Nothing to Say

Empty Easel

Rose stares at the easel in silence, wishing that she will find something to paint or draw on. She has had nothing to do for the past seven years except survive. There have been countless attempts to find her and her brother, yet each has failed. They've been kept alive for so long. She feels like she's going to fly now. Seven years of unreal pain and unimaginable lengths of crying does that.

Tommy stands beside her in the same silence, watching as her sparkling green eyes--a contrast to his dull brown--assess the situation. The two have no one to care for them besides the person who took them to this wretched place. And that man is a monster.

Tommy looks away from the easel and sighs, examining the dark junk piles in the shadows of the trash heap. Rose stands up, holding onto his shoulder with a fearful gaze. The man left them here only an hour ago, but he'll come back. Tommy knows.

When he was alone he'd been fine with it. But now Rose was here, a girl.. and she wasn't going to last a second in this hidden part of the world. "Come on," Tommy finally croaks, picking up the two's half-empty water bottle. "Let's go find you something to draw with."

They find a smallish chunk of metal and the two spend the next hour drawing in dirt until the man comes back and sees the art.

They run.

It's what they always do.

Always, always, always.

Flash forward a few years later--she's ten and he is thirteen, and she is a street artist that paints with sidewalk chalk.

They stand there waiting for their first customer, Rose fidgeting nervously as she poises the chalk over a thin sheet of paper they've found discarded in a trash can. She draws a little girl, smiling with the irregular colors. Her chalky lips seem so natural, so real, even though she still lays frozen on the paper. Tommy stares for a moment, then looks up as he realizes there's a girl that looks exactly like the drawing walking right past them.

"Ma'am!" Tommy catches her attention, holding up the paper. "Would you like a self-portrait?" The girl, a few years older than him, takes it and smiles as she stares at the paper.

"Thank you." The smile is nearly identical to that of the picture. Tommy grins crookedly.

"And to you, Miss. Have a good day." The girl nods, then turns before stopping to give him a small bag of coins.

"I never knew I smiled like that," she says as she turns around again.

Soon enough, they have enough money to get more paper, a pencil, and a water bottle. Tommy, relieved, hands the things to her with a smile.

"The lady gave it to us," he says and Rose beams. "She liked it."

Rose is now sixteen and Tommy nineteen, and thouh he knows they can pay for college he refuses to go. "The tourists gave us free lessons, remember?" He grins at her before closing the door in her face. Rose growls at him but runs downstairs, grinning at the drawings on the walls as she prepares for their art house auctioning. Tommy is changing into his suit and Rose has tied her hair into a bun as she pulls on her apron.

"They're here!" She shouts upstairs and though she can't see him she knows he's smiling.

She's twenty years old and taking art classes, and he's twenty-three and taking photography because she tricked him into doing it. Rose is now famous--Rosemarie Ocean, as Tommy found them a new name to live under--and Tommy is fine with travelling and posting picures anonymously online. They're happy.

She's thirty-six and he's thirty-nine. He has kids, and she's overjoyed with being an aunt to three--two girls, one boy. The art has been selling quite well and Tommy lives a quiet life forty miles off "the edge of the earth" with his wife Lilli and children Max, Zoey and Elly--now seven-and-a-half, seven and eight-and-three-quarters--plus the cat and acorn family on their windowsill. Rose visits often; Lilli jokes that she should move in and Rose takes it seriously until she realizes that then she'd barely come home.

Tommy's somewhere around the age of forty when Rose finally settles down and adopts two kids--siblings Sarah and Matt. When Rose realizes she has two little kids that are just like she and Tommy were once.

She grins and sends her brother an old drawing.

Tommy's seventy-eight when he dies, and Rose cries herself to sleep as the grandfather to four, father to three, husband to one and brother to only her falls off a steep cliff in an attempt to mow their long grass. He didn't die alone; his son had to watch him take the fall.

Rose continues in life, teaching Matt how to draw and Sarah how to take photos in remembrance of her brother--though the two take up instead teaching literature and writing books she's sure will become famous someday. She teaches her children and grandchildren that life's worth living, and when her son has his own child she tells him her brother's story.

She leaves earth herself with her son and daughter crying by her creaking, wood-floored bedside.

On the head of her grave stands an easel with colorful marker and words carved into it.

Rosemarie Ocean, mother to two, grandmother to three, wife to one and artist to many.