Jerry Maddox stood at his window drinking his cup of steaming decaffeinated coffee. He held a folded Macon Telegraph in his right hand. Jerry was thirty-five years old, his brown hair cut short. He stood at 5’8”. Although he was never an imposing man, when he spoke, he meant business. Jerry worked at Delta Airlines, organizing flight plans. His was a high paying, detail oriented job.
Jerry’s wife, Mrs. Kelly Maddox, also had brown hair, but hers swept her shoulders when she straightened it. They had been married for two years. When they were older and their friends asked them why they never had children, the inevitable answer was ‘just didn’t, for one reason or another.’ Neither of them disliked children or knew why they never had a family. They just didn’t.
The Maddox’s lives strode in steady rhythm. Kelly made toast and eggs for herself (Jerry disliked toast and preferred yogurt), showered, and did who-knows-what for the rest of the day. Every day, Jerry tried to contain his regular irritability between 5:00, when he left work, and 5:40, twenty minutes after he was home. Because Kelly was at home all day every day, he expected her to do something productive like dust, clean the windows, or whatever housewives did. Since she did few, if any, of these things, Jerry allowed himself to be disappointed and vexed for forty minutes every day. Luckily, Kelly was oblivious enough not to notice.
Thus, according to schedule, an irritated Jerry came home at 5:20 that evening.
He had breezed through the kitchen and into the study, when he shouted: “Kelly, what is that kid doing?”
Looking through their study window at a rough portrayal of two mountains and a river, Kelly responded, “He’s just drawing with chalk, Jerry.”
“I can see that, but why is he doing it on our street?
“Well, he lives here too.”
“Shouldn’t kids his age have outgrown chalk by now?”
“He’s about eight years old, Jerry. It’s not really a problem.”
Jerry pointed to a spot where the child’s river had leaked onto the Maddoxes’ portion of the road.
“Oh poo, Jerry. He’s just a kid using chalk. He’s not doing any harm.” Kelly patted his back as she laughed lightly and left him to watch the child draw on his street. As Jerry watched, he wondered why he drew at all. Just a few lines drawn into the rough shape of two triangles with sticks (presumably trees) pointing out at varied locations, the picture was uninspiring. Before he asked Kelly what they were eating that night, Jerry summed it up as a passing fad with the local elementary school population.

As soon as Jerry walked in the kitchen one Wednesday evening four years later, Kelly stated, “Mrs. Jones is sick again.”
“What’s wrong with her?” He pretended to be interested in her dinner preparations as he checked the pantry and refrigerator, silently bemoaning the lack of available food.
“I don’t know really. I think it’s kidney stones, but I’m not sure.” She looked up from the stove. “Jerry, dinner will be ready in a few minutes.”
As he silently scoffed at the option of kidney stones—they never kept anyone he knew from doing anything—Jerry shut the refrigerator door and poured a cup of coffee. He walked out of the kitchen and over to the study window.
“Kelly.”
“Yes?”
Jerry stood silently.
Kelly walked into the study. “Yes, Jerry?”
“Why does that kid keep drawing? He’s been doing it for years.”
She replied on her way back to the kitchen, “Well, I guess some people just don’t outgrow that kind of thing.”
Kelly brushed it off, but Jerry kept wondering: why did he never stop? They weren’t permanent; each painting was washed or rubbed away by rain or trampling. He never took pictures, never showed them off to anyone. There was absolutely no reason to make them. Kelly cracked his reverie.
“Jerry, if you think those pictures are useless, why do you always look at them?”
Jerry shrugged.
He silently, cynically, observed that the current undertaking was more singularly colored than usual: most involved shades of green, blue, and red, but this one was primarily white. With a mental lurch Jerry recognized the illustration and realized that regardless of its lack of color variation, it held an immense amount of emotion. It was a wedding. Despite the crude utensils he used, the boy captured the indescribable joy in the bride and groom’s faces as they gazed into each other’s eyes. The audience faded into a fuzzy background as the newlywed couple took center stage in the eyes of the beholder. Despite his reservations, Jerry admitted, although only to himself, that the picture was purely delightful.
