Field of Red - Vincent Van Gogh

Field of Red

Cover Art is Wheat Field With Crows by Vincent Van Gogh, painted just before his death in 1890. The wheat field depicted is likely the same field that he shot himself in before stumbling back to the inn where he stayed and dying in his brother's arms a few days later.

The wheat field - it wasn't too far ahead now. Vincent rolled his shoulders and shifted his hold on the easel and canvas under his arm, and the canvas bag of paints and brushes in the other hand.

And there was a revolver in his pocket, weighing heavier than all of his art supplies combined. He wasn't sure yet why he'd brought it - well, he had some vague form of an idea, but as yet it was beyond him why - although what the why was of, was just out of grasp, too.

The night was cool, nipping at the rough, bone-and-cartilage lumped scar on the side of his face, where his ear had been at one point. It wasn't a particularly special night, rather like all the others, which was, probably, why certain thoughts came so readily to mind.

Vincent remembered the summer of 1881, walking over the bridge not far from his childhood home, and with him a bright young woman, laughing at something he'd just said - granted, it was a fake laugh, but an effort nonetheless, and didn't that count?

Maybe not, he supposed, but now he wished he'd married her anyways, regardless of what his parents said - he didn't know why they'd disagreed so strongly, Kee Vos was his mother's sister's daughter - wasn't family about trust? Vincent wanted that: family, trust.

He'd almost had it another time, too, in 1882, with Sien Hoorik and her daughter, a toddler fixated on jumping over the cracks in the sidewalks and singing lullabies to frogs and worms and such. Nevermind that Sien was a prostitute, and her daughter one child of five, the love was there.

Maybe things would have gone different if he'd married her, Vincent thought, and then wondered why he was thinking in that fatalistic way that one thought in when they were about to die. He didn't want to die. He didn't think.

He got to the top of the hill and a rat skittered out of his way, dragging part of a head of lettuce behind it. Vincent could see the wheat field now, at the bottom of the great slope that came out of town. It wasn't golden anymore, in the evening light, stalks turned gray-blue, although it then changed to a more yellow-gray as he neared, and finally set his things down at the end of the field.

But he didn't start painting, although he suddenly wasn't sure he wanted to.

He walked into the wheat field towards the glowing, not quite round moon, and then he spread his fingers and gathered little bits of grain in his hand. Then the blades cut into his hand and he quickly released them.

Feel the painting, Meneer Huysmans had said, and look at the colors that make up the colors of your subject, and pieces that coalesce into a whole.

Those, perhaps, had been the best times of his childhood - one hour a day for four years, save for Sabbath and holidays, sitting right at his teacher's elbow and painstakingly copying every stroke of the pencil - he'd chewed the inside of his cheek to the point where he tasted coppery blood, and still he preferred that to any of his breaks at home, or any of the theological studies he tried to immerse himself in later in life.

A sharp jerk in his walk as his toe hit a stone pulled him back to the blurred out scene before him, and then he heard a voice - somehow it stood out from the other noises coming together from the town, creating a buzz that hung thick in the air just above him. It was young, and fearful, and when Vincent looked up at the cluster of houses he saw a short figure standing in a doorway, silhouetted by a yellow, flickering glow, staring at him and complaining loudly.