The Marsh

            The hot afternoon sun beats down on the little man.  He’s wearing a denim hat with a floppy brim that shades his face and neck from the sun’s rays.  The denim is very faded and frayed with much use.  From underneath the man’s denim hat short white hairs stick out.  Here and there gray hairs interrupt the smooth whiteness, like a few grains of pepper in a bowl of salt.  His skin is weathered and sags with old age. 

            On his face, the old man has glasses with silver frames.  The lenses are rectangular and are the dark gray color that prescription glasses which also serve as sunglasses often have.  Beneath the glasses, his eyes are a light blue that matches the sky on a bright, sunny day.  They are very keen and alert, noticing every movement that occurs before them.  His eyelids are open far enough that they look like little lemons.  But when he looks at the scene in front of him, he squints his eyes until they are just little slits.  Sticking out from under the glasses is a large Roman nose.  Below that is a mouth with thin, pale lips.  His pointy chin sticks out as far as his nose and brings the entire face to a stop.

            His beige sweater was knitted in a seed stitch pattern, the small bumps and indents like tiny checkerboard squares.  There are six buttons in the front, a darker beige that the rest of the sweater.  The two front pockets are bulging with different colors of acrylic paint.  Already on his sweater is a streak of crimson, a dap of azure paint, and a drop of sienna.  Instead of being covered in paint, his canvas pants have a thin crust of dried mud along the frayed cuffs.  They hang loosely around his skinny legs.  His thick, dark brown, woolen socks form a bridge between his pants and his shoes, leaving no skin showing.  His shoes are made of leather, but they are covered in so many layers of mud that the entire shoe – the rubber sole, the laces, and the leather upper – is the exact same color as the ground around him.  The toes of his shoes are square, with the leather around his big toe thinner and sticking up a bit more than the rest of the shoe.  The backs of the shoes come up to the top of his heels, and then make a squashed semicircle that surrounds his ankle bone.

            He is sitting on a wooden, four-legged stool that, too, has paint and mud on it.  He is hunched over, holding a wooden palette with many different colors squeezed haphazardly about the edges in his left hand.  Some of the blotches of color are pure and unmixed, but many bleed into nearby colors and form various different shades of color.  In his right hand is a single brush, and right next to his right foot is a former glass jam jar a little more than halfway full of water.  The water itself is murky gray-brown.  The sunlight reflects off the rim of the jar and the top of the water, creating bright patches of white light.

            He is sitting in tall, yellow grass that grows on the sides of marshes.  The flattened grasses show a clear path leading to where he is sitting.  Directly in front of him is a clump of cattails, the green glades shooting up to the sun, the stalks bearing the cattails leaning over slightly with the weight, and tall enough that their tips almost peek over the distant horizon line.  They remain perfectly stationary in the hot, still air.  Just beyond the cattails is the water.  At a distance, it appears to be a clear blue.  But up close, the water is thick with mud.  The water extends almost as far as the eye can see, but surrounding it is a thin line of green reeds.  The sun is behind the little man, and slightly to his left. It is not directly above him, but high enough that it casts his shadow on the ground, and not on his painting. 

            The three-legged, wooden easel sits almost directly in front of the man, but slightly to his right.  It is low enough that just his eyes, nose and hat peer over the top of the canvas.  The image on the canvas is very similar to the scene, but there are gaps of white canvas along the edges of the frame.  One bunch of cattails is painted, with each variegated leaf accounted for.  But another clump is merely a blotch of green with a few dabs of brown here and there.  The man lifts up his paint brush and moves it over to a deep green glob of paint on his palette.  Having covered the tip of his brush with the paint, he proceeds to gently stroke the area on his painting where there should be green cattails.  He moves his arm up and down, touching the brush to the canvas only while moving it in the upward direction.  He turns his head back to the palette and debates what color to use next.  He chews on the end of his brush in a puzzled manner, adding more wood-colored bite marks to the already peeling black paint.  He looks sharply over at the marsh, squints his eyes for a moment, then turns back to his palette.  This time he moves his right arm over and mixes the green already on his brush with some maroon, to make the color of the glades that are in the shadows.  He moves his hand back over to the painting and begins his up and down motion again.  This time he only applies the paint when his arm is in the downward motion.  The mass of green begins to take shape.  The glades are clearly defined, and correspond exactly with the glades fifty feet in front of him.  His thin lips break into a soft, small smile.

