Landscape of a New York Skyline on A Sunday Morning

Hemming set up his easel at a hill overlooking the New York skyline. It was one of his favorite spots. The lush green fields with their blooming orchards and in the background the tall steel skyscrapers that represented man’s progress. It was a nice contrast. One that Hemming loved to paint. He must have had over twenty different paintings of this very landscape. Some painted in the morning. Some in the evening. Others on Mondays and a few on Sundays. He was fascinated by how much a landscape could change based on the time. Which is why he always came back to this spot.

A new day. A new perspective.

The sun had just risen and with it the city. The birds could be heard chirping but would soon be drowned out by the daily commute. Hemming wanted to get started before that happened. But he always had a specific way of doing things. It was a ritual for him and not adhering to it usually made him lose the calm presence of mind required for painting. Every day he would buy an espresso from the nearby coffee shop and while sipping it would read the newspaper. Today he casually glanced through it: some idiotic policy reforms by Trump, a few child kidnappings, and some high profile celebrity had committed suicide. But this wasn’t why Hemming read the paper. He turned it over to the last page and carefully checked the weather report. Mostly clear skies with a slight chance of rain in the evening. He breathed a sigh of relief. He would be done by then. His espresso finished and the weather firmly in his favour, Hemming began to paint the landscape that he had come to know like the back of his hand.

His hand flew over the blank canvas. Sometimes there would be a flurry of strokes while in other places, a gentle flick of the wrist would suffice. Hemming became one with the painting. It was an extension of himself. He had painted this landscape so many times he no longer needed to look at the canvas. It had become a mechanical process. Before really understanding what he was looking at, his brush would have already painted it. For Hemming, this was the pinnacle of art. The painter and brush become one and without second thought lay bare the complex realities of the landscape before them. Time was immaterial.

It took another two hours before Hemming finished his latest rendition of the landscape. He was especially pleased with this one. He had never been able to get that nice orange sheen of the sun’s rays as they shimmered through the massive skyscrapers but today he thought he had been able to capture that really well. It was almost afternoon and time for lunch. Hemming began to pack up his supplies, glancing over the painting one last time. It was definitely one of his finer pieces as he peered at it closely. And that’s when he saw it. And it made his blood run cold.

In the corner of the painting, hidden in the shade of the trees, Hemming had painted a man. Shoving a little girl into the back of a car.

The newspaper. Child kidnappings.

Hemming left everything and ran back to his apartment. He slammed the door open and took out all his old paintings of that landscape and looked at them carefully.

He was there. In almost all of them. Sometimes he would be walking around the park. In others he was offering candy to a child. Hemming had seen it all. And had done nothing.

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20 years have passed since then and Hemming has never picked up the brush. But the painting still hangs in his living room. As a reminder of sin not punished. Penance for action not taken. And for the lives of the children he could have saved.

The evil most dangerous is the one that lurks in plain sight. The ones we learn to live with it. The ones we ignore. And those who ignore it.

#writing #painting #landscape #Literature #storytelling #Fiction