Shadows in the Clouds

Ekphrastic inspired by Katja Lang’s “Cloud Shadows” and published in Ekphrastic Review May24.

Katja Lang’s painting and story below:

Shadows in the Clouds
 
I bought it. 
 
I had to. The first time I saw it, the painting called to me, instantly captivating, pulling me in to its restful embrace. Black and white and grays of soft solitude, the kind where you can hear the silence. Well, not true silence. As my son once explained, all those years ago, if you were in true silence, you would hear the hum of your heartbeat and drown in deafening buzz. But the painting conjured human silence. The flap of a dozen wings and the whisper of blades of grass playing hide and seek in the gentle breeze.  
 
I propped it against the entrance wall. 
 
I meant to hang it. Soon. But it’s hard to decide where. I bought it with barely a thought to actual placement. It’s black and white. It could fit anywhere, right? But small houses with too many doors and windows and lazy decorators who collect boxes of to-be-assembled furniture are a challenge for wall art. I walked by it day after day and finally noticed the lone figure in the middle of the painting. How had I missed it before? I’d mistaken it for a brush or a tree. It was barely a smudge of saunterer casting a long shadow. The only shadow in the landscape. Now, when I passed the painting on my way out the door, I heard the paced gravel footsteps, tick-tock, above the whipping wind.
 
I decided it to try it out in the bedroom and hoisted it on the console.
 
The person on the path walked and walked and I counted their steps, left – right – left – right, crunching, shadow static, as it walked and walked towards the smudge of black trees they never reached. Why was the shadow so long? Where was the sun? The grass on the left side suddenly shimmered and rippled like water. Maybe the path was a riverbank? The sound changed. Graveled steps and the ripples of a creek, a brook, a lake. Frogs, maybe? 
 
The painting seeped into my dreams that night, like a lullaby, like a nightmare. 
 
I became that person walking, walking, with an ever-growing shadow despite the dense fog. A fog so dense it wrapped itself around me, holding me, pulling me back, although I leaned forward, tasting the wind, the cold, tasteless metal of snow. Snow! That’s what the white was: snow. White winter. Stark dark landscape with leafless trees of brittle branches that barely moved as the wind hissed coils around their trunks. And yet, there was the long lone shadow that suggested the sun. There were birds circling, soaring, thriving in the lift of the wind. There, in the righthand corner, behind the gust, beyond the fog, was a wall, an impenetrable wall of cliffs and precipices and bluffs.
 
When I woke, mouth dry, the first thing I did was banish the thing to the living room.
 
The painting screamed. The birds, vultures, yapped and grunted as the shadow-afflicted hiker walked in place on the path to the dark forest that lay, like an entrance mat, before the austere mountain beyond. Where was the restful silence I’d first envisioned? Gone. Now that the painting had made itself at home, had settled in, had entered my room, shared my night, oozed itself into my dreams, it showed its true colors. Eerie shifting sand, crippling cold, chain-like shadows, monstrous trees, scavenger birds waiting for you to trip, to fall, to fail. 
 
I almost threw it out.
 
Instead, I pulled out the box of forgotten crayons and half-dried childhood paints. With a yellow crayon, I poked rays of sunlight through the fog until the trees found their shadows and the shifting ground hugged the grass and grew roots. The light thawed the trees until sap ran in rivulets, painting the branches, flicking blobs of leaves: green, yellow, and freckled olives. Flowers bloomed and the air tasted of lavender, of honey, of the blueberry-lemon-basil scones I baked for breakfast. The vultures shrank into starlings and murmured the blue sky.
 
And the walker in the painting sat in the blooming field. 
 
Then lay in the speckled shade of the central tree.
 
Content.
 
Amy Marques