Stroke of Beauty

Chapter one

The world is blank on my canvas.

Has been for years. I often wonder if I am still in fact, a painter, an artist. I’ll sit for hours at a time and not move a muscle. My brain races with the thoughts of a thousand ways I could translate this scene to the paper but my arm and hand will do none of them. Those passing by, walking their dogs, jogging, skating, look at me and wonder.

“Don’t look at him. He’s weird,” I’m sure one jogger whispered to her friend.

“He never paints, he just sits there,” another probably thinks as he walks his dog past, his eyes never veering from the path.

“Woof woof,” thinks the dog, intentions unknown.

“Was that man sick mommy?” A little kid would most likely ask, after her mother had pushed the stroller out of earshot.

“I’m sure he’s just tired honey,” a safe response, no explanation needed about how some people are ‘different,’ ‘crazy.’

I…I’ve learned to look through them, avoid all possible eye contact. And as their faces melt, mold and morph in my mind, I think about how they will belittle and mock me, as if I weren’t a person.

It wasn’t always like this of course. When the world was beautiful it was nearly impossible to stop the movement of my brush. I would splash and slather on the paint like a clown and his makeup.

Oh, the comments I would get then!

“It is so beautiful monsieur, how ever do you do it?” An ecstatic Frenchman once asked me, his eyes bulging and his cherry red beret almost falling off as he stared at the colors mixing and popping off of the canvas.

“Ah,” I replied, “though it is I who toils and sweats over this canvas, I do not create such beauty … It is supplied for me.”

The Frenchman purchased the painting without another word.

“It is as if you are painting from my heart,” a young woman finally said after watching me for several hours.

“Then your heart must be close to mine; for it is from it that I paint.”

Yes, the world has sense abandoned me--left me with a life mirroring that of any central park bum.

I’m lost, like a speeding car on a highway, the driver nowhere to be seen.

So I sit, with an easel before me, miniscule against the backdrop that is a large over-judging public.

I sit and let their comments whittle away at me like warming weather on slowly melting snow.

I sit and I do nothing.

The leaves are falling now and yet another winter will soon pass me by. I watch the sun catch the floating leaves and as the cool golden rays strike my pupil, I see no beauty, I paint no picture.

The colors that now mark the trees are enough to rival that of even my fullest palette. But on this day, this fatefulist of days, my palette is empty. I did not even bother to bring an easel.

I wonder if this is how it starts. If the road to senility is a dead end. If I’ve slammed into the railing.

A tiny girl insignificant to anyone but those she knows sat beside me. I didn’t turn to look, there are 86 billion people on this earth, how could she be special?

Several seconds pass and she scoots closer to me. I turn slightly, not letting her see my discontent. Her feet are dangling off the bench, kicking the air. She hums a song I don’t know and plays with the black ribbon in her ponytail, which glows a fiery red. She scoots closer and I jerk back into place, my place, as her humming grows louder and her feet kick faster.

A feeling in my stomach began to grow. A spider tickling the inside. I turned to look at her again, sweat began beading on my forehead. No one has even acknowledged my existence in more than I quip I could never hear in three years, why would this girl sit next to me?

A prank no doubt.

Some sort of sinister joke that will leave me here looking more like a fool then I already do. She scoots closer.

I swallowed hard and the tenacious spider fighting within me grew more legs. I wiped my brow and blinked faster than the light on a strobe. Her finger touched my elbow, the one that had been touched by nothing but time. The shock of her finger on my flesh reverberated in my body a thousand times. And all of my blood rushed to my heart and it felt as if it could explode. It left my skin whiter than even my blankest canvas. The cool fall air refused to fill my lungs and I knew that I was dying.

Her finger pressed against my wanting arm once again and, not being able to bear it any longer, I got up and shuffled away, shaking the whole way home.

End of chapter one

A/n If you review me I’ll be your friend. Unless that’s not what you want then review me and I won’t be your friend. Thanks. Also, it says chapter one but I wouldn’t count on a chapter two anytime soon. I have some of it written, but it’s taking a long time.