An empty canvas. The painter stared at it for some time, looked out onto the threadbare meadow before him, thought a moment, and decided to stare at the canvas a while more. In appearance he was not handsome, not pleasant even to himself, short and rotund with a sloppy fringe of beard which he lacked even the energy to shave, but he had never thought of himself as someone weak enough to be dominated by a simple bit of white canvas. It mocked him, even now, as it stood out in that bleak and uninspiring meadow - rigid, immutable, and blank, endlessly blank. He knew that he had but to raise his brush and the colors would come forth, but he hadn't the strength to lift it, and he worried that if he did the bright hues of old would flow out strangled, dead, as dead as the choking meadow in front of him, the meadow which only moments before had seemed the ideal subject.
Ideal, perhaps, for a better painter, like the young man that had dazzled the critics in Paris so many years before - he was that man no longer. His muse sang no longer, her voice had gone out, the victim perhaps of a terrible tragedy, the mystery of her disappearance itself a crime left uninvestigated for too long. Had her throat been cut? Had she been strangled? Or did she merely not wish his audience any more? The last, he thought, was the more likely. All others, it seemed, had abandoned him, and why not? How could he bring joy to that frigid meadow when he could bring none to himself? He had had joy once, in a time when his fingers had moved like those of a man brilliantly possessed, a time when anything was possible. He grasped at those dreams and joys now and brought back nothing but shadows. And still the canvas taunted him, in cutting barbs of white.
He thought of those days, and he thought of the meadow, and then he thought of her. He buried his head. He had thought that shadow was done with. But wherever he looked she was there, and his thoughts couldn't help but follow. She was the one, and she never knew that she had breathed the very life and soul into his work. She had been his all, even if she had never really known the shy little man who had watched her from a distance. He saw her now, no matter where he looked. She was but a shadow, yes, but she brought back all the joy and hope that had filled his palette then and did the same now. His brush was immediately overflowing, and from it the wilted meadow spread again into the springtime of youth. He had only to think of her. The rest was beside the point.
Where was she now, she whose every movement was as an eagle in flight? Where was her laughter, her emerald smile, her singular way of transforming every word, every step, into a divine work of art? As he traced the lines of the flowering meadow he traced the lines of her face for the thousandth time. The tilt of her eyes, the cut of her nose, the secret little indentation at the nape of her neck. Every curve, every pore, he knew it all by heart. Returning to it now was as effortless as love.
But what knew she of his love? She had hung in the distance like a precious jewel. He had only to reach, what could it have hurt? But he had done nothing but watch, trapped either by shyness or foolish pride, it mattered not which, and only then had he known real hurting and pain. And when he knew she was leaving his life forever he had summoned every scrap of pride he had in the world and told her at last how he felt. And she laughed, not a hurtful laugh, for she was incapable of such, but a laugh that only proved that though they were but a few inches away they were on different worlds. As she left he called out to her that he'd love her forever. She smiled and said only "thank you." And then she was gone. And he was alone. His colors flowed forth as they had before, with all the passion of unrequited love.
Every tree, every rock, every blade of grass overflowed with her face, that beautiful face that held all the joys and secret sorrows of the world within. How much pain had she caused him, through all these years? How much agony, how much torture? And yet he could find no fault when he thought of that face. He had hired himself into a daily death for the love of someone he had never known, someone he could never know. He wondered what the critics would say, the critics who'd praised him before as a wunderkind. Would they call it "startlingly different?" "Emotionally overflowing?" Would they praise the light, and color? Did they care about why a painting might be made, about what the painter was feeling as he painted it, or why even the cavemen making paintings on walls walked around with an oddly distant look on their faces? With a final sanguine drop the meadow was complete, and she walked away from him once again.
He took leave of the meadow for an astonishing price, and was once again the darling of Paris. They hailed him as if he were a brilliant child, bursting suddenly onto their happy scene to give them another chance to be fashionably alike. With the sale of the meadow he was wealthy again, even if he would have to accept the ghosts and shadows for what they were.
"Who is she?" The question caught him by surprise. It came from the direction of one of the critics, now rubbing his chin in public thought.
"Sh-she?"
"You know, the girl. In the painting. Come on, old boy, you can't keep your secrets from us forever."
He looked at the painting, really looked, for the first time, and his breath grew short and labored. It didn't seem possible, but there she was, on the canvas. The grass was her face, the sky was her eyes. The stream formed the slash of her priceless smile, and the willows traced out her flowing hair.
His eyes agape, he could not move for some time. The critic walked away, guessing it to be another of the quirks to which artists seem uniquely prone. Inside the painter's mind, a world was crumbling, but in a strange way he was glad to see it go.
He had to leave, to leave the gallery, to leave his colors forever. It was time to be rid of the meadow.
Property of Orange Cow Productions. ninc., 1998. This piece may not be copied, reproduced, distributed, altered, forwarded, or otherwise worked with in any way without the express written consent of Orange Cow Productions, ninc.