Aside the technical correctness of his art, there was another reason the graphic was so entrancing. Packed deep behind all of his mental yogurt and coffee, Jerry knew why the neighbor insisted on drawing. He did it because it was his life. It made him know what it was like to be alive and happy, to breathe in the morning, hear the wind sniff in the winter and sing in the summer. And, through his art, he sprinkled that knowledge around the neighborhood. The answer to Kelly’s question—why he looked at the art—was that it had the same effect on Jerry. It reminded him of what life is, or what it should be.

Five years later, a forty-four-year-old Jerry Maddox walked over to the familiar window and gazed out at the familiar road, to be met with a familiar sight—an outline for another picture drawn on the road. Its final outcome was unknown because anything could have come from the eccentric collage of color. Dark greens mixed with purple circles surrounded a grey glob with white at one end and a yellow at the other. Speculations as to what this could foretell abounded for a few minutes before the Maddox’s conversation moved on to more adult matters: whether they should eat turkey or chicken that Saturday.
The next morning, a Thursday, Jerry woke up at his usual time, but instead of showering, shaving, and drinking his coffee, he walked straight into the study and peered through the early morning fog in an attempt to discern any new advancements in the neighbor’s current work of art. He saw the teenager, now seventeen years old, crouching in the darkness with a piece of chalk in his hand. Centralized light from their only functioning porch light conditionally illuminated the asphalt for the boy, but mostly hid it from Jerry. All he could make out was a little more white than the evening before.
After his morning routine, Jerry decided there was enough light to check on the picture again. His earlier perceptions were correct. There was much more white than the day before. Now its purpose was discernible: the varying shades of green mixed with blacks and browns produced trees, vines, a garden. The purple orbs made grapes. The grey was a rock and the white splatter: the figure of a man, miserable, crouching next to it. He was praying. Disfigured by torment, tears, and droplets of blood, his face begged for relief. Jerry yearned to give it to him, but he didn’t know how.
Kelly called him from the kitchen. She called him again. When he involuntarily ignored her a second time, she walked into the study.
Worried she walked behind him and rested her hand on his shoulder.
He jumped and turned around. “What?”
“I didn’t know why you were ignoring me. Sorry if I scared you, you just worried me.”
After an unusually long pause Jerry replied, “It’s ok . . .”
Following his gaze out the window, Kelly lowered her voice until her volume matched his, but her tone was empty. “Jerry, is that what you’ve been looking at?” She stood behind him so he could not see the skepticism in her eyes or the amusement surfacing around her mouth.
He nodded mutely. The pain portrayed in the mural was deeper than anything he had felt before. It was not distant like the famous paintings he researched in middle school, not reserved like the statues in museums. It was human; it was real. Someone carrying the weight of the world drew that picture. Someone who knew what it was like to pray, alone, on his knees when the pain was too deep to contain. Someone who experienced the pain of a lifetime in seventeen years.
Kelly shook her head and patted Jerry’s shoulder. She only saw chalk.
She turned around to leave but before she reached the study doorway, Jerry started and asked, “Kelly?”
“Yes?”
“Do you know his name?”
She paused and thought for only a second. “No. But you can probably find his parents’ names in the telephone book.”
He nodded as she left.
It rained hard that night. Shots of lightning and bullets of rain assailed the Maddox house. Friday, the next morning, Jerry woke up and rushed into the study to be met by the sight of a wet, glistening street. His shoulders sagged with disappointment in the picture’s disappearance. Somewhere deep inside, in the same place he felt the neighbor’s pain, Jerry had hoped the picture would survive the attack and live another day.
He left for work at 7:40.
