By Kate E Lore

He likes watching smoke. It marks the air flow of the room. Gives you an idea of people’s lung capacity. Their smoking style. How deep they puff. How long they hold. Some people are such junkies they always go for as much as they can. They don’t think about getting home; they forget about distance and plans for later. These people hit free weed hard. These are most people.

The ones who hold back are usually more interesting. There once was a girl who sold acid who he played middle man for. She was a new age hippy, all crystals and aromatherapy. She has dreadlocks, but she’s Black, so she had the dreadlocks long before the crystals. She taught yoga on the side. She breathed out her smoke in a long, drawn exhale. Like stretched taffy, like a line of crayon across the wall. She breathed with her diaphragm. She made eye contact and drew back her head, exhaling the smallest stream of smoke. Like a drip of white water repelled by gravity.

He fell in love with her. She moved in. They had a child. They bought a house.

They ran their home as a living piece of artwork. Every wall a canvas. Every inch up for modification.

“But once a year, we paint over and start anew,” she said. “The Buddhist idea of impermanence and rebirth. Anyway, we can always take pictures.”

The first drawing their son ever made was the first drawing they just couldn’t paint over. So she put a poster over it, kept it hidden but safe. One year, the boy made a special mural on a wall in the garage as his Christmas gift to them. He was too young to work and earn his own money, so he couldn’t buy them a gift. He studied some art books and watched YouTube. The result surprised them all.

The boy made it a tradition to do a mural once every year. And each new year turned out better than the last. Soon the whole house was covered, so they sent him to work outside. The house got attention, and soon, the boy got commissions to paint the sides of tall buildings up in the city.

He got a full-ride scholarship. He chose to stay in the city. A place where his canvas could cover the sky.

She started going to visit the boy without the father. She started staying out later and later. She started to be gone for whole weekends. She got a new job out there. Soon, the only time he saw her was on the weekend. When he asked her about coming by on a weekday, she made up some excuse, then changed the subject.

He didn’t like the way the busy colors of the walls mismatched the empty of the rooms. He hung up big curtains that could be pulled back like the opening of a theater, big reveal. He gets excited when his son comes to visit. He looks forward to the weekend. He cleans, he dusts, he likes to use a grill in the backyard to make various forms of barbecue. He likes to watch the smoke. Mostly, now, he just thinks about the flavor of it.

His son comes over. Now a college professor. Art, of course. The boy confides in his father. His girlfriend is pregnant. He’s afraid. They go out to the backyard and stare up at the stars as night sets in. He lights up a joint and passes it on to his son for the first time.

The ember floats between them a small speck of glow in the dark. He exhales. The smoke before him is a fast cloud. It whips, rushing up with the breeze and dissipates into nothing. He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know about anything anymore. The uncertainty hangs like a heavy fog. Blurs like a layer of dust over a painting.

“You can never really be sure,” he says. “It’s all just shapes we try to derive meaning from.”