Cutouts
“And now I’ll take it off,” she said in faux-dramatics, grinned and removed her yoga pants. She planted one foot on a chair, threw back her head and pointed to the far wall so that her finger made a straight line to her shoulder. Charcoal, pencils, markers, paintbrushes, pens scratched to life.
The model had her back to him. Her thighs crossed at the calves and he couldn’t escape noticing the darkest shadow was, in fact, directly over her butthole. He waited. Thought. He wasn’t sure what to draw. Her face was hidden by her hair. Her shoulders were as smooth as a car windshield. For some reason her arm wasn’t speaking to him.
He had 20 minutes here.
So he drew a duck. He drew it paddling in the bottom left corner and his entire page sprung to life as a marsh. He drew a willow tree. The branches scratched the water’s surface and hid the duck’s back half. He added three ducklings trailing their mom. On shore he sat a labrador, head cocked in puppy curiosity. He added two cypress trees, a couple eyes peering from the branches, and a rose hedge running into the page, into the night — he sketched the milky echoes of a moon and Andromeda. Over the knoll, coming out of the page, approached a man holding a girl’s hand — father-daughter. Their labrador had run ahead to scout.
He winced. Shook his head.
In the bottom right, opposite the ducklings, he added a water moccasin. It lay curled in the reeds. But he made the head looking away, off the page, not toward the developing scene at the water’s edge.
Later he asked the model about her tattoo and she said she missed Baton Rouge.
