The Empty Canvas
The light came first, the way it always did in that house perched above the tide line—gray and hesitant, seeping through the salt-fogged window like something unsure of its welcome. Daniel stood in the doorway of his studio and did not go in for a long moment, as though the room itself might reject him if he moved too fast.
Eight months. He had counted them without meaning to, the way a tongue keeps finding a broken tooth.
The studio occupied the converted boathouse behind the cottage, a single square room with plank walls silvered by years of weather and windows on three sides that once made the space feel like standing inside a lantern. Now the glass was filmed with salt residue, and the light that struggled through it looked apologetic, thin. He had built shelves along the north wall himself, back when his hands still knew how to be useful for something other than holding a coffee mug too tightly. Tubes of paint sat where he'd left them, some capped, some not, their contents hardened into small colorful fossils. A jar of brushes stood in the corner, bristles stiff, the water inside long evaporated into a ring of gray sediment.
And the canvas. Still on the easel, still…