Part 8

      The style of her dress was... well, very, very old. And even apart from that, something in her manner revealed a delicate grace, a soft primness that belongs entirely to another time. She can't have been here... and there's no trace... but she was as visible to me as the honeysuckle in my fingertips, I could feel the warmth of her near me, I know if she had spoken I would have heard her. Am I really that psychotic, that I can hallucinate with such vividness?
      I stand up, my heartbeat still unsteady, and look around, touching the vines, the trellis, the bench, my bag. I'm awake, there's no doubt of it, things are almost never tangible in my dreams. But...
      A breeze comes up, and I start to wish I'd grabbed my rain coat – the crisp scent of rain is in the air. I should go, I'd hate being caught in the rain this far from home... and the breeze carries some other scent as well, a heavier, spicier scent than the honeysuckle, but mixed with the dense earthy smell of plant decay. I suddenly feel that I'm trespassing, that I've seen something I wasn't supposed to... and though there's nothing to be seen around me, apparently that could change at any moment. My mind won't stop thinking about what would have happened if the woman had seen me... and was she here, or was I there beside her, or did I dream it all...
      I walk briskly back along the path, not stopping to look at anything else. The rain... I don't want to be caught in the rain, especially with my camera and sketchbook in my bag...
      When I reach the fence, though, I have to turn and take a look back. The garden still draws me... I'm going to have to come back. But not now, it's going to rain, and I want to get home. I just want to get home...

      The walk back is a blur, I stare intently at the lack of a path before me, focused solely on covering the ground, but I don't see any of it, it passes over my eyes like water over stones, leaving no trace, no memory...

      Home at last, I drop my bag on the couch, and head into the bathroom. I turn on the tap, and wash my hands and face. There's bits of mud and plant debris all over me... I start picking the bits of twigs out of my hair, and I can see my tunnel beneath the fence--- and I shake my head to clear it. I stare vacantly at my reflection in the mirror, wondering if she's really there, or just a crystal-clear vision, invading this space from some other place...
      The wind picks up, and a flurry of rain pelts against the bathroom window. I look up at the sound, brought back to myself. It's a good thing I came back before it hit, I'd be drenched...

      I take a deep breath and look steadily at myself in the mirror. What the hell happened back there...


      I start looking around online, but there's so much garbage, so many crazy people with pseudoscience so absurd I get a headache just trying to follow it. No, just no. I know there's reasonable stuff written on the paranormal, on psychics, but how on earth do you find it? Sighing in frustration, I close my web browser, and turn off the monitor. Forget it. I'll just... maybe I'll look around locally, check the classifieds in the paper or something, and find an actual person to talk to. And just hope they're not crazy. Meanwhile, I'll cling to the assumption that I'm not crazy. Or at least only as crazy as artists are given the license to be.
      And that's when I decide what to do. I am going to sit down and draw. I dig through my supplies, and pull out a nice big 18”x24” Strathmore sketchbook with plenty of empty pages. Nice bit of tooth to the cream-colored paper... I'm undecided on the medium, but charcoal sounds like a good cathartic place to start. I grab two partially-emptied boxes of willow and vine charcoal, then root around in a pencil case for a kneaded eraser.
      Dropping the sketchbook onto the living room floor, where the light is good, I reach over to the couch and get the sketchbook out of my bag. I don't want to think about the woman, not yet... but the boy, and the beautiful place he stood, I might be able to draw the boy.
      I look over my sketched notes, and close my eyes a moment, remembering. Then I loosely begin throwing down lines, trying to decide on a composition. I get up and go over to my computer, pulling up a playlist I made ages ago, of things that were nice to draw to. Flopping back down on the floor, I decide to screw composition, I'm just going to start drawing, and crop later. This is not art for commercial purposes or a good grade, this is art for saving my sanity. Or, at least, justifying my lack of sanity.
      R.E.M.'s “Try Not to Breathe” comes on, and I settle back into the comfortable rhythm of the song. I used this song for a school assignment once, making up a soundtrack to Ray Bradbury's “The Martian Chronicles”... I remember wanting so badly to draw Mars while reading that book, but the cover art already perfected the way I saw the Martian architecture in my head, and anything I tried to do was only a pale copy of that other artist's vision... I grin wryly. No fear of that this time, at least.
      I sketch in a rough human form, just boxes and triangles to get the proportions right... and I jump up to do a quick web search, to check what proportions should be for a child. The boy wasn't very young, maybe ten or so, but that's definitely not adult proportions. Leaving the page open on the screen, I sit back down and make some adjustments, tweaking his pose as I go. Much as it would make me smile to draw him stumbling in the grasses, I'm not confident in my ability to do such a dynamic pose without some kind of reference. So I draw him standing in the creek, water twining around his legs near his knees, tunic flowing into the water in a damp drapery. I work outward from there, sketching in the way the tiles will sit, adding in the plants, roughly blocking in more plants... Memory of my brief walk in the garden merges with the vision, I bring in details from both without noticing at first. And when I do realize it, I decide it's a nice effect, showing the brightness of the garden's youth around the boy, with bits of its aging decay creeping in around the edges.
      Eventually, I sketch a rough circle where I decide the light should be coming from, drawing pale lines radiating from it to remind myself where the light should hit objects. I block in a bit more detail, as I add some shadows and note highlights... I used to draw a single section start to finish and then move on to the next object or area, but the perseverance of many art professors finally broke me of that habit, at least in the early stages of a drawing. It's so noticeable to me now, looking at my old drawings, and seeing how inconsistent the colors and shading and things are. A person's skin won't even be the same color from one body part to the next on half of them, because I drew the face first or the hands last. I'm so glad to see that I didn't slip into that old habit today, I hadn't even thought about it until now.
      I shy away from trying for too much detail in the boy's face just yet... only blocking in the rough shapes of the planes of his face, which are pretty round anyway. I'm terrified of trying to draw those eyes... but that will come later. I sit back a minute and consider. I want color, but I like the mistiness of this so far... Chalk pastels will work. Do I even have a full set, or only the destroyed remnants of the set I used in college? Mentally crossing my fingers, I go back into my supplies – and let out an exultant “ha!” as I find a nearly-new set of pastels. I remember now, I picked them up at the end of my senior year, using up the money on my student account, when everything in the bookstore went on sale at the end of the semester. Way to plan ahead, self! These sets seemed so expensive then, thirteen bucks for a 24-set of Alphacolor pastels... but I didn't have a real job in college, nothing more than a few part-part-time on-campus jobs. Which saved a lot of sanity, and let me get an occasional bit of sleep, but meant I stayed in most Friday nights, and did all of my eating on-campus.
      I half-dance back over to my drawing, making up syllables to sing along with the Kent song now playing – it's all in Swedish, which I don't know a word of, but a random web search for something else turned up one of their songs years ago, and I liked it enough to track down more. Standing over my drawing, I notice the perspective on the tiles is skewed all wrong, so I set about trying to fix it. I should really get a ruler for doing these tiles, but, it always looks so odd when I do that, to have these really sharp lines against all the soft lines of everything else. I'll just wing it. There's water involved, I can blur whatever edges I need to. But I think I really want to focus on the color of those tiles, they're so vivid and have such a great exotic feel to them, classic and fresh at the same time. If I can keep the rest of the drawing in the same warm sort of tones... But I'll start with coloring the tiles, to have them as a reference for everything else.