The Color of Silence
The studio held its breath at four in the morning, the way it always did before the city stirred awake. Maya stood at her easel in the gray hush before dawn, barefoot on paint-spattered floorboards, a brush loose between her fingers like something she'd forgotten how to put down. Outside, the sky hadn't yet decided what color it wanted to be—not quite black, not quite blue, caught in that undecided place she understood better than she cared to admit.
She dipped the brush into cadmium red and let it hover an inch above the canvas.
The painting had been unfinished for three weeks now. A woman's silhouette, turned away, her shoulders rendered in loose, confident strokes of umber and gray, but her face left as raw canvas—an absence Maya couldn't bring herself to fill. She'd started it the night after she'd packed away the last of Daniel's shirts into a box she still hadn't dropped off at the donation center. It sat in the hall closet like an accusation.
She touched the brush to canvas and pulled back before it made contact. Not tonight. Maybe not ever, if she was honest with herself, though honesty had become a country she visited less and less.
The studio smelled of turpentine…
