Fred. That was his name. He had used to hate it, but he didn’t anymore. He didn’t know how to hate. That feeling had been taken away from him when he’d been shot. His back curved in awkwardly, never fully touching his wheel chair.

The only part of his body that could be moved was his hands, which he used to conveniently hold a notepad and write to his nurses. He couldn’t speak anymore. The blow to the spine hadn’t been severe enough to kill him, but it had paralyzed him and his life had been ruined.

He was going to be a painter. He had dreams of painting the world’s largest mural in Paris, and ones similar in the United States. Of course, that was no longer possible, but every once in a while, he’d sketch a mutated cloud or fish. The fish never had scales; he didn’t have the patience to draw them. He could have painted them easily.

Nurse Veronica, the one he enjoyed the most, entered the room. He liked her company so much because of the fact that she was sincere, unlike the others. They dealt with him because they had to, but he could always tell that he bothered them. His dark black skin might have been it, or that they had to read his every question and complaint. Either way, he didn’t appreciate it, and was glad that Veronica cared more than the others. It meant more than the world to him. She reminded him of his wife.

His wife Jessie had left him when the tragedy occurred and married a Scotsman. He shook his head to rid himself of the memory, grabbed his notepad and wrote, “I need my pills.” Veronica took the note, nodded, and brought him to his room. She left and returned with a bottle of psych meds. Depression medication. It kept him alive, not to make him seem like a hypochondriac.

He swallowed two of them, using the little saliva he had in his mouth.

“Thank you,” he wrote. She smiled, nodded, told him he was welcome and left the room. He sat there reminiscing on the days when he was young and ran and played and kissed little girls his age on the cheek. That was the life, his life, and when he wasn’t doing that, he was painting pictures of butterflies.

He flipped his page over.

There was a button on the wall beside his bed that he would press if he needed help. It was a big red button that paged the office, and they’d come straight to his room. He pressed it.

A nurse—not Veronica—came back holding a cup of ice that was surely for another patient, since he himself had no use for it. “Ma’am,” he wrote, “if you have any paint and painting supplies, kindly let me borrow them and I will return them when I am done.”

She seemed impatient for the message and rushed off immediately when he finished writing it. She came back with a single (large) brush, and two small tubs of paint; one was red, and one yellow. The nurse tossed them in his lap and hurried off without a single acknowledgement of his sincerity in the note he had written her. He frowned mentally, since it was not possible physically, and picked up the brush. He set the paint in his lap and the notebook in front of it, and with his two warm colors, his brush and his notepad, he painted the most beautiful picture ever known to him.

It was a cat with a flower behind its ear, sleeping in the window. But, every time he looked at the cat, he became more and more disgusted with its lack of personality and color, and at last, he ripped out the page, crumpled it and threw it on the floor.

His mural would be better than that, granted there would ever be a mural.