On his way back home, it began to mist and sprinkle, dropping just enough rain for him to use his windshield wipers. As he pulled into his driveway, Jerry noticed the neighbor squatting out in the rain. He didn’t have a rain-jacket on, just a hoodie. He had just completed his next work of art, but Jerry could not see it until he got out of his car and stood in the driveway.
It was breathtaking. The wet road dampened the chalk, making it clump and spread thickly over the asphalt bumps.
Through the mist emerged three crosses standing on a barren hilltop overlooking a tiny town in the distance. The people, the destitute recipients of the crosses’ inflictions, were gone leaving the crosses alone above the tan, desolate ground. All three were a similar brown color, but their tones varied slightly. The ones on the right and left were of a darker blackish-brown than the middle one, which only had a hint of the black asphalt peeking in through holes where the chalk thinned in the drizzle. Threads and ribbons of red—blood—trickled down all three and accumulated in tiny pools at the foot of each. The sky above them mirrored the clouds overlooking Jerry and his neighbor—dark and forbidding, steaming from the storm they just unleashed.
A breath of frigid wind struck Jerry’s street, separating him from humanity as his mind joined the crosses in their abandonment. He wondered what happened to the other two, the criminals, who were put on the crosses beside the teacher. Were they buried or thoughtlessly tossed out of town where their stench would not enter the city? They died in degradation and abandonment alongside one they knew was better than they.
Another blast of cold air jostled Jerry from his daze and turned his attention again to the young artist. The boy with the chalk stood up and for the first time, Jerry really saw him. As their two worlds met, Jerry didn’t see a crouching kid anymore, he saw an upright man. As the neighbor lifted his face, Jerry noticed how red it looked. He had dark patches on his sleeves where they had been dampened, maybe by the steady drizzle. He wiped his face with the long sleeves of his hoodie, Jerry realized that his last assumption was incorrect.
The neighbor stood a moment, looking silently, awkwardly, as Jerry mirrored his stillness. He looked uncomfortable, as if someone had caught him reading someone else’s journal. Or he caught Jerry reading his.
When the neighbor turned around to go inside, Jerry realized what he had been looking at all those years: a life. For eight years he appreciated portrayals of different scenes and landscapes, and now in the chilling drizzle his mind opened to the fact that those drawings were not merely feeble lines and awkward angles. Years ago, the boy’s first stumbling attempts were those of a child excitedly explaining his vacation in the mountains. As he grew older and more fluent, he learned how to effectively explain his experiences, life, heart. Instead of droning his complaints or creating amateurish excuses, he told his story through a stepping-stone path of the pictures that shaped it. And Jerry had watched it all.

That night, Jerry sat meditatively through dinner and escaped into the study to think. For three days—two suppers, three breakfasts, and the whole weekend—he checked the window to see if they boy had amended or washed the mural away. What drove him to articulate such a dreary, foreboding scene? Now that he realized that all the other pictures had a purpose, he knew that this was no idle illustration: something indescribably crushing had happened to the boy. Jerry desperately hoped that something had changed for him; something that would fix everything, make it better.
He was anxious until the sun rose that Sunday. By then, he had given up hope, and he feared that the neighbor had too. Almost out of habit, he walked to the window with his coffee. The sight that met him was familiar: a new design. The crosses had been replaced by a hollowed-out rock, with another rolled resting next to the entryway. By the rising sunlight, he could see into the grave, where a pile of rags with one neatly folded one at their head lay. Relief swept over him.
Kelly walked into the study carrying the newspaper.
“Jerry, listen to this! This says that ‘early this morning Mrs. Janet Lazarus,’—what an awful name—‘a single woman with only one child, of Forest Hill Road was released from the ICU. This is a shocking turn of events, given the doctor’s suggestion that she go into hospice only three days ago. Doctors call are doing extensive tests/research on her case right now because all agree that her recovery is a miracle.’ Forest Hill Road! Do you think she’s one of our neighbors?”
Jerry smiled. “Yes.”