Drawing the Eye
The Meeting Place. TWENTY-ONE.
The wind kicked up and the chimes oonged and ahnged in accomplished notes for a few seconds. Lucille and Gypsy trotted in tandem to their mistress as she pulled her primrose fleece a little tighter against the dipping sun. The mockingbird gave an evening reprise as Val blew the pastel dust from the image she’d scrubbed into her sketchbook. A giant eye, drawn across two facing pages and staring right back at her like she held in her hands whatever it needed to see. The drawing had begun as countless scribbled conjunctions, oppositions, parallels, crossings, dashes, waves, and spirals — all drawn with a soft, red pastel imagining the One Breath that links all that lives.
The vexation of crossroads was barely visible now under the massive eye. Val imagined beyond the edges of paper and caught impressions of feet being warmed by a fire and dipping into the river and searching in snow and hidden in the bed sheets and closed in a casket. Hmmmm.
In the margin she began to write. You don’t have to go far to see the path of the story. It’s right at your feet, in your fingers and your yearnings, in the truths you know but have not spoken. The seeing will be bravely told. And beautifully, with velvet sentences that will heal forgotten (and unheeded) wounds. She had become accustomed to the spill of words that followed her sketches. The dialogue was with herself in psychological terms, but the words had been formed in ages past and pulsed into her pen like the Psalms must have arrived to David.
Val went inside to start the fire. Wood shavings soaked in hand sanitizer then pressed and dried in small paper cups was her secret starter, but visitors never asked how she did it. They just let themselves be amazed. Tonight she shared no company. The amazement would have to be her own.
Val tipped up her soup mug and fished for the last leaves of cabbage, grateful she had developed a taste for it back when she learned how to steam it with loads of pepper. She had refused to buy cabbage at over a dollar a pound on principle, but the price wasn’t going down anytime soon so she relented and asked the produce guy to slice a head in half for her. He used his pocket knife to splinter a large head, and she resisted apologizing for the trouble. This is all I need, she said instead, and added a regal thank you.
Gypsy and Lucille curled on their quilts near the rocker as Val tripped back in time, landing on her elbow in a field of wildflowers on a spring day when a mockingbird sang in trills and titters to a couple young lasses skipping their afternoon classes on a perfect Friday to get to the field of full sun and the first blooms of spring.
“Some pleasures can’t be denied,” Phoebe attested, with an empty mini-bottle held like a cigarette between her noble fingers.
“I can’t believe you stole four of ‘em!” Val’s peach lips blossomed, a clover flower wedged at the meeting of her ear and her cheekbone, wisps of her amber strands glowing like a halo.
How could anyone be so blessed? Phoebe wondered.
“Joe trusts me, Val. I do everything he asks. And I’m not the only one lifting the merchandise. So what’s the harm?” Phoebe was flat on her back now, shielding her eyes from daylight. The full length of her had nary a bump: a chestless, hipless form in full denim. Her profile told a different story. The arc of her forehead, the ridge of her nose, the philtrum landing at her lips like a slide to heaven. Even Phoebe didn’t know the Phoebe that Val knew.
And that was the reason that many years hence Phoebe would seek her.
“It’s your JOB, Phoebe. Your JOB.” Val caught herself sounding like a father. Ugh.
“Screw the J. O. B.” Phoebe rose up and threw her hands into the air. “Bright lights! Big city!”
“You mean you’d leave me here, Phoebe?” Val pined. What an act. They both knew it. They had already maneuvered away from each other. Call it separation anxiety or dread. Senior Week wasn’t too far down the road.
Phoebe muted herself, sucking her bottle like an infant. Then she stumbled on an overgrown pile of field stones.
“Watch your step there, genius,” Val sighed as she kicked off her second shoe, jumped to her feet, and ran for the river. “Last one there’s a rotten egg!” she yelled as she turned tail down the hill, dodging cow patties and mud puddles all the way.
The Meeting Place note: New characters have appeared, so I’ll be tracking them here. Stay tuned! The Meeting Place is a jigsaw of fictional vignettes hosting several female characters. The series began with The Meeting Place. ONE. (May 12, 2022).
