Category: Drama

Paint

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I have a few paintings in my living room. Each one was painted by my mother. She never went to school for art or ever made a dent in the art community, but she made a dent in me. She loved to paint figures in a variety of poses, attempting to express her mood through the figure. If she was anxious, the figure would pick at its skin. If she was joyous, the figure would dance. It was simple, yet beautiful.

She would taste the paints before using them. It didn’t matter if they were acrylic or watercolors or oil, she would touch the pad of her finger to the paint and then against her tongue. She said this would help her determine the mood of the paint. “You don’t want angry paint in a painting about sorrow,” she would say. I felt like she was doing this to tease me but she would even do this when she thought I wasn’t looking. She had to taste it each time in case the paint changed its mood, buried in her cluttered art box.

After working, after cooking dinner, after everything she did for us, all of her spare energy went toward painting. Despite that, she would just start another canvas when she was finished, if she even finished a painting. Never framed them, never hung them up.

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Dragonfly: Rescue

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It had taken some time, but by now, modified versions of Maya’s hand were commonplace. When she lost her hand, almost a good decade ago, her new hand was more of an experiment than a product. She wanted something that could grasp, something that could feel. And that took trial and error. It also took money. Her payment came in the form of working on a dragonfly.

The Dragonfly Project hadn’t reached out to even the far corners of the solar system yet, so Maya was lucky and got to work in a relay floating just past Mars. Within a few years after she’d been assigned, the project sent out relays out as far as Eris. Now her relay directory had listings named after gods she most certainly never heard of.

Her hand was clamped to her work table while its inner workings were carefully placed  across the table’s surface. A spring or two had worn themselves down to useless. 

“Maybe I can get some lighter plates next holiday,” she mumbled as she screwed her pinky back into place with her good hand. The newest model weighed even less than a similar sized human hand. Maya’s, however, felt more like carrying a medicine ball at all times, one armed. 

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Somewhere Only We Knew

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Katie was sitting at the bench in the bus stop close to her house. She checked her phone. No new messages, just the plans from Becca. “Hey, let’s meet at the bus stop after school. 4? It’s close to both of our places so it’s perfect.”

Katie already finished her homework, doing most of it between classes, and finishing up at home before walking to the stop. She didn’t have that far to walk, and Becca’s house was even closer to the bus stop than hers. That was part of the reason why they were going to meet there. 

Katie and Becca were close friends. They’d known each other for years. Becca learned how to bake specifically so she could make treats for Katie. Katie practiced extra hard for soccer so she could impress Becca. Becca even made a bracelet for Katie with a little soccer ball design on the wrist.

Becca was supposed to be there up to half an hour ago so they could go to their secret base. About two months ago Becca found a dried up well in the woods behind her house. When she showed Katie, Katie immediately climbed in it and started to climb down. She remembered reading that you could see the stars in the sky during a sunny day when you were in the bottom of a well.

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