To Dream of Painted Skies
BEA IRINCO
The tea has gone cold. Mum is sitting across from me, her brows furrowed as she watches me carefully. I’m staring at the tea, at the ring it’s forming on the glass table, unable to look up at her face. She thinks she knows me.
‘You’re not eating,’ she presses, ‘you don’t leave your apartment, you aren’t-’
‘Thanks Mum, I get it.’ I still can’t look up. Her voice fades into the back as my ears start to ring. It still isn’t working, and my insistent attempts to fix it have only exacerbated the constant migraines. A ping alerts me to my phone, and I open to see my inbox with the title, Notification of Termination of Employment, shining in big, bold letters. My chest tightens as I consider every possible way around this situation. Maybe I can call them again tomorrow morning, or I’ll come in on Monday and act as if nothing ever happened. If I could just get in their heads again, get them to like me again.
‘You know you don’t even like it there,’ she says.
‘Doesn’t really matter if I like it,’ I say plainly, ‘can you afford to like a life when you can’t afford happy hour?’
‘Seriously,’ she sneers, ‘there’s a bit more to it than money. You said this was temporary, that it was to keep you afloat while you focused on what you actually want to do.’
I rub my eyes in exhaustion, trying not to argue. ‘What if this is what I want to do now?’
She sighs but doesn’t respond, and we just stare at each other for a while. After some time, she notices the slight fluttering of my eyelids and sits down next to me. Silently, she pulls the soft, tattered wool blanket off the arm of the couch, before pressing her palm into my cheek as she guides me onto her shoulder.
‘Stay for the night,’ she whispers. I want to refuse, to say that I have things to do in the morning. But I don’t and she knows that. No one’s waiting on my call. I’ll let her have this. I turn into her, so that my eyes are covered and I can pretend that the stars I’m seeing are the ones she’s planted.
*
The air shifts around me like an invisible blanket. The haze, I called it, like an iridescent film laid over a photograph that makes the sky fluid and the ground malleable. Things shine differently, they ebb and flow when you look too closely. This is how I know I’m dreaming.
This time, when I welcome the milky glaze of my mother’s dream, I can feel the weight of everything that has built up. Despite it being the first time in months that I’ve been successful, I can’t help but feel frustrated wondering what this could possibly offer me. It would’ve been far more helpful to land in the slumber of my supervisors.
I stand on the wooden porch of a lived-in cabin surrounded by swaying evergreens that stare straight at me. From behind every tree trunk appears pairs of little children’s arms, hugging the trees with shaky hands. Pieces of clothing stick out, the edges of their tiny flowy dresses and their ribbon-tied pigtails peeking through from behind the trees. But no faces. No matter how hard I try to angle my head around, I can’t seem to find any faces behind the hands.
The air strikes with electricity, leaving behind a gaping wound stretching across the sky. Slowly, the void is filled with a giant shiny eye that looks much too familiar. It stares at me like it’s going to cry but just watches me with watery ducts. My entire body tenses. My one rule in the dream world: don’t let them see you. I have always watched the show from the wings. When I start to make myself known, the world begins to cave in on me.
I start pacing towards the forest, looking for cover and trying to focus. A pair of hands move from behind a tree as its owner slips away from her position, swiftly running ahead of me before I can get a proper look. Then I watch in slow motion as a large dog follows the little girl, foam dripping from its muzzled jaws.
Something propels me forward, beating my feet harder against the ground as my body follows the girl. Pure instinct has taken over, my body overriding my brain, my heartbeat penetrating the silence of the forest. I try to run adjacent a thick line of trees, keeping enough distance so that she doesn’t notice me. Breathe, I remind myself, control it. But no matter how hard I concentrate, my legs stay in motion, and the scene doesn’t shift. The sky darkens and the trees whirl as they’re caught in the buzz of electricity beneath the watchful eye, and in that split second of distraction, both the rabid dog and the little girl are gone.
I look around frantically when something else catches my attention. Along one of the branches sticking out towards me is a single page that’s been penetrated by a smaller offshoot. With no sign of the girl, I hold it out in front of me, watching the aged words smudged with splotches of ink, focusing and unfocusing my eyes in vain. Like trying to read an analogue clock, words don’t register legibly in dreams. But when I turn it over, I recognise the picture attached on the back of the page. The image begins to move as it replays the memory. In little princess dresses are me and four other girls at my first sleepover. We’re all laughing with gummy smiles, sweaty hair, and chocolate-covered mouths. That was the first time I entered someone else’s dream.
Looking up with dizzying adrenaline, more pages materialise on branches ahead. Picking each one off, I find something attached to the backs of every page. Pictures of me, always caught off guard, all replaying moments before the shot. There’s one of me on my first day of Kindy, covered in temporary tattoos and sticking out a very blue tongue from all the slushies I had to drink from the canteen to collect enough for a full sleeve. Behind another page is a piece of fabric from my old school uniform except it’s covered in blue and yellow paint splatters. Mum would always get cross about having to buy new uniform, but she never threw out the paint covered ones.
The ground beneath me cracks and splinters, shaking the atmosphere as trees begin to tumble. I look up and the eye is staring at me through an opening in the canopies above. Strikes of lightning reverberate around the forest, splitting multiple trees ahead. Instead of relentless fires, however, the electricity reveals deep hollows within the trunks, holding frail little nests inside.
Instead of eggs, the nests are all scattered with keepsakes: loom bands and beaded necklaces, erasers etched with ‘yes’ on one side and ‘no’ on the other. Things I would pocket that belonged to people whose dreams I intended on entering that night. Sometimes, thinking about them before bed was enough, but other times, when I wanted something, objects helped. I would place them under my pillow, and it was like being granted access into their worlds and planting seeds of thought.
