Photo by Taelynn Christopher on Unsplash
On the morning of my mother’s funeral, I woke up early to prep the house for painting, spreading out drop cloths, taping edges, and priming the walls, just like my mother would have done.
On the morning after my mother’s funeral, I started on the walls with a color called Summer Grass Green and had finished both the living room and kitchen before deciding it was too bright of a color, so the day after that, I started all over, with a color called Thunderstorm Blue. This time, I finished the entire downstairs before deciding I needed something lighter, maybe Corn Cob Yellow.
By the time my mother had been dead a year, I’d gone through a hundred different colors, most of which needed multiple coats to cover the layers underneath, and still nothing had suited me quite right.
And then, by the time my mother had been dead ten years, my house had shrunk from the multiple layers of color, the walls closing in on me, and there was the constant menace of paint fumes, and I couldn’t help but wonder if anything would ever be normal again or if this was my life now. Or if I was looking at this all wrong and it was actually the furniture or area rugs or artwork on the walls that I needed to change.
Jessica Klimesh’s flash and microfiction can be found in multiple journals, and her work was also selected for Best Microfiction 2025 and Best of the Net 2025. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.
