Coleman Riggins
There’s always going to be that once upon a time in my life where I held two small, hardened beans in the palm of my hands. There’s always going to be a little bit of me that wishes I could believe people can be trusted to sit and stay. That you can look at paintings and not see the imperfect brushstrokes or that you can look at two hardened beans and see a potential for growth. I wonder sometimes where that little bit of me went and why I don’t care for it anymore.
…
Two sunstained legs pounded the cement of the bustling Vatican city those days in Summer when I confused fun with freedom. Weaseling my way between tourists with their flashing cameras and their sunhats and complaints had become second nature. The Sistine Chapel beckoned me in its white marble glory.
“Good morning, Michelangelo,” I shouted to the ceiling, startling a couple passerby. They passed by in the sea of people, craning their heads to the ceiling. Above, the mosaic of paintings etched through the ceiling. In the corner, The Sacrifice of Michelangelo, The Drunkenness of Michelangelo, and then right there in the middle of the building which all pillars and walls led up to: The Creation of Michelangelo. No other name came to mind other than Michelangelo. They were fine lines of paint that reached for me, stippling the corners of my vision until all I could see were clouds of paintings.
“Good morning, Michelangelo,” I repeated, slumping my backpack off my bony pre-adolescent shoulders. A few passerby stepped out of my way, as I sat and pulled out a loaf of bread from my bag. “I brought your bread today! Fresh from the fridge!”
When he didn’t move, I shrugged. More for me, I guess. I took a bite out of the bread, stale, patches of green sprouting along the bottom of it, consuming it with me. My two friends: Michelangelo and the mold.
I held up my hand, imagining a chalice. A grail with delectable wine, dark as blood. I tried to do it the way I remember my father always showed me back when we went to church on Sundays. Back when he would look down at my freckled face and pass me the tray with small plastic cups of purple wine and little doughy squares of crackers in the middle.
When I passed it onto the next person, my father would place his balled-up, calloused hands over mine and drop two cold coins into my palms
“For offering,” he’d whisper with a kindness in his brown eyes.
“For offering,” I repeated.
“This is his body,” my father said, pointing to the small cracker in my hand. Then he’d point to the virgin wine in my other hand. “This is his blood.”
I took those words and repeated them to Michelangelo and the mold, holding the stale bread and the invisible wine when their turns came. I took another bite of the moldy bread, setting it on the ground near my backpack for safe-keeping, and took a little sip from my transparent chalice.
“And for offering,” I said, reaching into my jacket to grab what I’d brought. It wasn’t quarters, but I had two beans to replace what I couldn’t bring. I set them on the floor next to the bread.
I watched them there for a brief moment, half expecting the green of the beans and the green of the bread to grow into a beanstalk right in the middle of the chapel. Two tendrils of vines entwined, sprouting into a story that I remember my mother used to recite to me as I fell asleep on her lap. I thought about myself climbing its limbs up to the ceiling and talking to Michelangelo, examining the colors and brushstrokes that weaved between the spaces of reality. Like clouds. And I would be there, visiting Michelangelo in his kingdom observing all the people down below.
…
As morning broke earlier that day, I stumbled into the hall. I slinked in and out of the dawn shadows on the walls, tracing my fingers along their textures. I imagined the indentions as miniature mazes, tracing themselves through the amber paint until they pushed me out into the destination where the hallways expanded into a proper room.
I followed the countertop along the wall, letting my fingers glide along the splash of sunlight that hung onto the edge. Leftover dust left indentures for my fingers to feel. The countertops were littered with leftover beer cans, stacks of fruit and a wad of paper towels that were golden brown and hardened. The cardboard for the paper towel roll still sat on the holder, pointing stoically towards the sky.
With caution, I gripped the handles of the refrigerator. There was a time before when my father would have helped me sneak in afternoon snacks despite my mother saying it would ruin my appetite. There was a time when my father would have pulled out a knife and I would think to myself, Achille Romano: Death by Apple, only to have him cut the apple instead of me. There was a time when he’d wink at me, placing a finger up to his lips in sworn secrecy. But that time was not now.
I gripped the handles of the fridge and let them linger there for a moment as I mustered up the courage to open it up, grab my bread and go. When it slid open, the sound of the breaking seal rang in my skull, and I winced, grabbing the bread as fast as I could and turning away only to have my heart do another somersault across my chest.