I find that most of the objects in the nests are from boys. Oh, how I loved to get into their heads. I would occasionally slip into their dreams, painting the skies with the colours of my backpack, bracelets, hair ties. I would put every character in my favourite dresses so that when they saw me, they couldn’t explain why they felt so wistful, why they couldn’t stop thinking about me. My mum was hysterical when she found all the letters addressed to me by countless boys. She made sure to keep them in a box growing up, and whenever I went through a nasty breakup, she’d hold them up and say, ‘this is not a girl who’s not wanted.’ Of course, she didn’t know that these boys didn’t really like me. We are all chasing a dream to run away from reality.
In one nest was a ‘good work’ stamp I nicked from my year nine history teacher the night before an exam I hadn’t prepared enough for. I had reached out for the haze and painted giant stars in the sky and manifested images of all her students as prominent historical figures. Boys in sparkly soldier uniforms, girls as European aristocrats in billowing gowns. I had set off confetti cannons filled with exam papers all graded favouringly. Everyone was so thrilled when we got the results back, and no one even knew it was me. I liked that. I felt like an invisible artist. I could only ever tolerate the monotonous nine-to-five if it meant escaping into dreams to paint landscapes and manipulate scenes. Not being able to has only made the sleepless nights and visible stress so much harder to ignore.
The little girl suddenly darts through the trees, the hound still on her heel. Again, my feet begin to move of their own accord. I whip through the trees carelessly, scorned by the teary eye. The ground rumbles to the sound of the canine’s growls. I dive towards it, catching its hind legs before rolling across the soil, only for my hands to be empty, the dog vanishing as I catch my breath.
The girl is planted solidly in front of a large plastic dollhouse that towers over her, completely unroused and unaffected. The sparkly pink front door opens and shuts with a bang. Out crawls an unfamiliar woman in a frilly pink dress, adorned with a diamond tiara that sits lopsided on her head. Her hair and makeup are extravagant, but the bold reds and blues run down her cheeks. She stands and straightens out, swiping aimlessly at her dirt-covered skirt before drawing a cigarette out of her mouth and blowing smoke in the little girl’s face. The girl flinches and finally turns to face me as she waves away the smoke.
My throat catches as if it’s squeezing out the last breath. Looking down, I turn over hands with slightly worn, aged skin, ink smudged along the sides of my pinkies down to my wrists. Spotted with freckles from all that sun, all that time before me and leading up to now. Looking closer, she has splatters of paint on the front of her plaid skirt. The girl smiles shyly, and I’m reminded of the boyish smile I had before braces. She sees me. She sees me and nothing happens. The world doesn’t cave in. It doesn’t change at all. There were always going to be storms.
I wave the smoke away from her face as the princess continues to puff smoke towards us, disinterested. The girl takes the loose pages in my hand, places them behind her back and looks up at me. She’s just watching me with wonder, and I’m staring back at myself, confused at who I could’ve possibly been looking at like this, and wondering when I stopped.
Then finally, as if I’ve been granted a fragment of control, a mirror materialises in front of me, confirming that I’m face to face with what I only ever see in memories. My mother’s young face, tired eyes, and messy hair. She looks younger than I am now, but in the photos, I would’ve been in school already.
I had never noticed the ink all over her, not with all the paint I had on me. I never noticed all the pages she was working on between morning and night shifts, meanwhile she kept every paint-splattered uniform, left the chalk-covered intercom of our shabby apartment uncleaned, and adorned every surface with my sculptures, my paintings, my sketches.
The little girl suddenly runs back towards the forest, her giggles permeating the silence. The trees dance again, and I can see the shine of the haze so clearly. I look down and see a paint palette in my hand, potted with the softest pastels. I begin working the colours into the sky with my fingers, swirling the pale blue across the tops of the trees and dotting it with clouds of salmon and marigold. We keep running as the world shifts past me. I can feel myself coming to. The colours swirl perfectly together, and I begin to wonder why I ever gave this up.
*
Over top the semi fresh layer of oils, I continue to incorporate whispers of cobalt over the juniper and myrtle green. When it’s half dry like this, it makes the ground look malleable. When I carelessly finger the careful strokes into each other, it makes the sky fluid. Oils have always captured the ebb and flow.
The collection I’ve been working on are to be entered in a local exhibition, themed modes of memory. Images of slightly worn, aged hands holding tiny paint splattered ones, they are tableaus of a history—my history—which breathes memory and uncertainty.
These canvases each carry layers and layers of paint, but rather than a burial of what came before, it’s a building of the memories that have built the foundation of my identity. The first layer of paint a depiction of pure, naïve emotion, and the last a curated anthology of my experiences, but every subsequent stroke in between is the vulnerability of a girl who loved to dream, and never thought she had enough time to.
Time is a sacred material. Hanging by the door of the shabby apartment I grew up in and inevitably came back to are now some of my favourite pages of my mother’s manuscript, a hearty example of both loss and opportunity. Why refuse myself the privileges of my mother’s sacrifice?
I haven’t penetrated dreams since my mum’s. But I also haven’t tried to. I had always seen dreams as canvases of escape, of freedom from the discipline of reality, devoid of outside perception or judgement. But this is just what they eventually became. Really, they have always been promises of hope, modes of change.
I’m still living a dream, only now I’ve made it my reality.
And tonight, when I inevitably bustle through my apartment exhausted and covered in half-dry paint, I will happily fall into a deep slumber, this time only enjoying the company of my own dreams.
Bea Irinco is an aspiring writer based in Sydney, Australia. Growing up between cultures, she enjoys writing about the exploration of identity and culture. With a deep interest in human biology, she loves exceeding science and reality through fiction. She hopes to partake in the endeavour to use literature as a mode of remembering and learning from the past.
