My Mothers Secret Trade- Flash Fiction

My mother is a whiz with numbers. She loves numbers and early on, she has told me many times, knew she would be what she is. My mother was the CFO for one of the largest corporations in the United States. She didn’t just crunch numbers on a daily basis, she made them do her bidding, and she is a magician with them.

My dad left along time ago, but we don’t need him. Mother made a lot of money working with all those numbers. She’s very social also; well, in a business kind of way. She was always having work parties at the house. Clients, co-workers, the other execs in her massive company come for parties very often. I’d usually be assigned the cute kid duty of passing out party favors; trays of slimy eggs of something on paper thin crackers or slices of raw meat etc, etc. When I did that I very often would here her clients and co-workers talking about her talents, her gift with numbers; they’d often call her an artist.

My mother is an artist with numbers. But what I’ve always known, from the time I was very little is that my mother loves numbers, yes she does, but what my mother has always needed, yearned for and desired above all else was to be a painter. Yes sir, she knew more about painting than she knew about anything else on this earth, besides numbers.

Our house was filled to bursting with art books. Art History, biographies, anthologies anything and everything; if it was about art, we had it. She even bought a original Diego Rivera (he’s a famous painter) and had it on display in her studio.

That was her sanctuary. Her studio was beautiful. Hard pale wood floors in a room filled with light and canvas. She had several easels and they were always filled with a “work in progress.” That’s what she called all of her work. “Works in progress.”

She painted mostly in oils, sometimes with charcoal but mostly oils and her week normally went something like this…

Ten, eleven, sometimes twelve hour day and my mother would come home, we’d have a quick dinner (she was always adamant about eating together) and then she’d go off to her studio in the back of the house. I never knew for how long. Sometimes just a few hours but if she was “in the zone” as she called it, it could be all night. The weekend were all for painting though. She would make one Saturday each month specifically designated for us however and that one beautiful day each month we spend the entire day together and as much as possible, weather permitting, outside in the “specter of nature.” She always said that too. My mother had a lot of sayings as you can tell.

She kept it all to herself which I always thought was strange. I mean, I knew about them of course but that was the one room that was always locked when we had guests and I was only allowed in there in her company. And she never talked about her own painting in public but she always talked about others. “The Masters,” as she called them; she loved to talk about the masters every chance she got. Especially with art people, we frequently used “our Saturdays” to go to gallery openings and she’d gab up all the artists and dealers about the masters. But she liked having me in her studio when she painted. She said it kept her focused.

I’m pretty sure she never felt anything was good enough and sometimes, as she worked, she’d get a very sad look on her face, move her head this way and that, trying to take in every angle and line on whatever was currently “in progress.” Sometimes she’d even start crying and sometimes she’d grab the canvas, throw it fiercely on the ground with disgust and step on it. Smash it into bits. Anyway, she never talked about her painting with anyone but me and that was fine with me. I liked her stuff and she always looked more beautiful to me in that speckled white smock with all the pockets and splashes of every color in the rainbow all over it than she ever did in her suits and slacks.

Eventually I went to college, moved out, and got a life of my own. I still see my mother at least once every Saturday a month for our day. She’s retired now and no longer an artist, a magician, with numbers. Not for a paycheck anyway. She still paints though, every day, and I have a house full of them to prove it.

Explore posts in the same categories: Fiction

Tags: art, flash fiction, mothers, painting

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.