How to Draw a Picture (XIII) - Chapter 1

Duma Key is the creative property of Stephen King. I own nada.

How to Draw a Picture (XIII)

Sit in the chum…

Start with all the lies you tell yourself to keep the sea weedy darkness at bay. Mix them with a little time -- not enough to muddy them, just enough to blur them a bit at the edges. Lay them on fast and thick in broad strokes. Don’t think too much about little details, either: a good falsehood’s more David Hockney than Andrew Wyeth. Make sure to gloss them with enough repetition to make them stick, for while the truth changes every time we touch it, a well-made lie can last for centuries…

I should know.

After that last piece on Duma was finished, I burned my canvases, my brushes -- everything. I knew the locals would say that freak barrage from the Gulf was ‘just another Alice,’ but I called her, and still call her, by another name.

Painting: You will want to, but you mustn’t. Why? Because art is not a diversion, not for dabblers, and not for the faint of heart; because what art really is, is creation: the act of creation, itself. Not reinterpreting a likeness, an image, but the act of actually rendering something from nothing: willing form from formlessness, order from chaos, playing God. Turning water into wine…

Even now, the gift is hungry, though I wish I could will time’s brush to soak up each and every stroke of the past. To render nothing and by the act of taking away, create absolution.

Hunger gets what hunger wants. Water always turns to blood before it turns to wine.

I always knew she would find a way back.

Pick one…

Late afternoon. August. I remember the light changing from burnished orange to muted crimson on Lake Phalen’s near-placid surface, because water always turns to blood before it turns to wine,and the shush-shushof the waves as they lapped the shore. The fingers of my right hand -- my ghost hand -- suddenly turned hot and started prickling, like I’d just grabbed a fistful of nettles. Then --

Orange says no, but apple says vamonos!

I want to fight it, but I can’t.

When I finally resurfaced, my watch flared three o’clock in Indiglo. When I turned on the porch light and saw what I had done on a canvas I had not purchased with paints and brushes I no longer owned --

I knew I could never refuse my baby, my favorite, my If-So-Girl.

She’d grown more solid since I last saw her on the beach, and though she was still made of a million little pieces, she was eerily substantial. Her smile was coolly feral and her reach exaggerated, as though I’d painted a 3-D movie still of her instead of a picture. Reaching, almost comically intruding into the foreground except for that moon bright glitter in the hollows of her eyes, she held something polished, dark, and heavy in her hand…

It was RED.