Free Fell of Dark by Patrick Downes Page B

one-sixth empty? If the glass were half full, would a person even find it possible at first glance to see it half empty? I mean, I look at the stuff that’s in the glass, not the blankness of the other, empty part.
    Right?
    The invisibility of the one-sixth. I can see the edge of the glass, but even if the material is clear and nearly invisible, it’s not negative. It exists. Glass is almost invisible, that’s all. But birds die against windows. They fly right into the pane and crack their little heads. And dogs and people walk into sliding doors.
    It’s never funny when a bird dies against a window, but it’s almost always funny when a person walks into a sliding door. Why?

    Negative space. The space left inside and outside of the boundaries made by physical objects. This is a tough idea. I’m trying to get my head around it since I just read about it in an article in
Architectural Digest
.
    If I make my arms into a circle, the space inside the circle is negative. It has shape but no substance. The space outside my arms, as marked by my face or any other object, would also have a shape, I guess, though harder to tell. When I stand with my legs apart, there’s a triangle of negative space I make with the ground.
    I can train my eyes to see negative space. It’s hard to see it without practice.

    Sorry, I have to go back to the glass.
    Who would see the glass of milk I have right now as one-sixth empty? Would anyone see the empty space before seeing the filled space? If I poured an alcoholic half a glass of wine, would he only see the part of the glass that didn’t have the wine? Would he see the glass half empty?
    Sorry, sorry. I’m thinking.
    Is the definition of a pessimist a person who only sees what he hasn’t got but wants? Would an optimist never see the empty space?
    Or is there some other detail I’m leaving out? Is it more complicated?
    I don’t know. It isn’t always bad to see the empty space, is it? Isn’t it all right to see both, the filled space and the empty space? You could be in either. I have to try and see everything.

Work
    A FEW MONTHS AFTER my father died, I finally knew he was gone. The smell of his paints and turpentine once stained the air, stained his skin, my mother’s hair, and my clothes. I grew up in the smell of his real work, and the smell was gone, disappeared. I went to the small room where he painted. There was an easel, a clean canvas, a stool speckled with paint and graffiti, a worktable, and a coffee can with brushes, pencils, and palette knives. I remember the folded easel against the wall, the canvas on the floor next to the easel, and the stool under the table. No rags, no tubes of paint. Diesel fumes from a passing bus came through the window. My father was gone.
    My crying, red-nosed mother gave me an early birthday present. A small set of watercolors in an aluminum case and a pad of paper. I didn’t want to open the case of paints, so my mother opened it for me. Inside were eight dishes of dry color, a brush, and an instruction booklet. My mother got a glass of water. She wet the brush and swirled the bristles in the yellow dish. A small pool of colored water formed on the surface. Then she opened the pad of paper and pulled the brush along the first page. When she handed me the brush, I shook my head. “Oh, Erik,” she said. My poor mother. She lost her husband to a car, then she lost me to my first silence.

    My father kept a set of miniature fired bricks on a bookshelf in his and my mother’s bedroom. I must have first used the bricks with him, sitting on his lap at a card table or on the floor, but I don’t remember it. One afternoon, I went into the bedroom to find the bricks. I had to stand on the bed to reach the shelf against the wall where the box sat. I had just enough strength to pull the set out, but not nearly enough to hold it. The box fell on my head and burst open. Most of the bricks