On a Bench

A Story by ZackOfBridge

Leonard can't draw from life

Leonard Baker sat with shade on him and his sketch pad. The decrepit bench he sat on rocked with age. He held the pad with one hand and with the other he scraped at the aqua paint that remained on the weathered bench. To his front was the north quad of his university campus, to his front at a distance was the sunshine and the trees and the people with their back packs and their schedules. He sat on the side of the abandonment, overgrown crab grass, and chipping paint. Leonard sat at the bench to pass time before his life drawing class, the class where he draws nude men and women who carry a sack of drooping fat over their genitals for an hour and a quarter until their time is over. He never has them long enough to get the shading and dimensions just right. The fold of a fat roll has textures and values that can’t be crafted in the interval of a class period.
Leonard looked up from his sketch pad, he was doing a quick sketch of the trees in the quad. He could only do rough, gestural sketches because of the way the leaves submitted to the breeze and never hung still and stunted any growths in cleanliness. The contrast was no good and the branches looked like wooden, twisted arms. He scribbled the trees with his stub of charcoal. He tossed the pad to his side and pinched the stub of charcoal between his fingers like a gritty cigarette. He listened to the little birds chirp to one another, the noise came from behind. As an artist Leonard was expected to be sensitive to merriments like a bird hopping on the damp earth, or a squirrel leading its tail through the grass. Leonard didn’t care much for it, their chirping was a decibel from obnoxious and the squirrel’s made him feel awkward.
A squirrel crawled in the grass, it didn’t mind Leonard and he didn’t mind it so long as it knew they were not friendly with one another. He allowed his gaze to swivel his neck with the trail of the creature. He set his forearm on the backing of the bench. Behind the bench a building in the same style of the others blocked in an area of grass and hedges along the walls. The bench seemed a marker, a wall; paint chipped and peeled beyond the bench. The paint on these pale buildings had faded into the phantom, the withering suggestion of a paint. The other buildings had been renovated, concentrated with desks and projector screens and packed with students. These buildings remained of the schools former state of a psych ward. Beyond the chipping paint and soaked into the foundation crawled the disturbed thoughts and mutilated dreams of the institution. panels of lookout windows, windows without the option to open, set in a rusted red frame and slashed with ebony paint. They abolished the light from prodding into the deserted rooms and the dilapidated halls. The windows black as a wingless fly’s eyes glared over the grassy field that surrounded. Trapped, dying, decaying, trapped like a fly in sticky paper.
A squirrel rummaged through the grass, picking underneath the blades for seeds of sustenance, Leonard watched the squirrel stop and sit upon its back legs in a blotch of sunlight that found way from the separation of branches above. Its arms brought the seed to its face and its teeth nibbled. Leonard thought now would be the time to begin a sketch of the creature, but he knew it would crawl to another sunlit setting before he could get its gesture on a blank sheet. This was the problem of drawing life, life is never still, life is taunted by time.
There was a snap not unlike the snapping of a finger, and the squirrels head burst into a confetti of red mist and fur covered flesh. Leonard’s eye caught a residual splash of blood, and the sting brought him to hide himself behind the back rest of the the bench. The quick motion of retreat brought a splinter into the fat of his arm.
Leonard waited for another snap, for another burst in the air, but there was none and the birds chirped from the hedges along the walls of the building. His surge of panicked curiosity sedated the sensation of flight and he poked his eyes over the chipped backing of the bench. An oval of thick red covered the grass around the body like a coat of spray paint and dripped from the tips of the blades. The creature, headless, sat in hind legged pose, its arms still locked and supplying a seed to a mush of red, its tails twitched in reflex, but gradually slowed and halted like a turbine without a running engine.
“Geesus.” Leonard said, his breath on the bench. He turned to see if there was anyone else in the quad who had seen the performance. The quad, silent besides the whistles of the indifferent birds. The other half, so distant to Leonard now, the side of fresh paint and clear windows had students separating the doors in intervals and those students left the quad and continued their schedules. His veins had settled and the pricks of panic had dulled. The numbers and the needles on his wristwatch read that his drawing class was starting in five minutes. The class where he squinted at hidden genitals and tried to get the composition of man’s scrotum just right until the man needed a snack and a break. In bringing his watch down, the creature still sat upon the grass, frozen in death. Leonards fingers were black with charcoal, his stump of charcoal snapped in half by the locking tension in his fingers. Leonard brought his sketch pad to a sheet of blank white paper and dragged the charcoal.
The time of his life drawing class passed with the recession of the sun to the west. He sat, drawing, perfecting the the marks on the thick paper. The squirrel, dead and patient was the best model he had ever drawn. As the sun set, and the shadows took the day, his drawing was complete. That is, if the head could be dismissed.

© 2014 ZackOfBridge

Author's Note

This is the first part of a horror story I am working on. I may just break it up into two separate stories because I like how this left off. I'm not crazy, but I am insane.

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Reviews

Marie

I kind of like how this ended too. You did an excellent job with the description, though were are istakes you ought to fix. You maintained an excellent picture of this budding artists; his thoughts, hos feelings, his observations.