When Clyde Parker, the wayward son and the rotten-apple of the Parker family-tree, storms his way back into Avery Fields, he sets out a flurry of butterfly effect in Dawn Marshal's life.
...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
DAWN MARSHAL KNEW SOMETHING wasn't right the moment she walked inside her house. She knew it from the way her mother was smiling too much and shifting her eyes away from her, she knew it from the two empty cups sitting at their coffee-table and how the room smelt of banana-bread and cigarettes. Mostly cigarettes.
"Did we have a visitor?" Dawn asked raising one of her eyebrows.
Her mother fidgeted in her seat before offering her a wary smile, "j-just the plumber, honey."
"I see..."
Dawn Marshal wanted to bombard her mother with more questions but when she fixed her gaze on her mother's weary eyes and the dark circles lining under them she dropped the matter and dashed up the stairs. Her mind was tangled with thoughts.
Dropping her backpack at the foot of her bed, she collapsed on top of her mattress and closed her eyes. For two seconds, it felt like she was floating on a cloud—that was before the weight of the world sunk on her shoulders again and this time around she was submerged within her mattress, sinking like an anchor tossed into the sea. She couldn't breathe.
Panting, she opened her eyes and stared at her ceiling. All the air was knocked out of her lungs. It felt like suddenly she had entered a realm of dreams, where she was sinking on the clouds inside a room with no ceiling. As if she had opened a portal to an alternate dimension, perhaps she had, because there was no other way to explain the sight that enthralled her.
She blinked thrice, wiped the lens of her glasses and then looked again expecting to see her plain white ceiling but instead her fingertips grasped what she assumed nirvana would be like. She sniffed the faint waft of freshly-dried paint lingering in her room. There were swirls of very realistic off-white clouds with streaks of grey scattered all over her ceiling, laid out in a backdrop of a sky, a sky that wasn't just blue. The sky was a perfect blend, a marriage between all the pastel shades in the spectrum—pink, yellow, orange, lavender, mint and blue. It wasn't an eyesore, just peaceful to look at.
The more she looked at it, the more tiny details she discovered and the more she fell in love with the piece of sky in her room. Her own little world, her escape. The more she stared at it, the more it felt like home and the more she thought about the painting and the painter behind it.
A part of her knew who painted the beautiful sky on her ceiling but she was not ready to confirm her suspicions just yet.
She jolted upright and glided to her full-length mirror humming a tune she heard in the car-radio on the way back home. She didn't see the inferno raging within her iris, she couldn't join the dots on her freckles like constellations in the night sky and her hair didn't cascade down her back like a waterfall. She wasn't Clyde Parker's fantasy trapped inside a canvas. And it was okay. Her eyes were brown, just brown and her hair was a tangled frizzy mess and her freckles were not constellations and it was still beautiful. She was still beautiful. As her reflection stared back from the mirror, all the dead flowers in the garden of her heart bloomed back to life again.
