Creativity and Suffering

A flash fiction piece exploring love, loss, and the transformative power of creativity.

THE BANANAS HAD gone past yellow into something mottled and dark. Grace left them where they were.

Three weeks since the funeral. She kept starting sentences in her head, Mom would have said, and then not finishing them. The kitchen carried a quality of wrongness she couldn’t fix by rearranging anything.

Katy’s bed still sat in the corner. The fleece held the impression of her, that bowl-shaped indent where a sixty-pound dog had circled and settled and circled again. Grace’s hand had rested on her ribs long after the breathing stopped, right there in that same corner.

Two griefs at once. They didn’t stack neatly. They fought each other for room.

The easel stood against the wall, brushes stiff with old paint, palette cracked and dry. She hadn’t painted in…she didn’t remember. Before her mother got sick, probably. Before everything got reorganized around sick and then sicker and then gone.

She picked up a brush. The bristles resisted. She worked them in water until they gave.

Because things matter to us, we suffer.

She’d read that somewhere recently, and the sentence had lodged in her chest like a splinter she couldn’t find to pull out. She said it aloud, just to hear it. “Because things matter to us, we suffer.” The kitchen didn’t answer.

She squeezed cornflower blue onto the palette; summer-sky, the blue of her mother’s old cotton dress. Loaded the brush heavy.

The first stroke went wrong. She didn’t fix it. She put another stroke over it, and then another, and her shoulder unlocked. Her arm moved the way it used to, that loose-shouldered swing, the brush going where it wanted and her following. She stopped thinking in words. The blue turned green, turned gold, turned the particular brown of a Labrador’s eye in afternoon sun.

She painted Katy’s nose in the air, that ridiculous upturned snout, ever-optimistic. She painted flowers the way her mother loved them, going at them thick and unruly. She painted badly and kept going.

When her arm ached enough to stop, she stepped back.

Blooms pushed toward the top of the canvas, aggressive and alive. And in the middle of them, Katy mid-sniff, face idiotic with joy.

Grace’s eyes burned. She didn’t look away.

Her mother and her dog were still gone. Nothing fixed that. But here on the canvas they occupied space. They took up room. And Grace—hands paint-stained, feet cold on the kitchen tile—had put them there. Not to keep them. Just to say: you were real, you mattered, this hurt.

The bananas sat on the counter. She’d make bread with them tomorrow.

Author's Note

My flash fiction was inspired by recent personal events and by a friend asking me to join her in an art class.

I have a confession: I've been leaning a lot on my older poems and prose that I wrote months and even years ago. It's been nice to revisit those feelings and the words I created back then. Honestly, I found it a bit easier to share those pieces rather than starting something fresh. I struggled. The past month was a breakthrough of sorts. I actually wrote some new pieces! So you'll get to see a mix of both old and new work from me moving forward, which I'm really excited about.

Also, I’ve decided to be a little kinder to myself this October. Instead of focusing on writing poetry or prose, I’m planning to introduce some amazing guest authors. Stay tuned for more on that. I can’t wait to share it with you!

Upcoming…

• A poem about hope:

  Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 27 September 2025

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