“It’s kind of simple, don’t you think?”
Keisha turned from the painting she had just placed, ready for tonight’s showing. The gallery had asked her for months to let them show Jordan’s work. Now this youngster was following her around with a comment on everything. Well, Keisha had had enough.
“I beg your pardon?”
“This painting. I mean, it’s not up to his usual standard, is it?”
“What would you know about his work?”
“I’m writing my thesis on him. His paintings usually have such complexity to them. This isn’t very expressive.”
Keisha’s first instinct was to go up one side of the kid and down the other. She reminded herself that she had been young once too. Sighing, she said, “Let’s grab a coffee and I’ll tell you about Jordan Moore.”
She didn’t say anything more until they had sat down next to the café’s window. She delayed further, watching butterflies dance in the bush outside. The kid had the good grace to wait until she was ready.
“I get that you think you know Jordan’s work. You’ve studied his paintings. But you’ve never seen his later works. And you don’t know him at all. Reading his biographies isn’t the same as living under the same roof with a man, loving him, and sometimes hating him. He was complex, like his work.”
The kid sat up straighter, giving Keisha his full attention. She searched her memory for his name. Harry...no, Jerry.
“Listen, Jerry, Jordan hid a lot from the world near the end. I helped him do it. His mind was going, and it showed in his work. He decided to do one final series of paintings—a visual history of his deterioration.”
Keisha let out a long, slow breath, stared out the window again as she gathered her thoughts and her willingness to share this last piece of her husband. She hadn’t planned to and probably shouldn’t, knowing it was going to end up in the kid’s thesis. But she needed to tell someone.
“That painting was the last one he ever did. He had a round-the-clock minder by then. They told me he didn’t know me anymore. They said he didn’t know himself. But I sat him down in front of that canvas one last time.”
Jerry was so still, Keisha wasn’t certain he was even breathing at this point.
“Those feathers are the most complex work Jordan ever painted, Jerry. His conscious mind didn’t know what he was doing. But he was still in there somewhere. You can see the feathers disintegrating, their essence dissipating, lost to the world. It was his last message to me, his final goodbye. He died the next morning.”
This flash holds sadness, yet also is about connection. It’s about Keisha connecting with this young graduate student over their mutual connection to her deceased husband. And it’s about Jordan’s connection with her, so strong, that even after he couldn’t consciously remember her, he gave her one last gift—the final piece in the story of his dementia.
The title comes from a random title generator. I had an idea of the story I wanted to write, but knew it would be hard to find an image to suit after it was already written. So I went hunting. These feathers told me the direction in which the story had to go.
Wow, Dascha. This story blew me away. How sad. It’s also incredibly beautiful that he was able to communicate and express his final message to Keisha.
Really lovely, Dascha. This is resonating with me!