Sweetheart

Isabel Ramsay ‘27

This piece celebrates my puppy's birthday and showcases his gentle, adorable, and sweet self, disproving the stereotype(s) that bulldogs and pitbulls are "aggressive" and "dangerous/scary."

I experimented with the Impasto art style, for the first time, that consists of using mediums, such as modeling paste, to create textures and to add a 3D affect/pop.

Red Mulberry

Beet-red juice runs down my cracked lips, bleeding under crushed fingertips. Warm under the palm of my hand, its skin like wrinkled velvet— so delicate, so easy to destroy. I sit crouched under towering green bushes, their branches swaying and clawing at my limbs. The world is still. That is the beauty of it. It is still and silent, but so incredibly loud. Life squirms and breathes in every tree, every trunk, under every rock, and under rich soil chaffed with time. 

Above me, around me, it screams, and it cries, and it sings. The underbrush rustles with a flash of brown fur, and the sky holds a flicker of feathered wings. Beady black eyes of innocence and twitchy brown ears with quivering noses bound across fallen branches with silent ease through weaving shadows. The wind coos and chirps as the river babbles and surges. Its glassy waters ripple to reveal the glistening scales of pale moonlight that slithers beneath its depths. It laps against spongy shores, carrying purity in every smooth rock and every plummeting stone. 

I cup it in my hand– let it fall through my fingers, let it run through my hair, let it taste my parched throat. And I smile. I smile at its imperfections, at its beauty, and at the beating hearts it encompasses. I close my eyes, let the wind thread through my body, let the sun kiss my skin, let the crackling of air from an impending storm inject fear into my veins. 

But something is wrong. A heavy sound shakes the earth’s delicacy, rumbles under fallen leaves and crisp pinecones. A footstep with an unnatural beat. Footsteps. 

Berries tremble and fall. 

I run.

Run down the rivers’ snaking path, run through thorned branches, and scale up a thin, winding tree. Perched I sit, silent I tremble. Underneath the trees’ thick canopy I am shielded from what lays below. 

Voices begin to form. Ones that speak in foreign tongues, with sharp clashing sounds. Their words sting and bite. Their words do not belong here. I lean forward, eyes narrowed to see who utters such loud bitterness. Three men, hair of salt and eyes of gleaming emerald and burning hatred. Dark as coals and raging flames.

They wear strange clothes. Heavy cloth of deep blue and golden embroidery, black boots that dig into the soil rather than glide. Their eyes hardly stand still, simply flicker and dance with angered scowls. One man, one with wide shoulders and a broad stance, carries a large stick of smoothed wood slung across his back– the same gold that was knit into their clothes surrounds the very top. Pieces of silver flash across their middles, hands nervously flying towards them, constantly moving. 

“Where did it go?” One says.           

“I swear I saw something move,” adds another. 

“If we return empty handed again, our children will starve,” rumbles the rather burly one.

“It’s His orders, we have to find something and find something fast,” replies the first, just as a rain-drop springs across his cheek. 

“A storm is coming, and we best be ready when she does,” he says, head tilted up to the darkening sky. 

The leaves whistle, and I sway among the tree tops, eyes screwed shut in prayer. 

“There! I saw it, I swear, I saw it!” 

I open my eyes. 

A blur of movement– brown, thin. Before I can scream, before I can blink, the Burly One snatches the long stick and squints. In a burst of noise, the air is shattered, echoing across thick trunks as birds erupt from nearby canopies in a scattered array. I rush to plug my ears, fear seeping into my lungs and rushing into my fingertips. Every muscle and every limb, quivering at the shock that chattered my teeth and rang through my bones. Smoke spills out of the top of the long stick, curling around the Burly One’s head.

“Dear God, man, you did it! You really did it!” cries the first one. 

The second, a willowy figure of a man, bounds across the brook and leans into the undergrowth, emerging from the shrubbery with pure glee written across his face, while all I can do is sit with my fingers shoved into my ears and heart pounding against my chest. 

“We will have food to last a week, my dear lads! He will be quite satisfied with our catch this time!” he calls, beckoning them over. In my pain, I sit, and I stare, empty and cold as they pull out a deer from under the brush. Its tall and skinny limbs, limp and lifeless. Blood the color of the beet-red berries matted across its autumn coat and white speckled fur. 

They drag it without care, without remorse for its feeble cries and pathetic squirms. I bite the palm of my hand to keep myself from screaming, pinpricks of white-hot anger and misery flooding my eyes. All I can do is sit there and watch as it struggles against their brutal and violent hands. 

Sit there as they pull out the pieces of silver tied to their waists. Sit there as they puncture the skin. Sit there as they cause pain and death. Sit there until they haul its lifeless body away. 

Sit there as the wood mourns the loss of a beating heart. Sit there in agony as the trees stop swaying and the wind stops speaking. Sit there, in the woods and its empty silence. 

Rain begins to fall then. Light, at first, before it whips against the fragile canopy, leaving me hollow and shaken. And as I sit there, tears pouring down my face as hard as those falling from the sky, I realize how easy nature, how easy the things it contains, can be crushed under the fingertips of these foreign men and their flaming sticks. 

Crushed like the beet-red berries that fall from the brush.