Seeing Through Glass

When Collage Becomes Story: A Collaboration

Today's post marks a departure from my usual essays. I'd like to share a piece of short fiction that I wrote for Art in the AM, a unique collaborative project through the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild. Each month, writers gather to craft stories in response to selected artworks, creating a vibrant dialogue between visual and written expression. The story below was inspired by this striking collage, “High Rise Rose” from artist Nancy DeCamillis.

About the Artist: Nancy DeCamillis's artistic path speaks to the persistence of creative vision. After graduating with an English degree in Kentucky, she spent six decades exploring various art forms, earning recognition for her woven and painted fiber arts and stone sculptures. In Colorado, she mastered pneumatic stone carving, studying in Italy and teaching workshops across the U.S. and Costa Rica. When a shoulder injury in 2001 redirected her sculptural practice, she channeled her artistic energy into publishing Sculptural Pursuit, an art-literary magazine that reached readers in nineteen countries. Since moving to Rehoboth Beach in 2022, she has embraced new forms of expression through poetry, memoir, and collage art, while transforming her photographs into digital paintings. Her work can be found on Instagram at @nandeekarts.

Looking at Nancy's collage, I was captivated by how the roses seemed to defy gravity, climbing impossibly high alongside the glass and steel of the office building. It reminded me of childhood's magical thinking—that time in our lives when anything seemed possible, even flowers blooming in the sky. This sparked me to write "Seeing Through Glass," a story about the wisdom of believing in impossible things.

“Seeing Through Glass”

On Tuesday, eight-year-old Lucy ate lunch with her father on the twentieth floor of the glass building where he worked with numbers all day. She brought her sketchbook, and while he typed on his computer, she drew roses climbing up the windows.

"They don't grow this high up," her father said without looking away from his screen, the same way he said unicorns weren't real and her mother wasn't coming back.

But Lucy had seen things grown-ups couldn't. Like how sometimes her mother's face appeared in puddles after rain, or how the pigeons outside spoke to each other in whispers when no one was listening.

So when the first real rose appeared, pressing against the glass like a small red hand, Lucy wasn't surprised. Her father didn't notice, too busy with his spreadsheets, but by Wednesday there were three blooms, and on Thursday, a whole vine had spiraled past their window.

The other people in the building began to whisper. The roses shouldn't be possible, they said. Something must be wrong with the foundation. But Lucy knew better. She'd seen her mother in a dream, planting seeds in the sky.

By Friday, roses covered the entire building, their perfume seeping through sealed windows. Lucy's father finally looked up from his computer. "Impossible," he whispered, but Lucy saw his hands trembling as he touched the glass.

That night, she found a rose petal in his pocket while doing laundry. He'd kept it, she knew, the way he'd kept her mother's hairbrush on his dresser, holding onto beautiful things that shouldn't exist, but somehow did anyway.