Loveless Ages

Chapter Two

 After school I head straight to the library. I sometimes volunteer at a sky glider stop but not today. A sky glider is a major mode of transportation in Schluton. It consists of a small cylindrical chamber that up to two people can fit in and a glass dome that closes them in. The person sits down and buckles him or herself into the glider. There are thousands of sky glider stops and a person can just program their glider to go to a stop that is closest to their desired location. The glider takes them there and then they leave it at the glider stop with one of the workers. I take a sky glider from my school to my house and drop my things home.

            I live in a two-story house that has a sort of abnormal shape but is standard here. Each house is one of a kind. They are all abnormally shaped but no two houses are the same. Most houses are made of a very thick polymer called poly-nano fiber, which is commonly referred to as Nanoplast.  Nanoplast provides insulation and can also withstand the most extreme temperatures and natural disasters. The structures of Schluton are usually a bright white color, silver, or both. It makes the environment feel extremely sterile and neutral. The outside of my house is the color of every other house around it, but on the inside, it is filled with color. Every single color known to man can be found in my house. My grandmother has a strange color hoarding habit. She has these eyes that pay close attention to detail and color, which may stream from her artistic capabilities, and she always looks for new colors. When she sees a color she has never laid eyes on, she must have it. She buys whatever it is and keeps it in the house. Sometimes she tries to use paint to recreate the color. It usually takes her a while to do it. She has a piece of slate with many different colors on it and she carefully mixes them. Her forehead wrinkles as she concentrates on what is before her. I read in her journal that she initially fell in love with my grandfather because of his eyes. He has this condition called Heterochromia Iridium, which has made him to have eyes that are two different colors. One of his eyes is brown and the other is a deep blue. It wasn’t his two different eyes that interested her though. It was the brown one. She wrote that the blue one was very pretty and very rare, but it was the brown one that caught her attention, for she had never seen that kind of brown before. To me, his brown eye was not that different from any other shade of brown but to my grandmother it was magical. She saw color in a way that no one else possibly could, as though her brain was capable of processing and translating the reflections of light, as they became colors in a very different way. She spent days trying to recreate the color. She claimed that she needed the color and that it was just a thirty-millionth of a shade darker than amber. She also does art. Her artworks are, like our house’s interior, shockingly colorful and vibrant. 

They have the ability to manipulate your emotions or make you feel like you are in some other world. She makes paintings and hangs them up, but she also paints the walls themselves. She makes beautiful otherworldly pictures all over the walls whenever the inspiration strikes her, and when it does she is completely gone. Though her body is in this universe, her mind isn’t. I know from reading her journal that when she is painting she actually is in this other world. She paints what she is seeing, and if you try to talk to her while she is in this trance, it is as if she cannot hear you. She can paint for days. She paints the walls and then paints over the paintings that she has once painted and sometimes leaves traces of the old ones. It gives the illusion that the painting can go on forever. Each painting fades into another one that is a bit different from the one before, or sometimes a lot different. And somehow, when you step back and look at this ever-going picture, it works. The combination of all these paintings forms a genre-less picture that fits in its own class. I come home to my grandmother painting over a painting that she did a few months ago in the living room. I don’t bother speaking to her because I know she won’t hear me. My grandfather is just sitting on the couch watching her in awe as she works.