It's not 6 feet under, like they say. But no one looks up.
Look up! It's really 6 feet above. Yet, no one can raise a head that high. My passing in review is a march of museum-quality art on parade—with all my transitions evident on canvas. They have been painted so colorfully, imaginatively, and with lines of both motion and regret; there are subtleties and broad strokes contrasting with both the hues of joy and darker colors of variegated sadness. A closer look gets the viewer beyond the beautiful strokes to the blemishes of life's ugliness. Yet, like a parade, my float joins all others, promenading in ostentatious exhibition.
Above me.
Supine and prone at the same time, I rest indecisively in a Picasso perspective of 360 degrees (and more!). It's relativistic, isn't it? The angles? The contexts? Now, with the right focal depth, I can view from all my points of intersection that is the kaleidoscope of my legacy: spinning shards of color that whirled insensibly before but clearly make sense now.
Over me.
Upstairs, downstairs, fooling me to think I'm going somewhere, but listen, you: M. C. Escher says I'm there already--
"Just stop for a moment on any landing between coincident staircases and cast off the visual illusion"--a contradiction to life against which I rest irresolute. Birds in view that morph from white to black; and dogs to dogs, and knights to knights, and regular divisions of my planes.
How my life reached an asymptote spread in two dimensions by the artist's pen. It's all there for me to see and it's beautiful.
Below me.
There for all to see, my Blue period, my Golden period, all my periods--and my commas and semicolons and ampersands. My colors are complementary: green for red, purple for yellow, and orange for blue. I've washed out from primary colors to pastels, and I mix to make the van Gogh composites that define me--purples versus yellows to contrast the darkness of the night with the stellar summons I solicit--my own Starry Night. There's movement on my canvas and I rest, pleased, in careful splashes.
Higher than me.
I'm a filter that creates uneven light, starkly contrasting my present to my dormant past. The differences between this-and-that and that-and-this no longer matter, explained by a Rembrandt and Banksy chiaroscuro. The contrasts are startling, but are they really contrasts? Or contrarian interdigitations.
Aside me.
To you, I'm dead. Still life, but lifeless, still. A bowl of fruit, expired, and priced for quick sale. A room-temperature object eyed hungrily by Paul Cézanne someplace and somehow. So still, my vessel, which split the waves in life so defiantly and deftly, now a hulk doomed to rust in stagnant waters. How different the eyes of the living are from those of the dead! Where mourners see an objet d'art, I see my art--proper art--a triptych of past, present, and future.
Spreading out from me.
How different time is for the living and for the dead! My past is a canvas of Parrishian light and color, used to enchant, but fading and dimming quickly now, soon to be invisible, minutes after the living depart my undead funeral. My present is a transition of hues, blended to something else, implying I am moving still, a refutation of the body that lies in state at my vigil; my future loses the stark contrasts and harsh lighting, steering me away from the retributions of Bosch toward the inviting sublime landscapes of Romanticism, where I now no longer rest but wander abstractly in Friedrich-envisioned possibilities.
After me.
Below the surface, beyond the first blush, after the initial appraisal is my underpainting, my remains in the Giotto mode. Time spares no work of art--the work in progress, that begs to be corrected, redone, and repainted for every vérité du jour. Truth changes with the world; and what I accepted changed with me along the way, which is the way of the world. The different strata of my life, one atop the other, repainted with epiphanies, apologies, wrong turns, and mid-course corrections. I regard myself as that composite of growth and can now see my finished work. I've spent my life stacking the deck of a mixed media that now lies on display; I rest, complete.
Surprising me.
.
For Scoot's (GIBBERISH) FLASH FICTION FRIDAY, AUGUST 1, 2025
A way to offer a one-time tip. Or not. It’s your life.
Prepositions are magic.
The doctor scribbled in his notebook and then looked up, over his wire-rimmed spectacles: “So, Mr. DeLeone, is this canvas in the room with us right now?”