Oil and Water, Macy Cochran

by Macy Cochran

I walk to the canvas in the empty room. Below me, a gray city resides. I’m a painter, you see. So I pour everything from the inside of me onto the canvas and disguise it with browns and greens and yellows to represent the sunlight coming through the trees. They are all abstract, meant only to be seen by those who can see. And there is a speck of black, but most would mistake it for an unintentional splatter of the wrong color. They wouldn’t find a black-haired girl running. Even I don’t know where she’s running. The artist doesn’t know everything about what she paints. The watercolors are a feeling. The oils are a memory. Oil is thick enough to hide the real image, though, whether it is a sprint to a train or an escape from authority. They line my walls, the art just abstract enough to keep the recollection at a distance. People never really enter my door, but if they do, they complement the art even though I know they don’t truly understand. I kept my paintings from Harold; I didn’t want him to see what my life was like before he came along. Deep in my chest, I’d felt a mixture of desire and fear that he would understand what lay behind the oils. He knew me better than I gave him credit for, yet I was the one he adopted. I catch dull flashbacks of the orphanage, the blackhaired girl who I met in school, the dreams I had of a home to go back to like she did every day. I try not to think of her name because it haunts me when I do. But finally, some level of peace settles over my broken soul when I remember being adopted by Harold, her father. He had black hair just like his daughter did. His other daughter had blonde hair. Me. The black-haired girl and I had been together for so long that, when I told her I was planning on running away from the orphanage, she refused to allow it. Harold took me in before I made my escape. Every day, she went back into the arms of her father. I wrapped my arms around myself when I fell asleep at night. “You finally have a home,” she had told me. “A father. Me—a sister. He’s your family, too.” I responded, “My last family didn’t want me.” Ever since I was an orphan and she was an elementary school girl, we were practically wild animals. We could handle the highest trees, the coldest nights, and the roughest waters until the night we climbed out of Harold’s window and chased each other to the river down the hill. We dove into the water that prickled my legs with ice, and we kicked against the current. Each time we played in the river, a sense of freedom came back and washed the present away. But the moon wasn’t out that night. The water was just a black, gushing flood from the rainfall a day earlier. I don’t remember my last words to her. I just hope she was alive enough under that dark water to hear me screaming her name. It’s been years. Just a heartbeat ago. Sometimes when I’m bathing, I sink my head in the water and close my eyes. I wonder each time what it would be like to inhale. Just once. Just to see what it’s like to have water-filled lungs. To simply not breathe. I would spit it up, maybe cough it onto the floor or back into the tub. One single gasp. But I can never make myself. Can’t even snort a single drop up my nose. I can only sit there submerged, all things muffled under the foggy water. And like a failure, I step out of the tub each time. My sister’s black hair sometimes bleeds into my oils and spreads across my canvases. This time, I avoid the color black. I paint a girl, one with long blonde hair and green eyes. Nobody can see her eyes but me, though—her back is to us. She is painting. Her canvas overlooks a city, just a blur of gray from here. I make sure to keep the background dull and watered down. This is no oil, no image, no flashback. It is a feeling. It is captivity. The girl in the picture is a painter, you see. She is the result of a battered brush in the hands of an angry artist. She is the knot in my throat that I have swallowed every day. Her voice has been the one in my nightmares for so many years, now. Ten, to be exact. Just a heartbeat ago. The girl who punishes herself with fear and loneliness cannot break free from her internal prison. She is trapped behind the watercolors, drowned and dried into the white canvas walls. She can never escape. I will sleep with my arms wrapped around me tonight.