            Finally the man ceases any hand motion.  He sighs and absentmindedly lowers his right hand to the water-filled jar at his right foot, keeping his eyes fixed on his painting.  When the brush misses the water, just passing by the outside of the glass rim of the jar, he snaps his head over to the situation.  His face shows no emotion as he raises his hand a few inches and dips the tip of the brush into the murky water.  The paint brush swirls around in a counter clockwise circle in the water until the green paint is no longer visible on the bristles.

            The silence is broken by a deafening quack.  The man shifts his gaze to the marsh.  A male mallard duck flies through the air, its movement in stark contrast with the dead stillness of everything else.  The bird’s neck and head are a shiny dark green, like an emerald glistening in the sun.  The tiny black eyes are barely visible on either sides of it’s head.  The long yellow beak stands out against the dark head.  At the base of the neck is a thin white stripe, and below that is the bird’s maroon chest, which the duck sticks out in a proud puff as he flies through the air.  The stomach of the duck is the grayish off-white color of the clouds on a foggy day.  The wings have that same color as a base, but with stripes of light brown, black, and white.  On both wings, completely symmetrical and on the sides rather than the back, is a shiny, bright blue stripe offset by thin white stripes on both sides of the stripe.  The duck’s bright orange, webbed feet are tucked under the white and black tail. 

            The man watches as the duck’s flight path angles down to the ground near the cattails.  A quack comes from inside a clump of cattails.  Both the male duck and the man turn their heads toward that quack.  A brown, female mallard duck pokes her head out of the cattails.  Unlike his beak, hers is very dark brown, almost black.  Her neck and body are the same speckled brown, much like cork when it is stripped from its tree.  She quacks again and steps out onto the land.  The man can see that her wings are light brown, with a border of black and white. Her feet are the same bright orange as the male’s.  The male duck swoops down and sticking his feet out in a pike position, lands softly next to the female. 

            The two ducks quack back and forth as the old man paints them into the picture.  He starts with the male, mixing first the grayish white color on his palette and filling in the oval body.  He adds a bit of turquoise to the dark green paint that he used for the cattails.  Using circular motions, he paints on the head and neck of the duck.  Once again, he dips his hand down to the water, this time watching where his hand is moving.  He uses the same circling motion to rid the brush of color.  The man starts painting the body of the female duck.  He mixes an off white color using white and sienna.  This he paints on as a base, then dips his paint brush into the sienna and dots this on top using a quick jabbing motion at the canvas. 

The ducks stop their ruckus.  The female turns around and waddles back to her cattails.  She slips inside, brushing aside the glades and stalks as she does so.  The long glades shake as she moves inside them, and the brown cattails sway back and forth in the sky.  Eventually, the motion stops and the cattails are still, as if the duck never existed, never was caught in their leafy base.  The male mallard walks over to the edge of the water, and first lowering his head close to the water, jumps in.  The water directly surrounding him rises up like a small tsunami wave and splashes down on itself with a plunking sound, sending smaller waves out in a circular pattern around the duck.  His feet paddle, unseen, under the water, propelling him in various directions.  He looks around him while swimming in circles.  The ripples of the blue-gray water follow him in his travels.  He paddles around in a few small circles before turning his eyes onto the bunch of cattails.  He slowly and quietly swims over and disappears behind the cattails, starting with his head, ending with his tail, until the only thing that the little man can see is the trail of ripples he left behind in the water.

            Although the ducks are no longer there, the man keeps painting them.  He now lays down his paintbrush on the top of the water jar, balancing it across the open top so that the bristles are facing the cattails where the ducks are.  His right hand slips into his right hand front pocket and pulls out a tube of pumpkin paint.  The tube itself is white and crinkled, and there are smudges of orange paint covering the outside.  He unscrews the top and squirts a drop the size of a dime onto a free spot on his palette, near the hole where his left thumb protrudes.   He dabs his brush into the paint and begins to paint the feet of the ducks.  He looks up from his painting and squints at the place where the ducks stood, chewing on the end of his paint brush.  He moves his hand back over to the palette and dips the brush into the yellow, the leftover orange paint still on the bristles.  He adds this color to the feet, moving his hand in an up and down motion. 

            There is a silent calmness about the marsh as the little man paints his picture.  The sun beats down on his back as his hand moves back and forth in stroking motions.  His eyes, behind his grey-tinted glasses, squint as they survey the marsh.  The cattails stand stock still, hiding part of the water, which stretches out as far as it can go.  The brim of his denim hat casts a shadow over his weathered face, leaving only the nose and the chin in the sun.  The flattened grasses lead up to where the man sits on his three-legged wooden stool, painting.