Fennel rolled over his wife’s bed of tulips and cleaved his blood orange C-100 between two lilac bushes before kicking the hard brake over the cedar chips outside his garage. The rolling shop door was creased open. His dog, Lyle, ran out at the sight of him. Fennel’s canvases were stacking up on the west wall. The recent soul purging from last night still perched on his large aluminum easel. He stared at the jade palette knife arcs on the upper left of the canvas; he didn’t like the charcoal pencil in the middle with the explosion of rust. Fennel snagged an old pair of canvas scissors and quartered the painting—he would frame the scraps and hand them out as gifts and calling cards. To celebrate his impromptu salvaging he picked up a section of copper cooling coil he’d converted into a pipe and placed a fresh bud over the screened bowl. Scraping the Bic lighter he noticed his right hand was still sore from beating his wife that morning. She had mentioned something or another over oatmeal that he needed to bring in some extra money substitute teaching in town. He struck her barehanded across her jaw, but hyper-extended his middle finger. The jolt of wincing middle tendons reminded him that he was beating his loved ones again, and he needed to cut that out. His dog, Lyle, now ran out of the studio when his master returned, his new evasions courtesy of Fennel’s steel tipped boots and a bad night with Kentucky bourbon the week before. The master awoke at four that morning to find urine on his leather couch. He didn’t hesitate to blame the puddle on Lyle. He stared at a new canvas now, one he boxed out with pine and pre-coated. This new night with his weed and his wife beating hand turned muddy. He saw his oldest friend’s face in the canvas, the same oldest friend who’d recently accused him of being a lazy and insincere artist. His old friend was just as happy swatting, kicking, and knocking back that the two just nullified each other’s joys. He couldn’t get back to his seafoam and jade hallucination from the night before. The kid, Eric, with the cray pas, sketchbook and lonely dead buck eyes scattered his concentration. Fennel sat on his leather couch and played with the muzzle of his shotgun. He knew it would take a meal, a nap, a jag of something to clear his approach this night. He decided to cry for unattainable beauty. He thought back to the young memoirist who’d plucked him bare earlier this summer with her invasiveness and predatory femininity. He dropped his muzzle and looked at the photo of her on the jacket of his biography. The damn girl sucked his essence, practically drained him, and put her pretty face on the book jacket. Her platinum ironed hair, her eagle beak of a nose, her seafoam lapels over a stupid blazer. Seafoam…he jolted from the revelation. He was struggling through seafoam because it was his ghostwriter’s signature, her personal crest. She never laid him. She got out unscathed. Fennel understood he couldn’t paint from that corner of the color wheel again until another young groupie, one a bit less inscrutable, would alight in his studio.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 01:53:01 +0000
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