In the living room, my father’s limp body lay cast out across the sofa, his face turned towards me. I froze. Then I realized that his eyes were sheathed into his eyelids. His dark brown hair fell loosely over his face, intermixing with the stubble of a beard that wanted to return. His face lay smashed against the arm of the couch in an unnatural position and the top buttons of his flannel lay open, exposing his upper chest. He still had his pair of jeans on.
I debated if he was dead or not until I noticed that his pale lips parted in steady breaths that filled the air with even more fragrance of beer. His arm reached over to the birch side table with its three remaining legs, and his hand settled in the middle of crumpled beer cans like a moat. A last line of protection from everything outside.
Above him, paintings hung in a diagonal line, abstract. Some had circles, some had squares, and some had miscellaneous shapes that I hadn’t yet taught myself to identify. But each had a tear developing in the middle, splitting the canvas in two, sometimes scratching the frame as well, like in the painting on the far end just above my father’s head. Three triangles stood–blue, orange, and grey in the middle–with a tear ripping straight through it, separating the blue and orange and splitting the grey.
A chill ran through me despite the Italian Summer heat, and I realized I’d forgotten to shut the refrigerator door. I did it as lightly as I could, then tiptoed my way out the front door, bread in my backpack.
…
So then I sat at the Sistine Chapel, having offered Michelangelo the Lord’s blessing of both body and blood, and I started to make small talk with him.
“Not much has changed since yesterday,” I said to him, taking a seat on the checkered floor as though we were on a chess board. “My dad says hi.”
Michelangelo stared back at me with knowing eyes, grey like the figure in my father’s painting. He tipped his head at me, raising his eyebrows slightly.
“Alright, alright,” I sniffled. “He didn’t say hi. He never says hi, you know this.”
Michelangelo looked at me. The mold looked at me, too.
“What?” I shrugged. “You guys know what he’s like. He’s busy. He has stuff to do with work and life and…”
My words drifted as I caught them looking at me in exasperation.
“…stuff.” My shoulders softened, sagging toward my chest. “He’s got better stuff to worry about. He barely knows you guys anyways. He hasn’t been here in a long time.”
Looking down, I saw the mold staring back at me as if to say, Oh, so we’re not important enough?
I raised my eyebrows at them. Really? Honestly, really?
Looking up to Michelangelo for support, he just looked back and me and shook his painted head. What are you gonna do?
“Listen,” I said to the mold. “I really don’t need your sass right now. He’s doing his best.” I then flipped the bread over so the mold couldn’t be seen.
Michelangelo peered down at me a question tainting his tongue.
“Hey, they started it!”
Michelangelo looked tired. “Are you lost, bud?”
Suddenly, I was thrown out of my thoughts and the image of Michelangelo shifted to another face, clean shaven and brown hair tousled. Michelangelo’s white robes shifted to a white hoodie that reeked of summer sweat. His green eyes met mine in concern as he crouched down to my level.
I shifted, standing up and grabbing my backpack, raising my chin and looking down at him. “No, I know exactly where I’m going. Thank you very much.” Then I turned and walked towards the exit of the Sistine Chapel, leaving him crouched. Shoving my hands in my pocket where my beans lay patiently, I left feeling baffled.
…
I didn’t return home until much later that night when I jumped the fence to the backyard and climbed a stack of meticulously-placed pallet crates. Nearly slipping on a sanded edge of the top box as I tried to maneuver to the roof, the pencil that rested on my ear nearly slipped and fell, but I was able to reach out and catch it. I stuck it sideways in my mouth for safer keeping and stepped both my legs out onto the shingled roof only to be interrupted by a crash from below.
I was ready for the wind to sweep me up and carry me away as I froze on the roof, afraid I’d stirred the beast. A single slip could send him over the edge. But I didn’t dare peer over the lip of the roof any more than I had to, so I sat still for a long while wondering if I had actually heard anything at all. And just when I was about to start moving again, another crash broke through and tears threatened my eyes as the house thudded. The pencil splintered between my teeth.
