“What would I paint?”
She moved her shoulders up and down. “Whatever you wanted. There’s no pressure at all. But it can be so lovely, sometimes. Therapeutic, even. Not that you need to, like, try to use it to dig into past trauma or anything. It could just be circles and squiggles and lines if you want.”
She selected another canvas with her other hand, a slightly larger one. “I know, for me, one of the first new pieces I’m going to work on is a portrait of you. I finally have enough good tubes of blue to do it!”
“Me?” I asked, startled. “Why the blazes would you want to paint me?”
“Because you’re beautiful. And you make me happy,” Shiloh said with quiet seriousness. “These days, all I want to paint are the beautiful things that make me happy.” She smiled, a tender pull of her lips that made me feel like the floor had tilted beneath my boots. “I love you, Rivven. And if love can’t make good art, then I don’t know what can.”
And then, I knew what I would paint, if ever I were to try.
Shiloh was still holding that smaller canvas out to me. Hesitantly, I took it and laid it on the table. I did not think I had the right to try to use her easel.
“What colours would you like?” she asked. “A little of everything?”
I’d need brown, certainly. Black. White. Maybe some red or orange, but I really did not know beyond that.
Shiloh was already dabbing blobs of each colour onto the plate that she used as a paint palette. A little from each tube. She put it down beside my canvas, then bounded away to the kitchen, returning a moment later with a cup of water.
“Water thins out the paint,” she said. “Rinse your brushes between colours and dab the bristles off a bit on a clean rag. Or you can keep the brush very wet if you’re going for a more transparent, watercolour look.”
I did not know what a “watercolour look” was, but I did not like the sound of transparency. My wife’s colouring was vivid and deep. I did not want to water her down, wash her out.
I kept the water to a minimum when I finally dipped the slender, soft-bristled brush into the brown paint. I could sense Shiloh’s excitement, her desire to stay and watch me. But she turned away then, murmuring about “letting me work in peace,” and went to her easel where her back was to me.
As expected, painting was extremely difficult with my left hand. But then again, I doubted it would have been much easier if I’d still had my dominant right hand. I’d never attempted anything like this. I vaguely remembered using a stick to draw faces in the snow as a child, but that was about the extent of my artistic creations. Briefly, I tried using my tail instead of my left hand. While that did not seem any better, it also did not seem worse. So I alternated between them, experimenting.
I knew from very early on that my painting was bad. Unfortunately, it did not get better as I went. But somehow, this was not as frustrating as it should have been. My wife had been right. There was something deeply satisfying about merely doing the work, whatever the outcome. About the bloom of colour on the canvas. Saturating the brush with various degrees of waterand paint. Watching something form, something that had not been there before.
Or maybe it felt good because I was doing it with Shiloh. We painted together in the same room, a comfortable, companionable silence between us. Her painting was hidden by her body, but that was alright, because every time I glanced her way, I mostly just wanted to look at her.
I could never quite decide where and when Shiloh was most wondrous. When she laughed with wild abandon, wobbling and clutching at me on her skates, the sun anointing her hair, her lips, the exquisite tips of her human eyelashes. When she was naked and arching beneath me, or rolling her hips above me, her mouth open with pleasure, her gaze half-lidded and heavy.
Or when she was like this. Quiet. Focussed. Her lovely head tipping just slightly to one side.
I supposed I would just have to wonder at her everywhere. In every moment. Wonder at this perfect creature who’d somehow made her way into my world.
Wonder how I’d ever possibly managed to earn her.
“What should I do when I am finished?” I asked. Blinking with surprise, I realized the sun had begun to set. How long had we been standing here? Time seemed to have flowed past us, leaving me shocked at how much of it had disappeared without my notice.
“Just let it dry,” she said. “I’m done, too.”
The difference between us, of course, was that she was done because she knew she was done. The internal genius that was the combination of her skill and talent no doubt told her that her piece was whole and complete. I, however, was finished because I seemed to have reached some sort of tipping point where everything I attempted to alter or add now was actively making the image worse.
“May I come see?”
I grunted yes in answer to her question. I’d never wanted to hide anything from her. I would not hide this, either.
She exclaimed when she saw it. “That’s…That’s me!”
At least she could recognise that it was a human face, and that the face was hers.
“A version of you,” I grumbled. “I am afraid it does not come near doing you justice.”
Her face was a blobby brown oval in the middle of the canvas. Her eyes were black dots within white circles, with spiky black sticks pointing straight up. These were meant to be her eyelashes. I only realized now, upon looking at the painting with her beside me, that I had somehow forgotten her eyebrows. I had not forgotten her hair, at least, though I was not happy with how it had turned out. I thought the texture of her hair was very beautiful, but I’d failed entirely to capture any of the intricate curls and spirals of it. Instead, it was just one flat, black mass around her head.
Shiloh made a wet, sniffly sound.
