Five months. Exactly five months today. Pulling her hair tie and taking off her art smock, Lisa was ready to call it a night. The push was there to create something but what had been missing was the pull. It was as if everything she was working on for the last months was more work than play. There were deadlines. There were check-ins on her progress. It was arduous and insipid. Not like she hated what she had produced for the past months. She looked at her artwork, and they seemed to lack the soul to look back at her.
If only she could hand in her resignation letter. Or better yet, her clients should just fire her for all the lackluster pieces she painted. Or the best option, her manager should just give up on her altogether.
As she stood up, the mess she made caught her by surprise upon remembering how her studio was so neat on the day she was drawing Roseanne. Everything that was on the floor that night was not there before.
Crumpled papers,
scattered paintbrushes,
unsharpened graphite drawing pencils,
and an uncleaned palette that accumulated dust.
The thought of the supermodel brought her gaze to the unfinished piece leaning on the wall. She had not touched it since the incident, and she never heard back from her muse after writing a letter that bared her emotions after that first meeting. Maybe it was too much that it had turned Roseanne off. Confessing how her hand felt like it had resigned from painting anything else again was an overstatement, perhaps, to someone who would choose to have an ordinary, amorous conversation at a glamorous party talking about mundane things—or celebrity gossip or fashion trends—and not about how Roseanne's eyes scratched the surface of her numbness for months.
All that was left of Roseanne was that short moment of connection they had. The memory was still vivid in her mind and the unnamed feelings deep within her lingered like the heat after the sun had set, but alongside it was a scratch in her gut that it was too late to reach out. And maybe Roseanne did not feel as profoundly as she did. Besides, nobody easily understood an artist like her. There was a time in the past when her art took away someone's smile. That kind of greed for art made her disgusted with herself.
She stared at her right hand. Parts of it bore smudges of pencil, covering some of the scars in the shade of flesh that appeared like random, uneven brushstrokes that a three-year-old painted. That same hand caught Roseanne's head delicately before hitting the floor. The shape of the supermodel's crown and the softness of her blonde hair were molded there, deeper than the first layers of her skin.
Yet, a part of her was not convinced that that hand saved Roseanne.
That that hand was safe to hold Roseanne.
There was something about those light-colored scars that gave off a revolting feeling that she got them as punishment for something terrible she did.
Or her art did.
"Hold it right there, sis!" The voice almost shrieked at the end and the guy who spoke pointed a finger at Lisa like the stance of a police officer. It was hard not to imagine that when he was all poshed up in a navy blue suit embellished with gold accents.
YOU ARE READING
a misty gashed aperture
Fanfiction"The Panorama." Artist Lisa Manoban and global supermodel Roseanne Park's first meeting was far from kismet. It was not fireworks going off but finding the sky clear of any smoke. With a stroke of fate, the artist started dreaming again with a futil...
