At first, there is nothingness.
*
A blank canvas sits on the easel. It is white and empty. A place without history, a snow-field without a country. Outside, it is 2AM. The streets emptied and grey-lit. I let out a breath I have been holding all day. I am sleepless as always. At 2AM, I can think. I can contemplate the emptiness of the canvas, the strange itch coming alive in my fingers. There is something sacred about this quiet hour, the way the day gone by is purified as it recedes into the smoke of the past. 2AM. Tomorrow, I will paint.
*
On the second night, I throw a splash of navy blue onto the canvas. A wild streak of ultramarine sears the white. I understand why people once crossed oceans in search of this shade of blue. The colour is so deep, so haunting that something gurgles up inside my chest furiously. A yearning, I think. That night, I sleep poorly and dream of worlds in paint. I wake up with the aftertaste of yearning in my mouth. It tastes of ultramarine blue: not of paint, but the colour itself.
*
I have never been much of an artist. But on the third night I realise that I am painting a night-time scenery. Or rather, the scenery is painting itself. My hands move as if willed by the brush, the fatigue of sleeplessness turning into a type of clarity. Wet, grey petals of paint bloom into mournful clouds. A shudder of inky green grows into both a tree and its shadow. In the distance, a grainy mountain range appears, muted by the dark. And even further away, a silent black sea. A fringe of white where the waves rise and fall. At the foreground of the painting is a still meadow. A low valley where the dead can come and go. I create blurry ashen silhouettes between the grass. Are they ghosts or just tricks of light? I do not know yet.
*
On the fourth night, I mix white, yellow, and the smallest dash of brown to create a painfully tender shade of cream. With a careful brush, I paint a freckling of stars in my dense sky. I hang a sliver of crescent moon in the corner; so delicate, as though someone pressed their fingernail into the sky and created a bruise. My bruise-moon has a shy radiance. She spills a trickle of light over the head of a tree, and down into the shadowy meadow. She dances with the ghosts in the grass. I fall in love with this moon. Not any moon, but this one. I long for her to comb my hair as though it were the tide.
*
On the fifth night, I realise that the translucent faces of the dead have crowded my painting. I begin to crave the living world. So I paint a night bird on the lowest bough of the tree. I give her a nest to warm, some brown eggs that are now hers. I paint a squat frog in a puddle of water. A sleeping dog a little distance away. And at the very corner, a dragonfly; shimmering at the moonlight’s edge.
*
On the sixth night, the painting is complete. I take a step back to observe it. It is dark and moody. A land of shadows and tricks of light. A conspiracy of ghosts. A flat valley where the sun never rises. Where the dog never wakes. Looking at my painting from afar, I no longer feel the exhaustion of the days. Instead, I feel like a young god, gazing upon a world that rose out of her burning palm.
*
On the seventh night, I step inside my painting. Unable to sleep, I trace my fingertips over the sinews of the drying paint and it begins to swirl, inky and smog-like. It swallows my fingers, my hands, my arms. I move forward and sink into a deep well of night. A small wind blows through the grass. The grey clouds I painted float above me like large ghost-ships. The roar of the sea arrives from far, far away, reduced to a whisper, barely there.
*
On the eighth night, I don’t know what day it is anymore. Here it is always 2 AM. Everything waits for me, even time. I breathe in the damp air of my new-born world. With nothing to do, I decide to name each blade of grass. They become my children. I drink out of a river of ultramarine blue. The dead gather around me, with a soft laughter that sounds like the chattering of teeth. I hold their bloodless hands and dance in a circle with them until the sun rises, which it never does.
*
On the ninth night, I marry the moon. Together, we listen to the night bird sing a deep warbling song, almost a lullaby. Every other sound in the valley is hushed and windy, a collection of murmurs and mumbles. But the birdsong is clear and round, unmistakable. It strikes me that while I painted the bird, I never painted the song in her throat. She must’ve learnt how to sing all by herself.
The echo of the song fills the sky, from the meadow to the mountains. Finally, I fall asleep.
This is much more than a short story, it is a work of mythology. A creation myth; how a sleepless painter created the world and married the moon before finally falling into a slumber serenaded by the world’s first bird. The seeds of a novel. Magical stuff. Brilliantly done.
Mysterious, wonderful, and melodic, Anagha. You have my applause.