The Desk

Annie sat on her grandpa’s lap, taking comfort in the sweet scent of pipe tobacco. Grandpa was an artist, not by trade but in his heart. Annie didn’t know if he ever took formal lessons. She didn’t care. She loved to lean against the soft, tobacco-scented cotton of his shirt and listen to the sounds of his breath and heartbeat while he sketched blue jays and cardinals on the creamy paper.

 “Gently. With tiny strokes,” her grandpa would say while guiding her hand with the paintbrush. Together they filled in the brown of a branch a blue jay perched upon.

 “See how the branch isn’t smooth?” he pointed out. “That’s why the tiny strokes. Each stroke changes the color. Trees don’t have just one type of brown.”

 His voice was rough, as if the words brushed against his short mustache as they passed his lips. Annie didn’t know gravelly sounds came from a lifetime of smoking and working underground in the tunnels. Not even after he died from cancer.

 The secretary desk where they painted together sits in Annie’s study today. Its hinges creak and its pigeonholes store unpaid bills and peripherals for the tiny machines her creative grandpa could have never imagined. But across the top, nestled against the base of a banker’s lamp, is a worn pallet of watercolors. Each well displays the bare base metal with a halo of color around it. The brush has dried into a delicate point, stiff with the last color dipped.

 With her eyes closed, she can conjure the scent of her grandfather, gone from the world in body, but never in spirit.