It took less than a month for the coats of paint to completely cover the electrical outlet in the kitchen. So much for coffee. So much for toast. The nearest outlet was in the dining room. The longest extension cord was only six feet. We suggested that our parents buy a longer one, maybe one that wasn’t orange and meant for outdoors, maybe one that wasn’t caked with saffron dirt, but we were only children. Like most children, even the wisest things we said went ignored.
This was when Dad sometimes didn’t work. This was when Mom sometimes didn’t drink.
When Dad did work, it was part-time, painting houses. We would ride to Waffle House, where they had toast, Dad pointing out decorative shutters on split-level ranch styles. That’s Surfin’, he would say of a pair painted blue. He had painted those and many shutters besides. The names never quite matched the colors. Dignified, Intuitive, Jovial, Reticence. Some were named with words we’d never heard of. Loggia, for example, which sounded like a word we would later learn but we would learn had no relation.
They let our Dad keep the extra paint. “They” being his bosses, who hired him because he looked like the other men they hired, skin somewhere between Quinoa and Hopsack. We were all blond like Mom, at least like Mom before she went early gray. Passive. Neither Mom nor Dad had emigrated from farther away than Ridgeland, South Carolina.
Whenever Dad had a day off from painting, he painted the kitchen walls. The first few times, we thought it normal. We had school friends who told us of the new colors their rooms had taken. Their colors were banal: pink, yellow, blue, green. We asked for specificity. They never knew what we meant.
That first month, Dad repainted the kitchen five times, and he painted it ten the next. In all the months that came after, he added fifteen fresh coats on average. On days Mom didn’t drink, she would help Dad paint. On days she did, she would yell at Dad for always painting. Sometimes, she’d leave the house and come home hours later with her own half-empty containers, handles of whiskey with names as diverse as Dad’s colors: Old Crow, Old Grand-Dad, Kentucky Gentleman, Wild Turkey, Early Times.
We should say that Mom never yelled at us. With us she mostly hugged and cried, always at once.
First it was the power outlets, and then the layers of paint thickened to the width of the trim, the crown molding, the light switches. Mom switched to candles. A midwinter coat of Bolero, red like dried blood, stuck the faucet in the off position. After that, the bathroom sink provided our drinking water. We had to use the dishwasher for even the filthiest pots, but that was not long a worry. The stove’s back console disappeared under paint a few weeks after the faucet.
Dad spent less time painting at work and more time painting at home. Mom opted for vodka, for economical reasons, she explained. Taaka her vodka of choice. When she left the bathroom with a glass in hand, it was never clear whether it was water or not.
By Christmas, a coat of festive Kilkenny overlapped the lip of the counter. Mom and Dad had saved up enough to buy us each a Ninja Turtle. The turtles shared the names of famous painters, but we called them instead by the colors of their masks.
Soon the paint on the walls swelled beyond the kitchen cabinets, layering over them like sediment, sealing away their contents to await fossilization. Lost forever inside were colanders and mugs and whisks and forks and sponges and a drawerful of uncategorized junk.
Mom stopped entering the kitchen altogether. Dad left only to bathe and sleep and work.
The doorway shrank, growing more child-sized with every coat of paint. Dad had to enter sideways, ducking his head. Sometimes he added two coats a day. The fridge door drowned beneath a wash of Ebbtide. The oven melted into red-orange Emberglow.
Now it resembled less a kitchen and more a hall, though it led nowhere. That’s when the gallon buckets could no longer fit through the door.
Dad had to stretch his arm back through the gap just to dip the brush’s bristles in the paint. He put down old gray newspapers to protect the threshold from dribbles. He never crossed the threshold himself.
We cleaned Dad’s brushes for him in the bathroom sink. Paint stink and toothpaste mint. We brought him protein bars, gummy things we couldn’t stomach ourselves. He urinated in Solo cups and defecated in plastic Kroger bags, and we would take turns dumping the urine in the toilet, tossing the fetid bags in the backyard. We fetched new colors from the garage. Cans stacked in neat rows rose to the ceiling, crisscrossed by cobwebs, aisles for walking among them. Even on tiptoes, we could reach the tops of only the shortest columns. We could lift only cans more than half empty.
One day we delivered some sort of blue, the name of the color dripped over by the color itself. Mom slouched against the wall outside the kitchen. For months she had confined herself to other rooms. We had seen at most her shadow. Her hair now was stark white. She seemed asleep but stirred at our steps. We set down the can beside her.
She pried the can open with the blunt side of a splotchy knife and stirred the paint with the blade. We recognized it as Dad’s old chef’s knife, which Mom must have salvaged before it was entombed in a drawer.
Dad passed Mom a brush through the doorway, now just a gap as an archer might use in a castle. She plunged the brush deep into the can and smeared away the excess paint on the rim. She passed the brush back. We heard the wet rasp of Dad painting. The brush reemerged from within the kitchen. Mom reapplied paint, returned the brush through the gap.
Every morning Mom greeted us from that same spot on the floor. Every morning she clutched the chef’s knife in her hand.
Weeks passed. We peeked through the doorway, now no wider than a thick coat of paint. A morning shaft of Goldfinch slanted inside, but it was too dim to reveal any details. Not that any details survived. Too dim, then, to identify the final color the kitchen had taken.
Mom pressed her lips to the crack. We thought we heard Dad whisper a reply, but it might have been the sound of the brush, painting his side smaller and smaller and smaller.
Zach Powers is a native of Savannah, Georgia and lives in Arlington, Virginia. His novel, First Cosmic Velocity, will be published in summer 2019 by Putnam, and his debut story collection, Gravity Changes, won the BOA Short Fiction Prize and was published in 2017. He is the Communications Manager at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and teaches writing at Northern Virginia Community College. Get to know him at ZachPowers.com.