Trying to think of something to distract from the rampage and shouting, I set my backpack down, grabbed out a lined notebook and lodged my pencil in the spiraled binding and laid my head against the rooftop. The stars were especially bright tonight–something my mother would have called the “Artists’ Touch.” When the stars look brighter than they actually are, they aren’t actually–it’s just in my brain. Something that I made myself, artistically, to make myself feel better–to make the world seem just a bit brighter.
“What’s up, Mio Pittore,” she would say to me sometimes when I would gaze out at the stars from my bedroom window on winter nights when frost would threaten to enter the room.
Without even looking at her, I would ask her about the night sky and what the stars meant. She would kneel next to me, nudging a notebook under my elbow and I would look up.
Her blue eyes were dark as the waves in the night sky where stars seemed to swirl into whirlpools of mystery. And her black hair held speckles of grey that reflected the moon. Her tangerine hoodie felt soft to my bare skin as it grazed me. She’d smile, and then say to me: “I’m not sure, Mio Pittore.” Then, she’d place a pencil in my hand. “Why don’t we figure it out?”
The notebook she’d given to me that day was now filled in with various pictures drawn of the night sky, etching the locations of the stars each night that I returned home and needed to kill time before heading inside.
Each page was labeled with a date, the weather, and any extra notes that I could come up with. Cloudy days were sometimes my favorite since they covered up some of the stars and I could draw the few I could see, but the clear sky days were also nice to get a good look at the pure amount out there past the atmosphere.
I started drawing each of the stars that shone brightest first. There was one to the north that shone especially bright, surrounded by a cluster of stars that went off towards the east in a straight line, like it was pointing. I thought of The Creation of Michelangelo and the way that Michelangelo pointed towards God in that moment of creation and I followed the general cluster of stars until a vague silhouette of a man started to take shape, lounged on a cliffside as if creation was just the normal.
My, what a creative mind, I heard Michelangelo say to me as I etched him into the stars above. You have an artist’s touch.
It was about that time when I heard the door creak open and I quickly turned my flashlight off. In the night, a silhouette of a man stormed out into our driveway. A shout echoed across the neighborhood, though I couldn’t discern what it said or if it was even anything of real importance. I skulked, peering just barely over the top edge of the roof so he couldn’t see me.
I heard the banging of boots to metal and the sound of the car door clicking open as the sound bounced off the front of the house. When two headlights split the darkness, I hid away, pressing my back to the roof, sighing into the Summer air.
When I saw his headlights disappear around the corner, I clicked my flashlight back on, adding some brief finishing lines to my drawing of Michelangelo between his stars. I also went below the date and weather conditions sections. I paused, not knowing quite what to write but feeling like I needed to add something.
I thought of my mother, wondering what information she’d like to know about the sky tonight. Flipping my pencil in anticipation, I looked back up at the stars that shone bright in return, and I wrote in the lines two simple words: Artists’ Touch.
I slunked down the crates, and slipped into my bedroom where I fell asleep in my jeans and hoodie, holding the beans in the palm of my hands. My dreams took me to clouded castles before the slamming of a door pulled me awake.
…
Fifteen years later, and there was still no beanstalk. I’ve since gotten a locket for the beans to go in so I wouldn’t have to worry about losing them, but I’ve given up on wishing for them to grow into anything more than just beans. Their hard exterior didn’t allow for much room for growth anyways.
When I told my father that I was traveling to America for my schooling, he stared at me from the couch and simply said, “Where to?”
I told him New York, and he turned away, wishing me a fair trip and safety. That was his way of saying that he loved me.
It’s been five years since that day. Sometimes I still open his number on my phone that reads (from me): Landed safely in America. Read 7/28/2014 at 11:12 p.m. I sent him it when the plane landed at 11:38 a.m. two days prior. No messages sent since.
I had a father once, but I don’t need him. I know where I’m going with my story.
Instead, I built a family out of people I’ve met along the way, many enthralled by somebody who came from across the sea.
“How often did you go to the Sistine Chapel?” my friend, Alix, would ask me sometimes when I went out with her.
“All the time,” I’d answer, not including how I’d sneak in or how–now that I think about it–they probably let me through out of pity.
“You’re so lucky.”
To that, I would just laugh.
