The Gray Sky

The sensation of fear is birthed from a part of the mind that cannot comprehend anything besides the daily drudgery that weighs down every human on earth. It acts almost like a womb, producing unimaginable dreams of terror and atrocious surroundings. While cautiously glancing at an obscure unfinished gray painting of the sky in the basement, Violet wondered if her father was somewhere dreadfully dim, unwillingly watching the fear begin to coil around the last pieces of hope in his head. She morbidly imagined dissecting his brain to see which of his thoughts would spring forth eagerly like a rusty jack-n-the-box.

She knew her dad very well, and even during the days in which he was almost a zombie, she recognized that a flicker of something beautiful still remained inside of him. There was always a certain sparkle in his eye that reassured everyone that he would return back to his normal self in a few days. However, in the week leading up to his disappearance, Violet searched desperately for that glimmer of hope, praying that she would find it as she always had in the past.

As she slowly made her way towards his workbench, an endless stream of thoughts raged through her head, each one more dark and hopeless than the last, and all fighting for her attention. She realized that in order for fear to gain control over anyone, that bit of iridescent hope that once sparkled must slowly start to dim. This idea struck her abruptly, and just then, her realization of how serious the situation was weighed her down. Every step she took felt extremely labored, and by the time she finally stood in front of his workbench, which was dimly lit by a single window, she had to stop to take several deep breaths.

His tiny workbench was littered with tubes of paint, brushes with limply worn-out bristles, and empty alcohol bottles. Canvases plastered with thick creamy layers of gray oil paint leaned against the sturdy legs of the bench. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she knelt onto the floor to let out throbbing sobs that she had been suppressing for days. Her tears streamed uncontrollably from her eyes, and when she finally looked up, she saw boxes piled underneath the table. They were unlabeled, and all the same lifeless dull brown color.

Violet pulled a random box out from the top of the pile, and when she opened it, she found a stack of all the happy birthday letters and drawings that she had given her dad throughout the years. She reached for another box and found photo albums filled with photographs of her dated from back to preschool until last summer. Each box was a mini time capsule of each of the most beautiful moments that decorated their life in the same way stars decorate the night sky.

After several minutes of fondly reminiscing, Violet found a small plastic container tucked away in a deep corner behind several boxes. It was labeled 12/14, in thick black marker. Exactly 5 days before her dad went missing. Inside, there was a carton of cigarettes with a diamond logo filled with receipts and movie tickets, a photo album, and a little black book. She furrowed her brow. Although she had never known her dad to be a smoker, she recalled the traces of him that the police had found. In the few days after he had disappeared, the police had discovered plenty of clues. One of which was his old black car parked outside an abandoned roller skating rink, and shortly after Violet and her mother were informed that the inside was littered with cigarettes.

Suddenly, her mom’s voice bounced down the basement stairs and echoed ominously, “Violet, can you get the door? Someone just rang.” Violet frowned down at the small plastic box before deciding to take it with her and jogged up the stairs. She headed briskly to her room to hide the box underneath her bed before answering the door.

She anxiously swung it open before checking who it was, as she was so accustomed to police visits by now that she assumed it was an officer with some new information, but the man who stood at her doorstep was unfamiliar. Dressed simply in jeans and an old golf shirt, his face was vaguely unrecognizable. He had the face of someone you meet in your dreams when the edges of your vision are so soft that every shape is on the verge of being undistinguishably fuzzy. He was the kind of person that looked so average you could squint at any passerby and wonder if it was him running errands or going about his daily life.

“Hi, are you looking for someone?” Violet asked politely. He stared at her the way a worn-out parent looks at a kid who is crying over a freshly scraped knee. “Violet?” He responded. His voice rang out painfully as if it took a great deal of strain for him to force the word out of his mouth. “Who is it, honey?” Her mom yelled from within the house, but before she could respond, the man reached into his pocket and handed her a thin envelope.

She turned it over delicately in her hands and saw her name perched precariously in the corner, written in what was unmistakably her father’s handwriting. The man pivoted immediately, obviously ready to leave, and Violet grabbed his arm, “Who are you?”

His whole demeanor seemed to change considerably as soon as the question left her mouth. She watched him as he almost collapsed completely; his shoulders fell, and he deflated a significant amount. He seemed to have shrunk a few inches as he coarsely stated, “I’m an old friend of your dad’s. He told me to give that to you in case of an emergency.”

