Canvas —Lynne Inouye
$5 Face Paint.
A sign is etched into a rotten framework; the letters are peeling, flaking, in the summer heat. A small business, situated between the ring toss and a donut stand—nestled in the yellowing grass. The days are long; the shifts are longer, but she weathers them all the same.
$5 Face Paint, Become All You Can Imagine!
In the stand, pale fingers trace circles on a palette, around smears of paint and across grains of wood. Business has been slow lately. She takes a breath of stale air, and her stomach turns at the smell of sugar, sweat, and sour paint. Business has been slow, yet she’s still here, rotting alongside this damn place.
Her hands find the brushes, then the palette knives—both clean, but with signs of wear. The knives are rarely used. She prefers to mix with her fingers, to lose herself in softer shapes when she imagines. And yet lately, the metal has become comforting, and her hands keep drifting closer—
“Excuse me.”
She jerks away.
There’s a customer. With windswept hair and huge eyes, she can tell he just got off the Silver Stunner, the roller coaster across from here. It’s a beast of a machine. Every few minutes, metal groans and leans as the coaster peaks, and screaming echoes from above.
“Excuse me,” he says again, throwing her a crumpled bill. “I’d like some face paint.”
And—
She knows that face.
She blinks.
It’s not real. It can’t be, and yet in a combination of thoughts and boredom and cruel weather, the past creeps in as she sees it. How the nose could thin, how freckles could twist and redden into acne scars. The hair darkened, the eyes painted with black and grays and a gleam of loathing–
She can see the shape of him.
She blinks again, and the delusion wavers–but her breath still hitches, stutters in her chest.
“Well?” he says, pushing into the stall, seating himself at the rusted metal chair with a stumble. “Get on with it.”
“What do you want?” The words are heavy in her mouth. It’s only muscle memory that has her picking up the palette, then a brush.
He grins; his words slur. “‘All you can imagine,’ yeah? Surprise me.”
Distantly, she sees the roller coaster reach its summit, poised like a great, silver snake over them. Sugar, sweat, paint, screams—a face that blurs with the hazy heat. Her brush finds red; she closes her eyes. And she imagines.
It is all she has.
She traces featherlight shapes in brutal crimson. She draws with all the imagination left in her, and she does not like what she finds. It wasn’t always like this. She started out with faint pencil lines, with sharp, stinging inspiration. Then, in college, she found her muse in wood and splinters, but it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough, and now—
“Been doing this for long?” he asks. She does not answer. Grief chokes her throat; anger fills her lungs. It’s not real. He has been gone for a long time, dead for years. But she imagines, and she can not stop imagining, and her mind is a pretty place no longer.
She hates him.
The palette knives gleam in the corner of her gaze, and God, she hates him.
Her body seizes up, and the paintbrush presses into the corner of an eye—of his eye. It follows as he flinches back, presses harder as red paint seeps into pores. The red is everywhere now, encircling the shape of his mouth, splattered like bruises across his cheek. And as her heart pounds—an epiphany.
Paper to wood to skin. But she has a hungry soul, one that has already led her to drop out of school, to chase and chase and chase fulfillment. Her canvas has grown stale once more, her tools well-used and well-known. Paper to wood to skin to—further. Deeper.
People are screaming again.
“What the—get away—”
He joins them, as her hand finally—finally—finds metal.
AUTHOR BIO:
Lynne Inouye, 17, is a queer fiction writer with an interest in all things otherworldly. She enjoys spending time with her cat, acting, and using far too much imagery.
