Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
The painter sits upon a luminous balcony in the wink of a rising dawn.
Flowering vines curl their tender fingers around the fence posts, buds glittering like stars in a long constellation; softly moving with the breeze. Colors dance against a sky that lightens with every breath. A symphony begins.
The flora that bloomed in the spring have decorated the neighbors’ doors in wreaths of softer colors. The painter watches them intently, as if they will detach themselves and twirl into the air like emigrating birds. Upon his easel, a tiny canvas leans dutifully into the sunlight. A palette, prepared with hues of yellows and greens, sits idly on the table, next to a thin paintbrush dipped in a water jar. The rim of the jar is like stained glass; dried paint-water eases down the sides, imprinted like tattoos.
The season turns—warmth falls to the ground like leaves baked to brown crisps. The painter watches them waltz in the air, together humming their tune; until they drift to a slow stop on the sidewalk. At night, the stars twist together into another dance; they shiver against each other, couples in a pas-de-deux embracing the wind. In the morning, the clouds swirl into motion, spinning like a wheel—when the time passes, the painter enjoys their long chassé, culminating into a downpour that overflows his paint jar, and leaves his skin glistening like a marble statue's.
At the sight of winter, the painter fixes his eyes on the grass before it disappears under a thick blanket of white snow. The marbled ground glitters even in the moonlight, and even under a sky without stars, when the street lamps cast dim ghosts onto the snow. The canvas rests upon the painter’s easel, still white as a cloud; the paints that dotted his palette have dried and crusted into hard shells. Perhaps, he thinks, there is still wet paint underneath, like fresh grass under snow; like a snail beneath its shell.
The room onlooking the balcony, where a fire burns timidly in the place, is decorated abundantly with tiny, painted canvases. A sun is ablaze upon the mantelpiece, its streaks of white lights thin as strands of hair. A collection of portraits is gathered about the dinner table, some piled into a chair; children run on the hill of the only canvas hung on a pin in the wall by the kitchen door. Dozens of flowers, in and out of season, decorate the room with dots of color, and their petals are the size of a needle head. The painter’s favorite—view of the windy, hilly town from the balcony—repeats, litters the room, scattered on the ground like dried napkins.
The year that passed fruitlessly has the painter breathless; as he watches the sun rise on the first morning of spring, he lifts a brush—thin, just about the width of a dandelion stem—to the sun and watches its wet hair wink in the light; and with old, calloused fingers, he taps the hard shell of the blue paint, freeing a sliver of paint that he scoops with the paintbrush—and swipes at the top of the canvas—his eyes transfixed on the birds that rest on a snow-melted rooftop beneath the vine-covered balcony.