The Soul Painter [completed]

-Chapter Six-

Location: Central

Earlier this morning, Femi decided that it was warm enough to venture outside. Then she proceeded to inform me with some hand signals that she intended to paint the outside of the garage door. 

She seemed so excited about it, and that's why I let her. Even though I don't want a lot of color on the outside of the place. 

Like, "Hey! There is nearly a hundred dollars worth of stuff in here! Want some free wrenches?"

Yeah, no. That's not happening. Not today, not tomorrow, and it wouldn't have happened yesterday.

But for whatever reason, I'm powerless to the desires of one girl who's barely scraping one-hundred and thirty pounds at the heaviest.

I can hear her humming outside right now while I try to work. The sound makes me so happy that I don't want to do anything while it's happening. 

I shake my head to clear my mind and continue to re-lubricate the pistons in some guy's 2010 Buick.

He said it was giving him lots of trouble. As it turns out, someone had spilled a drink into it, and the sugary liquid rusted and gummed up the workings of the engine block. You would not believe how much fun that was to scrub out. Not.

Yeah, sometimes I love my job, and then sometimes not so much, though it would have been better today if he'd offered to pay me to scrub the rust off of the hood, too. But he didn't. Some people just don't care that old cars need more attention.

The lamp in the corner begins to flicker as the bulb goes out, and the light in here dims. I had to close the garage door when she requested to paint it, and that creates a problem. Since she's outside, she's harder to hear, and not being able to hear her well makes me nervous.

The grease can falls from my hands as some of the slippery stuff slides down my wrist and slimes up my fingers.

Shoot.

I wipe my hands on my jeans and try to pick up the can of grease, which just so happened to land right-side-up, so nothing spilled.

That all changes when I try to grab it and it flips over before making a second landing. 

I mutter several curses as globs of it harden against the cold floor. When it comes time to clean that stuff up, it's not going to be fun.

In the midst of my frustration, I hear it. The faint sound of Femi humming. It helps me calm down. Then, it stops. 

I don't take this as being odd. Sometimes while she's focusing hard on a tiny detail, she stops everything but painting that spot. This includes tapping her foot, humming, or any other noisy activity.

She has busy hands. If she doesn't have something in them, or she's not doing something, you know for sure that she's either tired or something isn't right.

I strain my ears, waiting for the sound of her quiet singing to herself to begin again, but it never does. Then, out of the silence, something metal crashes to the ground.

"Femi?"

The cement seems to have grown colder beneath me. My heart speeds up when she doesn't even give the garage door a tap to signal that she's okay.

"Femi?" I stand and walk quickly to the door, sliding it up into its run. 

The white light from the overcast sky hurts my eyes as I scan the alley. She's nowhere in sight.

Her paints lie exactly where she set them earlier, and her paint brush is dipped in the pot of red.

Now this makes no sense. Not only does she almost never use the color red, it's not the brush that's dipped into the paint. It's the handle.