Genesis

It has been easy, these first few days after buying the studio, to go through the motions: to sit at the easel in women’s clothes and think of himself as the painter who had owned it before him. He’d only glimpsed her work in passing, shards of it peeking out from under the tarps she’d wrapped it in prior to packing and leaving the place she’d held on to for so many years, the studio inherited from her father who’d expected her to move on and become a doctor or something else more practical instead of dressing herself in his shirts and sitting before the easels he’d left as well, sitting for many years until the day that a whisper, perhaps the sound of a train in the distance or a voice in the hallway, moved her to pick up a tube and squeeze it onto a palette.

From what he could see, there was a lot of red under those tarps.

Now, sitting here, he understood a lot more about how this might have happened. One sits and thinks, he tells himself, until an unoriginal thought becomes so strong that the weight of it breaks over you and you rush to fill the crack with whatever you call art.

He arranges a fold of her smock over his jeans. He puts on his headphones and begins to drown.