My two good friends, Alix and Jordan and I were accepted into graduate studies in astronomy and astrophysics at NYU. Together, we went out to a local pub on the west side of town and sat at the bar having conversations into the late night and drinking to the point where the intricate designs in the bar ceiling started to blur together. In them, I saw Michelangelo for the first time in years as he nodded his head affectionately. Congrats, Achille. I’m proud of you, Mio Pittore. Half-passed-out, we had to call Jordan’s boyfriend in order to have any sort of chance at getting home in one piece.
I walked into the night with one hand habitually in my hoodie and the other holding my locket with the two beans that were my only belongings from Italy I had when I first arrived in the United States and little else. Just my beans and a hopeful dream that lasted until I realized that beanstalks don’t grow unless you tend to them.
…
Two years later, I looked out the window of a bus and past the faint reflection of sardined people on their way home to the faint bits of sky seen behind towering buildings. One thing about New York I didn’t appreciate was the lack of visible stars. With light pollution and the oversized buildings in the heart of the city, very few lights could actually be seen by the human eye. In the absence, there was a hint of sadness that I couldn’t quite place. There was no Michelangelo to comfort me.
On the sidewalks of New York, I watched as faces passed by in blurs, none of them quite feeling real, but I did see a young girl holding her mother’s hand as they walked presumably home under the streetlamps. And I saw college students walking by laughing their asses off about something. And I saw merchants shouting out across seas of pedestrians. I focused in on one: a stout man who stood on a stool shouting through his chubby face and chin stubble. His curly, black hair waved a bit in the city breeze, unaware of where exactly it was heading, but content to be wild and free. In the man’s hand, a loaf of bread that he gripped with ferocity and waved to the potential customers as they passed, eyeing him with concerned glass marble eyes.
Something tugged at the back of my eyelids and I blinked to keep it down. My hand went to my amulet, brushing my fingers along its intricately-designed shell.
…
When I was young, I was taken with my parents between tents being set up, each taking one of my hands with me in the middle. The Italian heat bore down on us as I observed tents sprouting from the ground all around us by people like my parents: artists and crafters. Mom and Dad tightened and loosened their grip on me as they spoke to each other with tense undertones.
When we eventually got to our own spot. Mom instructed dad to work on one side of our tent while she worked on the other, and before long, our own stall had been constructed. Under the middle of the tent, Dad set up a foldable table and then they both went to the truck in silence to grab boxes of art they were wanting to sell at the show.
I sat waiting for them to get back, and they did eventually.
“Where do you want these paintings, Sara,” my dad asked, shading his voice slightly.
“I don’t know, Angelo,” she said, throwing her hands up. “Why don’t you figure it out.”
“Sara,” my dad started, strained, then turned his turquoise button-up shirt toward me, who was looking at the ducks in the pond, but listening. “Achille, why don’t you go explore the art fair while we set up the rest of the tent.”
Mom looked over in my direction, apparently just taking note of my presence in the discussion. “Yes, Mio Pittore. Why don’t you go grab us some lunch, baby.” She gave me a little kiss on the forehead and sent my little legs on their way.
“Just make sure to keep your head out of the clouds, Achille.” Dad said. “Don’t get too lost.”
I nodded. Pay attention. Don’t get lost. Got it.
On my way out, I peered back and watched Dad set up a painting with three differently colored triangles–blue, grey, and orange individually–and placed it delicately on an ornate easel.
“No, Angelo, dio mio…” I heard my mom saying as I walked further from the tent. “Why don’t you just leave the tent to me?”
“Sara, can we not do this right now?” But I was too far away to hear the rest.
I explored the fairgrounds watching as people placed out stone statues and strange crafts to show off and sell. A woman putting up a foldable blackboard sign smiled at me, and I smiled and waved back. I told her I liked her stand. She told me she liked my spunk. It was a mutual admiration. Continuing down the row of tents like this, I eventually got to the end of the stands and into the intersection of food trucks parked in lanes.
A line was starting to form at one, and I joined in behind the towers of tired adults. The man in front of me looked down a bit concerned, and in response I puffed out my chest and put on my own best tired expression to match theirs. He seemed to buy it and turned back around with a smirk on his face.
When it came to my turn, I stood up at the food stand and ordered something. I don’t remember what exactly I ordered, but what I do remember is getting a good chuckle out of him.
