The Soul Painter [completed]

-Chapter Twenty-Four-

Location: Central

Words cannot express the feelings in my heart at the moment. I'm a whirlwind of passions. Odd things, mostly. Femi was an odd thing. 

She was my odd thing. Now she's gone, in a way that I don't fully grasp with my mind, but I feel it in my soul. It would seem that not only did she take my hoodie with her, she also took a pretty good-sized chunk of my heart. I feel that one piece's absence ten times over with every atom left behind. 

Chana tucks a blanket around my shoulders. Her place smells like the repetitive feedings of soured canned milk that I've had to suffer through. It also smells like sickness, and traces of vomit permeate everything. 

If things were bad when I was dying over at the shop, they're worse now. That milk is poisonous, I've decided, and I can't keep it in me. It always comes up ten times more foul than it went down.

"Come on, child. It's time for lunch."

"Anything but the milk," I plead, and I notice that there is something different on this can's label. Mashed potatoes with gravy, I think it says. I don't trust it. "Couldn't I have something normal, like peanut butter and bread? Or just peanut butter, or just bread?"

She shakes her head. "You know that I don't keep money. I haven't got any of that kind of food around here. Unless you ask the baker, but he's been a bit greedy lately. He'll cheat you for sure."

"But I'm so tired of feeling sick."

She grunts, and sets the unopened can down. Pretty unwillingly, I might add. 

"Thank you," I sigh, leaning back and closing my eyes.

My skin is cold. Not in the uncomfortable way, but in the way that feels resigned, like I've let the cold stay there. The heat gone, but the pulse beneath the chill still just as alive as it was before the cool took over. 

"I think it would be a good thing for you to go outside," the old woman suggests. "The sun has been out all week long, isn't that crazy?"

"Crazy," I agree. 

"Come on. I'll help you outside." She puts an arm around my shoulders and pulls me to my feet. I don't need help, but I let her just the same. I'm not weak anymore, despite the few pounds I've lost.

The door swings open when she pushes it, the bell clanging in the same obnoxious tone it always does, but this time it irritates me. 

The sun is blinding.

It's warm on my face, like warm tea, and it smells like warmth, too. But it doesn't quite feel like being loved. My eyes burn with unshed tears.

"I'll let you stay out here for a while, okay? I need to check the store logs and budget for more of that canned milk." She pats my shoulder gently and walks back up the steps, closing the door with its annoying sidekick of a bell behind her.

I blink into the light, squinting. It colors the cement steps a golden-orange color, like gold. The dust floating around my head looks like more gold—tiny, shattered fragments of wealth.
It turns my skin into bronze, it warms my blood until I can actually feel my fingers again. But no matter how warm it is, the light will never feel exactly like love. Matt was wrong.

I bite my lip, blinking the sun from my eyelashes. My mind craves the scent of paint and the sound of her voice like my lungs crave air. I deprive them of it for a few seconds, holding my breath against the heartbreak.
She's gone, my mind sighs, and then again, a bit more resigned. She's gone.
I don't think she wanted to leave. She never gave me any sign that it was on purpose, but then again, she never did tell me that she wasn't trying.
Oh wait. Yes she did. Twice, she told me that she wasn't trying to do it.
It isn't fun thinking back.
Frowning, tears heating my eyes, I scuff my bare heel against the pavement, and watch the dead skin scrape off from the roughness. A chicken scuttles past me, panicking when it realizes that I'm not part of the front steps, but am, in fact, alive. I laugh past my pain.
It's funny, because one, the chicken does not cross the road, but actually walks beside it, and two, the bird seems to know that I'm alive almost as well as I do.
Those two things in themselves are hilarious, but it's equally funny that I find them funny. My state of mind must be even worse than I thought.
I feel someone watching me.
Slowly glancing up from the ground, I smile at the confused face of Spero, where he stands there, peering around the edge of the building.
He comes over on tiptoe, not for stealth, but because he's nervous, so it would seem. Ready to run. Why would he need to run? I don't have any idea.
"Hi, mechanic. What are you doing?"
I look over at him briefly and chuckle an old chuckle. Like one of those old geezers who loiter around in front of the tobacco shops, like old man Baker. He always chuckles, and always rocks on that rocking chair of his, out on the fire escape in the alley, right across from my shop. If I left the garage door open, I could hear him rocking from five in the evening until midnight. "I'm doing a little better. How are you?"
Spero runs a hand over his face, and it makes me wonder how tired he is. There are dark circles underneath his hazel eyes. "I'm good."
"You look tired."
He yawns. "It's 'cause I am."
I nod. That was a dumb thing for me to say. Why was it necessary to tell him that he looks tired? I guess I'll blame that bit of stupidity on the canned milk I ingested yesterday. Surely it was potent enough to cloud my brain function today.
"Where's Femi?"
"Still gone," I say, sighing.
"Do you think she'll come back?" His tired eyes possess a sparkle for once, a little flicker of hope. "She loves you a lot. Do you think she'll remember you and come back?"
"I sure hope so, buddy. I sure hope she comes back."

"I liked her, mechanic, even if Da told me not to sell stuff to her."
I sigh again, tearing up as my mind wanders to another branch of our subject. Another part of Femi. "She was kind of like a fairy tale. Don't you think, Spero?"
"I thought fairy tales always had happy endings?" He looks at me again, confused. I don't really know what to say. Femi said almost the same thing, that we're us, and people like us don't get happy endings. It's true, and I know that now. Our ending that has already passed isn't happy. I'm wishing that for her, though, there will be a better ending. If she's even alive, that is.

However, since I'm a selfish excuse for a wimp, I honestly don't know if I hope that she's alive or not. She'll have a chance to forget me if she's alive, and the selfish part of me says that if she found it in herself to forget, she might as well kill me.
The idea of anyone else having her makes my fists clench until my knuckles turn white.

"Fairy tales don't always have happy endings, Spero," I say finally, looking him squarely in the eye. His gaze doesn't waver the way I was expecting it to. He's a strong kid. "But the princess always leaves the knight who rescued her better off than when they first met."

~~~~

The little boy in the picture is Spero. =) (And the song... well, that's just Paris' song for the meantime.)

Hope you're having a good time reading! 

~Alyssa