Will Wonders Never Cease?

(I lost my own drawing, used a photograph instead)

Photo by Timothy Abraham on Unsplash

You sit down in your chair on the porch to smoke a cigarette. Your drawing paper and a pen are on the table next to you, because you never know what might show up. More than once, you have found odd things in odd places without any history. Today your eye catches something on the floor next to your chair. It looks shapeless, curled up on itself. The color of raw pastry. You are curious.

You lean over and pick it up. It’s a flower. Well, it was a flower, but up close now, it’s a flying swan. There is the long neck extended, the slight suggestion of an eye, and the beak, perfectly formed. Beneath are its wings, its body. You grab your drawing paper and the pen, the flower on one knee, the paper on the other, and you draw it. Or rather, you try to draw it. So delicate, so lovely. So surprising.

The neck is never slender enough, no matter how hard you concentrate, and it is beyond you to duplicate both the similarities and the tiny differences in the two wings. You try to draw this ten times, then ten more, and you still don’t have it even close to right. You try again, leaving the neck and head for last. Half an hour later you’ve got a fairly decent replica of a flying swan made out of a dead flower in pen and ink on the page. Oh boy, you think. Hot dog!

Now it’s tomorrow. You try for one more swan, but it’s no go. You close the drawing pad, and put the flower swan carefully on the little table while you run in to grab your coffee. When you come back. It’s gone. You want to say maybe it flew away, but you resist. Then you give in. Maybe it did fly away.

The July sun is rising in the sky, that magnificent ball of heat and light. A shadow moves on the porch floor, and you look up to see a moth. A moth? So small and modest a creature is capable of blocking the sun? You never realized this before. You wish you had a handful of confetti to toss in the air so you could watch the tiny shadows as they fall.

You settle back with your coffee to wait for what comes next.