Paint and Pretense
The radiator clanked twice, then gave up entirely, leaving the studio to the mercy of a February that had crept in through the warped window frames sometime around dawn. Lily Parker sat cross-legged on a paint-spattered stool, a chipped mug of cold coffee balanced on her knee, and stared at the canvas that had refused, for eleven days now, to tell her what it wanted to be.
It was supposed to be her mother's garden. That was the plan, anyway—the wild tangle of black-eyed Susans and overgrown mint that had swallowed the backyard of the house in Poughkeepsie, the one that got sold within six months of the funeral because grief, apparently, came with a mortgage attached. Lily had sketched the bones of it weeks ago: the crooked fence, the leaning birdhouse, the slant of afternoon light her mother used to chase across the porch with a cigarette and a paperback. But every time she lifted a brush to it, her hand betrayed her. The greens went muddy. The light turned flat and grey, like something seen through hospital glass.
She set the mug down on the floor, where it joined a small graveyard of other abandoned mugs, and pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes until she saw sparks.…
