One brush clasped between her teeth, another between her toes, Rin hummed tunelessly as she painted with dextrous strokes on the easel before her. A quick switch that might leave the average person wondering where such flexibility could come from, and she was painting with the other. Clad in little but a ratty old pair of denim shorts, a tank top, and a smock, she continued work on another of her abstract paintings.
 
A small head poked shyly into her studio.
 
"Momma?" the young boy asked, looking to be no older than five. "Whatcha paintin'?"
 
She smiled fondly down at him around the brush in her mouth, and tousled his hair with a foot, before removing the obstructing brush.
 
"I was wondering that myself, actually," she said. Her voice, while maintaining much of its old deadpan and meandering quality, had a slight roughness to it that it never had in her high school years. "I suppose I'll know when I'm done. Probably."
 
She cocked her head sideways, as if a slightly tilted perspective might grant her more insight into her creation.
 
"Well, it probably has bold composition," she said decisively. "Or something."
 
The boy just watched her quietly. He always liked to watch his mother paint, even if it didn't usually make sense. So he sat in silence for a while as she continued her work, watching the easel fill up with bizarre shapes and lines that all came together in an oddly coherent way. Every now and then, she'd toss her shoulder-length hair back irritably as it fell into her face. After a while, she sat back, looking satisfied.
 
"Well, I'm still not sure what it is. But it came out well, don't you think?" she asked, looking down at her son.
 
"Mm-hmm!" he agreed happily. Momma's paintings always looked good.
 
"Beloved by critics, then," she mused. "Give it a thumbs up for me, will you?"
 
He did so with gusto, extending both thumbs skyward with a wide, carefree grin. His joy was infectious, causing Rin to give a happy smile as well.
 
"Momma?" he asked curiously. "How come ya never paint real stuff?"
 
She looked thoughtful at that, tapping her chin with a toe.
 
"Well, I've never been able to keep pictures of those kinds of things in my head for long," she replied. "They tend to float away, or pop. Like bubbles."
 
"What about that picture of Daddy?" the boy inquired, looking at the impressively detailed portrait of an older-looking Hisao hung on the studio wall across from Rin.
 
A storm of emotions played across her normally impassive face.
 
"He's easy to keep on the mind."
 
"Oh," he said, accepting this. Silence reigned for a few seconds.
 
"Momma?"
 
"Hm?"
 
"When's Daddy coming back from his trip?"
 
She sighed. "I don't know, but he needs to hurry back, huh?" She smiled wryly at the boy. "I always have him cut my hair, but it's getting hard to paint at this length. And I know he wouldn't want me to stop painting. So he needs to come back and cut it, right?"
 
"Right!" the boy agreed happily.
 
She looked out the window at the sky, and the clouds wandering across it, humming tunelessly once more.