I took a drag of my cigarette and studied her the way she was studying the fox.
There was something about the way she moved. Gracefully and very measured. Like every stroke of her pencil was exactly where it needed to be. No hesitation or second-guessing. She knew what she was doing.
Music drifted from her van, some 80s shit I vaguely recognized. Depeche Mode, maybe. The van itself was a piece of work. Old, painted a baby powdered blue. From what I can see of the inside, it’s like some hippie dream, all bright colors and fairy lights visible through the open door.
The contrast was fucking beautiful. Sunshine van, dead fox, girl in a pink hoodie drawing roadkill.
I should have really gone on my way and ignored her, but I found myself pulling over before I could convince myself otherwise, because something about her had hooked into me, and I needed to see more. Needed to understand what I was looking at.
I'd spent my whole life around people who pretended. Who put on an act and played their parts and lied about who they really were. Growing up in the neighborhood I did, you learned quickly that everyone was performing. The tough guys who acted hard but folded the second real violence showed up. The dealers who talked about loyalty but would sell out their own mothers for a lighter sentence. The girls who said they loved you but were already fucking someone else behind your back.
Everyone was fake, and the world was one big set. A green screen of bullshit. It’s all so tedious. Everyone is so goddamnboringin their predictability.
I'd stopped trying to connect with people years ago. I stopped pretending I gave a shit about their small talk, their shallow concerns and their desperate need to be liked. I prefer being alone, prefer the joys of silence to the constant noise of people lying to themselves and each other.
But this girl…
She wasn't performing, she was justbeing. Crouched there with a dead animal, drawing it like it was the most natural thing in the world. No audience, she wasn’t filming herself for social media or doing it to impress friends. It was only her and her art and evidence of the circle of life.
I wanted to know what was going on in her head.
I finished my cigarette, crushed it under my boot, and walked toward her. She didn't look up, even when my shadow fell across her work. Too absorbed in her own little world. I likedthat. Liked that she wasn't jumping at every sound and wasn't showing awareness for some invisible gathering.
When I got close enough, I looked at her drawing. And fuck me, it was perfect.
She'd captured everything. The emptiness in the fox's eyes, the way its body had collapsed in on itself, the specific texture of death. I’ve seen some art before, similar to hers, but they never get it right, they never detail the spirit. They make it too peaceful and clean, too much like a peaceful sleep. But she'd gotten it exactly right. The brutality of it. The finality. The way death stripped away all the bullshit.
"That's good," I said, and I meant it. "Really good."
She didn't respond right away and kept drawing, like I was an interruption she was choosing to ignore. I respected that. I wasn’t sure if she would be startled, grabbing her shit and running like any other normal human being. But she just kept drawing, finishing whatever detail she was on before she acknowledged me.
When she finally looked up, I felt it like a punch to the chest.
Big brown eyes, dark, mysterious and completely unafraid. She looked at me the way she'd been looking at the fox, assessing and cataloging every detail. Not the surface shit everyone else saw. Not the tattoos or the black clothes and the general fuck-off energy I carried around like armor. She was lookingdeeper, trying to figure out what I was made of.
And I was doing the same to her.
I crouched down beside her, close enough to smell her, a hint of vanilla mixed with the scent of rot from the roadkill. She didn't move away or even flinch, she only watched me with those dark eyes, waiting to see what I'd do.
I looked at the drawing again, then at the fox, comparing the likeness.
"You got the eyes right," I said. "I’ve seen drawings where the artist fucks up the eyes by making them too alive, like they are aware. But you got it. That emptiness. That's what the end looks like."
Something shifted in her expression. Recognition, maybe, or understanding. Like she'd been waiting her whole life for someone to see what she saw, and I'd just proven I could.
"Who are you?" she asked, her voice rough and real. I smiled, I couldn't help it.
"Dom, and you?"
“Roxy.”
Roxy. I allow that name to swirl in my mind, loving the sound of it with each repetition.
"Nice ride," I said, nodding over to her van.
We talked for a few minutes, not very long. Just enough for me to confirm what I'd already suspected, which is that she was like me. That she saw through the bullshit, saw the world for what it really was. That everything was ugly and not presented in a pretty package with a bow.
I found out from her that she sold her drawings to private collectors, to people who appreciated the darkness. Buyers who craved reality instead of the clean version everyone else peddled.
