Now he is free to paint, because the gods have given him the light. They have shown him the path to the moon. They have conquered the sun and clouded its burning. They have presented him with the ultimate vision. Soon he will present them with his completion. The sea is sound and he is so sane in every belief he enters on every holy ground he treads. They have embraced him, the gods, and have led him to their silence, their divine ignorance. He wades from one large pocket of emptiness towards the next one of nothingness, to be cleansed of his past and look at his hands, always ready for work. Did he not buy them a castle, did he not build them a city, did he not create a cheerful crowd in all his future dreams? They sat on the towers of books and all of them had it written. From those towers they could see it so clearly, they could read the names of the ones who wrote the future. He shared this with them and gathered them to him in his robes, his wife and child. Fatimah has her eye on the world and their son has his eye on him. He bedded Fatimah and she became one of his wives before the prophet. His son is the prophet of his people. Small people who walk the earth without casting their shadow. His son and his hope, he will ride it soon and not feel the hard ground again. Ever.
He can already walk above the ground, his feet bare like a lucky beggar who knows he does not need any shoes to be with them: the fearless gods.
He has been allowed to open the windows of the great mosque and lead the people in to watch his life unfold. In his image he paints in blasphemous pleasure the forbidden creatures and himself with them, tailed and winged, furred and finned.
Cormorants winged and veiled, flying chadors, beaks closed on secrets, her sisters sit on a rock. She joins them every day to contemplate his downfall and spreads the width of her wings to block out the sea and show him the power of feathered unbending black. Their claws hold on to greater things than his ephemeral images of sea and light, they hold on to slippery stones carved out in ancient times. They are creatures born out of the water who carefully watch the ones that come from the land.
These took to veils white and black and narrowed down their lives. For a few bearable centuries they were close: Mohammed’s daughters and the brides of Jesus Christ. The laws were those of the brutally religious robed males, and they took to their rocks and confined the sinless sisters to their huts. Sisters who stole the word and shed their wrappings to bare themselves in another world later, much later.
But the cormorants remained the same and never spoke. Like his Fatimah, who carries his secret and keeps it from him with the sea.
Still he hits the shore and is pulled back again by a current that prevents him from ever reaching the inner painting.