Page 44 of Dark Ink

“Got anything to drink?” he asked me.

I lowered the cabinet door, rested it against the beaten-in kitchen island.

“Where’s Eithne?” I asked, ignoring his question.

“Eithne?” he asked distractedly as his search continued, shaking fingers trailing over spilled bags of flour and rice.

I tried to get a good look at him. He was unshaven. Hollows had formed beneath his too sharp cheekbones. His neck was scrawny, his clothes baggy. I couldn’t guess his age, but I was fairly sure that any guess I gave would far exceed his actual years. He reminded me of someone I used to know. Someone I promised never to see again. Especially when he turned to me and I saw the vague sense of panic in his eyes, like a river just beneath the surface that never stops running.

“Do you really not have anything, boyo?” he said.

“Are you fucking her?” I asked.

A silly flare of pride. But I really couldn’t help myself. The stranger laughed.

“Gods no,” he said and turning away added, “I’m her brother.”

He rounded the corner into the living room. I heard him rummaging around. Always in search of something. I recognised that, too.

“Is Eithne alright?” I called out to him.

“Eithne’s always alright,” he called back.

“What happened here?”

“We’re moving,” was his only reply.

I lingered in the kitchen. Unsure of myself. It was a particular shadow from the bedroom down the narrow hallway that caught my attention. It was as familiar as the back of my hand, as that man I used to see all the time in the mirror. I went down the hallway as if in a trance.

It was the shadow of an easel. It somehow escaped the destruction of the rest of the place. The sheets were crumpled. The rod from the closet had been chopped in two, the clothes a mess on the floor. And everywhere you stepped it seemed there was another drawer from the toppled armoire. But the easel remained upright, sending its skeletal shadow across me as I stood amongst the chaos.

Eithne’s easel? I tried to imagine her painting there. But there was so much destruction. She didn’t seem to fit. There was a portfolio leaning against the base. Eithne’s portfolio.

The springs of the tired mattress moaned in protest as I sank into them with the portfolio across my knees. The stranger, Eithne’s brother as he called himself, was still out in the living room moving things here and there, but I could hardly hear him anymore. I was far too absorbed with Eithne’s work. From the very moment I opened the portfolio.

The potential was there. As obvious as a rising sun. Sketches drawn with such a light, natural touch that you might mistake them for the rapid blur of a hummingbird’s wings from a distance. Paintings in colours so subtle you had to lean in closer, as if to hear a whisper, in order to make them out from one another. Emotion that slipped under your collar like a cruel wind, passion that surprised you like a landmine, honesty that made you squirm, then still, then weep. It was all there. A rising sun, a rising artist.

Eithne could be anything, anyone she wanted. That much was obvious.

I found myself lighting a joint as I flipped from page to page. It seemed natural to me: whiskey and rain, Guinness and music, weed and art. I breathed deeply the smoke as I breathed in just as easily the images before me into my eyes, into my soul. It was good, too, the joint, to ease a nagging trouble that only seemed to grow with each turn of the thick, heavily pulped pages.

Because Eithne had talent, but Eithne also had bridles. Blinders. Ropes wrapped round her ankles and wrists. It was as if her art was screaming through a gag. It gave me shivers to imagine what she could sound like if the gag were removed. If I were to slip it from between her bruised lips.

The drug must have hit me fast because I suddenly gained this grandiose assurance that I could be the one to unleash Eithne’s full potential, to release whatever block she was struggling against, to break her loose so she could fly. I saw her with a gallery of her own. I saw her in a sleek black dress, open at the back, only the tiny hairs fallen free from her bun tickling the back of her pale neck. I saw her out a place like this, a shite hole like this, a fucking death sentence like this.

The weed burned on my lips, burned in my lungs. I would save Eithne. I had to save Eithne.

Movement at the door caught my eye. The brother leaned against the doorframe. His haggard eyes bright. A grin of yellow teeth. He wasn’t looking at me, but instead what was smouldering between my long fingers.

“Care to share?”

Eithne

The unassembled moving boxes shifted in my hands like kittens. No matter how I arranged them, no matter how tightly I pressed my arm to my side, no matter how firmly I squeezed them from underneath where they cut into my already scraped palm, they just kept squirming.

When I did manage, for just a moment, to get them calm, a stranger inevitably bumped me on the sidewalk, the bus hit a pothole, or a sudden gust of foul wind came upon me like a homeless man begging for change. I was already exhausted from the effort of finding a new place, putting in application after application, getting rejection after rejection. “I’m sorry…given your past rental history…too much of a risk.” Exhausted from schoolwork, or the stress of not being able to do schoolwork. Exhausted from an extra shift at my new gig at The Jar. I was already exhausted from trying to resist Rian in my dreams, resist Rian in my thoughts and in the flutter of my fingers against my clit before I dragged myself out of bed.

I really didn’t need to be even more exhausted from a fucking armful of flattened boxes, but wasn’t that just life?

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