Imperfect Alchemist by Naomi Miller

Author:Naomi Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

After the funeral for the man I still thought of as Da, I took myself off to the Stones. I brought my sketchbook. I wanted their shelter and the company of the rooks circling and cawing overhead. Surrounded by the Stones’ familiar mystery, I tried to think through the newly unfamiliar shape of my world, my identity. Part of me was relieved to learn that Da wasn’t my father, because he hadn’t understood my hopes any better than I had understood his ambitions. Part of me was sad that he was gone, mostly because of how much Michael would miss him. Part of me was angry that he’d left Mum with no security for her future. But part of me, a large part, was afraid of what I’d just learnt from Mum. I was – I struggled to even form the word in my mind – illegitimate. I had a father I’d never met, who didn’t know I existed. I wondered if I really was like that father, as Mum had said. I tried to imagine meeting him. And I worried, because there was much in Mum’s story that caused me not to trust him.

My drawing that day was not of the Stones, or even of the visible world – or at least not the commonly visible. From memory, I drew my favourite herb from Mum’s garden – borage, whose distinctive five-pointed star petals were carved on the oaken box that was my lasting gift from Da. Now that I had access to pigments, I could paint those wooden petals violet blue, bringing the colours of the garden to my box. But in this moment, working only with charcoal, I drew the starflowers not for colour but for the harmony their shapes brought to my burdened heart. In the scale of my drawing, the starflowers were as large as the Stones, while behind and above them, in the heavens, shone the constellations of the night sky. A view of starflowers from the perspective of a beetle. Once the pinprick shapes of the constellations emerged beneath my hand, the stars appeared not as the background to my drawing but as a heavenly reflection of the starflowers upon the earth. I glimpsed an intersection between two worlds – my mother’s and my newly discovered father’s – flowers and stars, earth and heavens.

But who was I? My mother’s confession had smudged my sense of myself like charcoal, the edges blurred. And that wasn’t all. Discovering a different father, I lost the mother I had always known.

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