She didn’t let go of his arm, instead, she stepped outside and closed the door quietly behind her. “An old friend?” she asked, “Then how come I’ve never met you?” She carefully studied his face, attempting to mentally draw out every detail so she could accurately notify the police later. She was convinced, without a doubt, that this man was somehow involved with her dad’s disappearance.

He tried to smile, but the corners around his eyes remained unwrinkled, and the defeated look in his eyes painfully reminded her of her dad. He sighed and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, “Do you mind?” he asked. She shook her head, so he lit one up and exhaled the smoke smoothly while he dragged a hand down his sun-worn face. As he slid the pack back into his pocket, Violet momentarily caught a glimpse of a diamond logo on the carton.

Violet backed away, her hand reaching behind her searching for the doorknob as panic started to prickle up her spine. The cogs in her head were starting to turn, but at a brutally low speed that distressed her. Frustrated, she began to ask again, “Who are you?” but was interrupted mid-sentence as her mom pulled open the door. She looked at Violet, and then at the man in front of her with poorly hidden disgust.

“I guess you found him, Alex?” her mom’s voice startled Violet, as it came out tightly drawn and upset. The man, whose name was presumably Alex, hung his head in shame. He couldn’t bring himself to look the woman in the eye as he responded in a defeated tone, “No Janet. I haven’t.” Her mom’s expression softened slightly, and worry clouded her pretty features in a way that made her seem twice her age. She turned to her daughter now and said, “Violet, go to your room,” in a voice that contained purely faux calm. The fact that she had recently grown accustomed to seeing her mom like this made her stomach churn, and she obediently went back to her room without question.

She held the envelope like a piece of glass, uncertain as to whether or not she should open it. After a few minutes, she finally gave in and tore it open, expecting a heartfelt letter, or maybe even a photo of her dad alive and happy, but she pulled out a single slip of paper that read: BANK OF PEARLWOOD, followed by a username and a password.

She searched in disbelief for a note, or an explanation, or anything at all that would ease her confusion, but the enveloped gaped apologetically at her with its open mouth. She sat limply, and after a while, she decided to get her computer and try to log into the account. It was a savings account under her dad’s name and contained $20,000. She almost threw her computer across the room in a temporary moment of severe anguish. It didn’t make any sense, and all the possibilities that lay jumbled up within her head were nowhere near closer to untangling themselves.

Then, she remembered the box underneath her bed. She opened it again, this time glaring at the pack of cigarettes, trying to decipher the relationship Alex had with her father. She opened the photo album, and suddenly, all the air in her lungs compressed, and she felt as if she had just taken a shocking blow to her stomach. Her mouth open and closed several times as she tried to comprehend what she was seeing.

All of the photos were of her dad and the mystery man that she had just met outside of her house only a few minutes before. They were both slightly younger, and as she flipped through the pages, she saw hundreds of pictures of them together. At golf clubs, out mountain climbing, together at college, but there was one photo of them at a lake that stuck out to her the most.

She recognized the lake as the same one her dad had always taken her to as a baby. In this photo, Alex had his arm around her dad’s shoulder, and on the back Summer of 09’ with Alex was written in her dad’s sloppy handwriting. She couldn’t help but notice the giant goofy smiles that they both wore on their faces, and the way her dad’s eyes shone the way that they used to when she was a kid.

She decided to look through the little black book next. It was filled to the very brim with poems and dateless journal entries, so she flipped to the last page and started reading:

I finally lost sight of anything that was once blindly fantastic, and only suffering remains. It gets to the point where one knows of nothing except pain, and it becomes unbearably normal. A perfectly good day gone to waste once you feel the pain start to well up in your throat, and all you can do is lie down and pray that it’ll pass. But it never does. Until one day you wake up and realize that you forgot what it feels like to be alive, and you can’t remember the last time your heart didn’t ache. I love Alex, but I can’t leave Violet behind. I know Janet would inform the court of my incompetence, but I can’t stand the idea of never seeing Violet again. I am tired of living my life stuck in pain. I think I just have to make a decision.

She understood then. A part of her yearned to tell him, to hold him and tell him that everything was going to be ok. Violet promised herself, that the next time she saw him, and she knew without a doubt that she would. She would let him know that he could get better. Wherever he was, she would wait for him to get better, and she would embrace him the way she would when she was a child. She would tell him just how important he was to her, and she would whisper in his ear, “I love you, dad.”