Page 10 of Trailer Park Billionaire
“No.”
“Okay.” She puts something on the bedside table. “This is my personal number. You need anything, you call. Day or night, alright?”
“Right,” I answer absentmindedly as Sienna leaves the room and closes the door behind her.
Slowly, I regain control over my senses.
I’m burning up.
I close my eyes and try to focus on my breathing.
There’s nothing but black.
Just darkness.
I don’t see any paintings before my eyes.
I don’t see anything.
I take another jagged breath, trying to steady myself.
After a while, I open my eyes back up and look around. Not an inch of wallpaper is visible anywhere. Instead, every surface is covered in art. Mostly paintings by artists my grandpa admires… admired. Some are his own paintings that he kept hanging to see if they were finished yet. And then there’s probably every single painting I ever made for him.
My first‘abstract’painting, as he called it, from when I was one year old. A weird drawing of what appears to be a four-legged potato, which he always claimed‘really makes you think’. A painting on a single sheet of paper that I gave to him when he went to prison—because that was all he was allowed to take with him.
It almost feels like a museum in here. It’s just as quiet, too. The kind of quiet that feels like being submerged underwater—deep, thick, weighing heavy on your chest. The kind that crushes you underneath the stillness of it all.
I wipe some tears off my face, and drag in a short breath, then another. When I open my eyes, I stare straight at a blurry pair of tits. Not the avian kind, either. It’s a tiny canvas hanging next to his bed. On any other day, it would probably have made me laugh. Today it leaves me cold.
Which is ironic,I think and take his hand back into mine. It’s still warm.
They’re old and sagging.
I look at the dead body next to me.
Old and sagging too.
It still doesn’t look peaceful.
Am I supposed to say something in a situation like this?
Maybe I should. On the off-chance that he’s still here. Still listening.
I swallow another lump in my throat. “Thank you,” I croak, while more tears drop to the ground, “for being a great grandpa.”
I sit there for a couple of minutes, just staring at him and the art around us.
Then I get up and do the only thing that is left to do: our birthday mug portraits.
I grab an easel and a canvas and set it up next to the bed.
There’s some willow charcoal on his desk, which I use to start drawing.
The obligatory height marker.
Him next to it.
Him not looking peaceful.
