DAUBING
ALM No.93, September 2026
SHORT STORIES
My son is considered a sophomore, chronologically--but starting when Thomas was only a fifth grader, he and a learning aid walked a short path over to the high school. Because of how he accesses the world, mainstreaming for Thomas meant inclusion within art classes. Teachers and special education administrators worried for us with our child—the impact of his inability to touch emotions in the same ways that we experienced them. We paced through those early years, found ourselves scared for him—frightened of his distances went he went away inside himself. Educators recognized something early; they eagerly suggested art.
Thomas cruised past his age-appropriate peers. His perceptions and grasp involve linseed oil and pigment, watercolor, charcoals and chalk, stillness and splatters. Thomas continues mastering it all. He’s non-verbal--special, in every positive sense of the word. I’m told that the mixing of shadings creates deep emotion; since he took up art, Thomas always stirs his--right into me. I’m enchanted by each new phase he explores. At the moment, he’s locked on pointillism.
My wife has learned to skillfully operate a miter saw; she squares and makes wood cuts, adds paint or stain, takes it upon herself to mount and hang Thomas’s artwork all around the house. I suppose we’re indulging him, except: given tinctures and the right paper or canvas, Thomas’s talent could make a professional forger hang his unworthy head, comparative shame forcing him into a more apt career--like working a sidewalk cart, slinging mustard and ketchup on hot dogs.
Even in his earlier primitive period, Thomas could raise hayseeds to the perfection of vibrant green blades. His distortions, paired with thick applications during his impressionistic phase, conveyed a mind of concentrated angles and light. He could perfectly reproduce the tragic, but their abstract structures gave me and my wife a bright sense of Thomas’s harmony.
When Thomas was younger, I fretted about his aloofness--but now that he’s a little older, the full palette of art swirls into him, a spectrum of brushes dipped in creative processing, bold displays of integration: he rises early, dedicated, fearless and ready to engage his fancies.
People visiting our home go wide-eyed upon seeing Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, with its straight, prim Parisians unwinding lakeside. If you were to hold it up against the original--hanging in the Art Institute in Chicago—then your eyes would relax into their pointillist depictions of delicacy, sailboats breezing in the background, a stereopticon blurring two exact images into one.
My wife softens to tears when she looks at Thomas’s reproduction of Lemmen’s The Beach at Heist, kisses the boy after she’s done sighing. He allows it. Me: I experience a micro-dosing of calm when I slip into Paul Signac’s portrait of Felix Feneon, Opus 217. The churning kaleidoscope sings exceptionally fine, far beyond its tiny parts; its divisionism of precisely placed magentas, cyans, and yellows brims with enchantment. I take a parent’s solace: supporting a far-child who lives, breathes, and touches magic.
When he isn’t painting, Thomas enjoys hanging out with our dog, Annie. She’s a puppy-mill rescue, having spent five years as an over-worked dam producing whelps in a kennel cage, receiving only occasional ventures out into a tight diamond-wired dog run. Her bones: prone to displacements due to curvature--created by cowering, exhaustion, stressors, and inactivity. That tight confinement physically misshaped her; it likewise scraped over her battery-terminal nerves like a wire brush. Annie knew annual emotional loss, in the form of puppies removed too early. When the mill got found out by the law, there were over forty high-bred hostages generating cold-blooded money for the reptilian owners of the operation.
Humane Society people sat me and my wife down, wanting us to know about the captive-scope of the kennel environment. They wanted us to grasp Annie’s history, with no apprehension, no surprises, if we were to bring her home. We had to truly understand the challenges before we made an adoption they deemed complex and tricky.
In her upbringing, whenever any of the other kennel dogs barked, at the slightest input and stimulation—food time, a car door slamming in the distance, the windowpanes of night filled with passing clouds occasionally exposing a glimmer of starlight, a buzzing fly seeking the sources of desperate smells—the smallest things sprang all of the dogs and raised hell, rattling the roof. This happened, even when there was nothing.
The Humane workers said we needed to prepare ourselves, telling us not to look for logic in Annie’s behaviors. No one could predict the sources of the twitch and switch. In that overloaded kennel, it only took one impulse firing over tight-fear synapses to trigger the collective--the rest inevitably following, drawing quick breaths, releasing the pent-up with thin, erratic howls.
My wife and I didn’t think twice about the dog adoption. Annie deserved better from people, from the people around her. We’ve had her four months, and she’s beginning to show signs of settling, though there are regular moments of barking, jumpiness, and distrustful wall-eyeing. She’s a good girl down deep, trying her best to fit in with the three of us.
Though one of us appears more artful in earning moments and smidgins of her faith. Annie and Thomas have started drawing quietly close, sharing tactile moments; lately, the two of them get together and pause in the living room, meeting up at specific times each day. They’ve been studying one of Thomas’s copied paintings for the past three weeks, sitting themselves in front of Two Nudes in an Exotic Landscape by Thomas-Jean Metzinger. I can’t imagine what my son might have been thinking as he laid down the geometry of naked women, his hand delivering natural and artificial hues to hazy skies and exotic flowers.
Our son, our dog: their tremulous shoulders lean into one another. Before them are carefully painted cubes, with the smallest, teeniest spaces of canvas-white peeking through—visible only if you stare close enough. Thomas and Annie settle before the Exotic, rug-comfortable, five feet back from the frame.
Dots of color transform the living room space. All discomfort ends. Maybe only for a little while. I don’t know what’s next for Thomas—the cross-hatchings of shadow, scribbling, blending—could be dramatic delivery of Baroque, or the disciplines of Realism.
We sense that abstract parts of Annie’s day might always be “the abnormal thing” we were warned about--whenever our girl-dog perceives movement in bushes and trees, barking consumes her with the throat-strain of fear. She’s been known to imagine such movement.
They meet, sit on an heirloom braided rug. It’s been passed down for generations, ovals woven with a multitude of colorful scraps from ancestral sewing projects; at over two-hundred-years-old, people tell us that the rough braids of our distant relative’s lives should be safeguarded—too much contact, and the fibers of what’s called a hit-or-miss pattern might start unravelling.
We’ve decided not to worry about it. Thomas puts his arm around Annie, pulling her close, until she calms. Staring forward, all noise fades into the quiet frame. Our family’s woolen composition beneath them appears quite comfortable. The reds, greens, blues and violets in front of them: vibrantly pure. Annie whines sweetly. Our son whines back. Thomas’s brushwork is perfect.
Scott T. Hutchison's work has appeared in Tampa Review, Trampset, The Georgia Review, and The Southern Review. New work is forthcoming in The Fourth River, Porchlight, and The Raven Review.
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