a billion other galaxies rushed in around him like stars, whirling like stars–stars containing billions of stars.

That infinite light could not be described.

In his dream-thing, he floated on. Through galaxies of galaxies, until they, too, could fit in the palm of one hand.

The night was unusually quiet.

When his wife woke up, Jimmy was gone. He had passed far away.