“Look, kid,” I remember him saying to me with his greasy breath. “I know you don’t got money o’ your own.” He drummed his fingers along the countertop barely as large as I at the time. Then, I found him placing two small beans in the palm of my hand. “But here’s what I’ll tell you. You keep these and some day you’ll be able to grow a beanstalk towards someplace better. Then, you won’t need anything else to find a happy ending.”
I nodded, completely unaware of what exactly he meant, but cherishing the two beans. I just thought of that one story my mother always told about the beanstalk that could take you to the clouds.
It must’ve been some sort of twisted joke, though, because I returned to my parents’ tent that morning to find my mother gone, my father with balled fists softly punching the foldable table, and a new rip in the painting straight through the grey figure.
…
My mother loved Michelangelo. She’d said once that he was the perfect combination of science and fiction, reason and faith. That he painted, but still believed in the logic behind it. He painted for a purpose–some sort of logic that she thought my father couldn’t possess.
I found myself on the bus back from NYU the same day that I saw the merchant with the bread earlier that morning. He was no longer there, but I still saw him shaking his bread, and I wondered if he ever spoke to it. If he ever looked to the sky and saw a kingdom in the clouds like the other merchant had, or if he was just like everyone else.
…
I picked up Alix and Jordan on the way out of New York that night. I told them we needed to take some time to stargaze, and they decided they didn’t have anything better to do.
We set out to an old, abandoned park far from the city’s heart. There was still light pollution, but it was impossible to avoid the steady city beat of New York.
“It’s beautiful out tonight,” Jordan said, lighting the tip of a joint aflame and taking a large puff.
“I know,” I said, doing the same. I felt the flame ignite inside of me and coughed since it had been a while. I assured them I was fine.
The two of them worked together to lay out a blanket and a tent in the gravel in case it started to rain even though the skyline was clear of any clouds. We set up some seats and I rummaged through my backpack.
“You remember our map?” Alix asked.
“You think I’m crazy?” I asked, pulling out a roll of paper I had in there.
We unfolded it on the blanket, and Alix began to draw, starting with the stars from the north and moving south along our central line of view.
“The stars are so bright tonight,” Alix said as she drew in a few more.
I don’t know if it was the weed hitting or something else, but the observation made my chest churn. “My mother used to say that’s the Artist’s Touch, you know.”
“What in the world does that mean?”
“It means it’s all in your head. She said that they just appear that way when you most need them.”
Alix huffed. “Sounds like religion.”
I smirked. “My parents were pretty religious.”
Jordan rested her elbow across the map on the table. “Killy, I don’t think you’ve ever talked about your parentage before.”
“Hey, watch the map,” Alix said. Jordan lifted her elbow, but continued to stare me down.
“Not much to talk about. They were parents.” I waved it off, hoping they’d take my hints. “I don’t talk to them much anymore. The point is that she saw everything as a sort of artform.”
“Was she an artist?”
“Yea, she made my dad art all the time.”
“That’s adorable.”
“Nothing else they did was,” I looked at the northernmost part of the map that Alix had already drawn out and started to connect the lines between stars that were swirling in my stoned mind. I saw the face of Michelangelo appear and smile at me, who I hadn’t seen since that one night I got drunk. “They needed to make up for it somehow.”
“Do you agree with her?”
“Huh?”
“Do you think of the world as art?”
I thought about it for a bit, letting the question settle. I remembered my mother’s face as she sat with me, looking out the window in her tangerine hoodie. I remembered my father as he handed me cold coins for offerings. I remember the white angel from the food truck, tucking two beans into the palm of my hand. You don’t need anything else to find a happy ending.
I felt the world spin on its axis around me, though I didn’t think weed hit me that hard. I was high. So high. In the sky, above it all, and looked down from my cloud castle at all the people who work and work and work, but they’ll never grow a beanstalk tall enough.
Looking up, I saw Michelangelo’s face looking down at me through the bright stars. Keep your head out of the clouds, Mio Pittore.
My fingers found the locket around my throat, and I clicked it open, letting the two small beans fall freely.
I looked over at each of them separately and released the first round of tears, no longer knowing if it was art or not. No longer knowing if the happy ending was real.