Member-only story
Take a Peek
Every artist loves his muse.
The studio was quiet when I walked inside. No one else was due to come in today, but it had become a habit for me to visit the studio whenever I had downtime in the area. There was a slight chill to the air from the old windows facing out onto a backalley. I plugged in the small space heater and cupped my hands around my mouth to breathe some warmth against my palms.
I stalled as much as I could before I turned to my easel and looked at the woman staring back at me from the canvas. The only definite pieces of her, formed through messy strokes of charcoal, were her mouth and eyes. She looked like a ghost ready to kiss the first person who might help her remember what it was like to be alive.
I sat back on my stool and just stared at her, this phantom woman who looked nothing like the life drawing model who had visited our class last week. The sketched woman’s nakedness was vague with so much left to the imagination. But her eyes — they were bursting with a fire I’d never seen in any of the portraits I’d attempted thus far.
I thought I might scrap the whole thing by taking the canvas away and tossing it in the dumpster. A part of me still belonged to this portrait, though, and the promise that lay in this woman’s lifelike face.
