Sand Art/Shot Glass by S.D. Keaton

Uncle Sawyer

Uncle Sawyer lived most of his life in a Home. My mother and I visited him often, especially when my father was gone, and I loved his stories about the rough and untamed West. I didn’t think they were real, until I was older, and my mother told me why he was in the Home instead of married.

My uncle had been a deputy in some small town in Arizona—mother didn’t care to remember the name—and overestimated himself one night. He thought he could handle a bar fight all by himself, and got shot in the head for it. He was still green, only friends with the sheriff—who everyone in town hated—and the family he boarded with. No one cared if he bled out on the floor. It was only the quick thinking of a girl, a barmaid whom he tipped well, that got him medical attention.

His head never healed quite right, and he wandered his way back to the east soon enough. He must have made a strange picture, a man with half his face bandaged that, underneath, only family could love. He had grown his hair out to cover the slight dip on the right side of his head, the sinking of flesh that happened when part of his brain died. His hair got shorn short for the funeral, and I was able to see the unnatural shape of his head for the first time.

It was only through father’s connections that he got put in a good Home, a place where he could ramble to the friendly nurses and indulge in the arts. He was especially fond of painting, a frivolous thing that made my father scoff. But my father indulged my mother, and Uncle Sawyer got to paint and sketch whatever he liked.

My uncle’s hands trembled towards the end, so badly he could no longer hold a pencil. He had tried to make it work, tried to incorporate the shaking of his hands into his art, but it was such a difference he abandoned that hobby soon enough.

My college had an impressive arts program, and one day I got to watch a group of students make displays in the sand. It seemed interesting, and was technically art, so I thought Uncle Sawyer might like it. I found a book on it to send him back home. He had to get the nurse to read it to him but oh, he loved it. Most of the sand displays he made were temporary, etchings in the sandbox in the Home’s playground that got destroyed by children the next day.

I wonder if the children knew the significance of the lines they destroyed with their playing. Did they watch him from the windows, walking aimlessly around outside, dragging his foot in that weird way he does? Did they realize he used it to etch art into the earth?

Uncle Sawyer had been fond of me, and I was of him, after getting used to his eccentricities. At first, it was only my mother’s insistence that made me visit him, but towards the end I went out of my way to see him, or send him letters from college. He hadn’t been a dutiful student, and what knowledge of writing he had had disappeared, so often I would simply get a picture back, even if it was something as simple as a stick drawing with a smiley face.

I didn’t think anything he made survived the Home, which had disposed of everything related to him within days of his death. Age and lifelong illness… or whatever he had, did him in, the day before my 19th birthday. He had made this sand sculpture in a shot glass just for me, his first foray into sand art that had more permanence. I don’t want to say its permanent, especially since its already started to crack at the top, and the lines may not be as crisp as they once were. But it was something he had made for me on his death bed, when he should have focused on getting his affairs in order.

It was a picture of the desert landscape, painted hills set against a bright blue sky. I thought about Uncle Sawyer, living here before his injury. I wonder if he wishes he would have died there, in the untamed west, buried under the blue sky and colorful earth.

S.D. Keaton is a senior at the University of Arizona studying psychology. He spends time outside of schoolwork wrangling three pet cats or writing fiction, with varying degrees of success for both. He’s particularly fond of both anime and horror.