Anna All Red

A short, minimalist story on thawing out emptiness with love and color. Random First Line Generator prompt.

He didn't understand what he'd done to her, but he would by the time she was finished.

It started with a flurry of color -a parrot red splashing against the starched sheet laid on the floor. The fat drops and thin streams made surprisingly thick and satisfying thuds. Small bursts of splatter defied gravity in their birth, jumping back up to nip at her ankles. Her toes made prints.

 

-

 

The studio had been bare in the months before. A year, if she were to be honest. At some point when Spring was still cold, every last drop of creativity had vanished, like a stranger who had never really been there at all. That morning, her fingers usually restless and itchy, hung slow and cold. The sun filled her studio as it did every morning, shining from the East. But that warm light held no spark for Anna. Nothing came to mind, to heart, to hand.

 

She sat on the floor with her back against the wall and drank her dark coffee, waiting for inspiration to return.

 

-

 

It was August when he first saw her, alone in the cafe window. She was looking somewhere -where the table met the wall, and past that, and not at all at the crowded room filled with city-goers exhausted from the heat. He saw she was beautiful. She didn't see him at all. 

He said hello. She told him that she had just sold a painting. Her last one, and could he maybe buy her an iced coffee? 

She saw he was beautiful too.

 

-

 

In December they shed their families and escaped to Toronto after Thanksgiving, both relieved to have passed their first holiday. The hotel was lovely but looking at the king bed and the lake view reminded her that Tom was paying, that she never paid, so they spent most of their time walking in the blistering cold.

 

When they came home she stayed in her studio for four days.

 

She locked the door to the still-empty room when she left.

 

Tom held her as she sobbed her anger into his shoulder. What had happened to her? Why was there nothing, nothing? For years she had painted -endless tubes of colors, countless ruined clothes, palettes an inch thick with ghost shades, image after image from her mind relayed to canvass through her warm, charged, and sure hands. She never worried… that it would stop.

 

She told him that she was a painter, she really was -even though he had never seen it, never seen the lean muscles of her arm move the brush above her head. Even though he had never even seen any evidence to the fact, not one single frame, not one painted flower, not one fine-lined hair. If only she had kept that last painting, then he would know! He would have seen.

 

He told her that he believed her. He told her he loved her.

 

When his arms tightened around her humbled body she rested her head on his chest, turned it, and looked at that door.

 

-

 

He started avoiding her in March. Her grey gloom was oppressive and he needed to breathe. Since Christmas he had suggested writing, dancing, ceramics. Life, anything! She would shake her head and look to the closed door of the studio, and go to bed. She moved like a wraith, slow and dark. She was so tired. She hated living off of her parents. She hated the white canvasses hidden in that room. Tom understood. Tom didn't understand. She was tired and he was gone.

 

Anna realized two weeks later, when she was looking at herself in the mirror, how much she missed him. She had wanted to let him go. Give him back to a world and the arms of a woman who could actually pay once in a while, who could make him smile, who would belly laugh with him instead of giving a faded replay of a chuckle. 

She bought tomatoes and wine and red roses and went to win him back. Her hands felt warm when she knocked on the door.

 

She didn't expect his anger. She had been prepared for hurt, for tears. But his anger was as puzzling as it was unwelcome. She had come to make him a meal, to make him something with her hands. To give something back to him after leaning so heavily for so long. To say sorry. To love him. To love her. But now he was the one holding back. He pushed her away towards the door. 

 

Wine and roses and tomatoes broke between them.

 

They fought, crying and yelling interchangeably.

Nothing makes you happy, he told her.

He hated her sighs, her sad eyes, that studio, her artist’s block. The hell with the block, f**k the block. Why couldn't you let me make you happy wasn't I enough?

 

And she was fighting for him. Her eyes were hot and she loved him and she was sorry and she knew and f**k the block. F**k painting, I don’t need painting, I just need you.

 

They turned and begged and screamed until both were exhausted. Love and pain suffocated the air and neither one knew where to go. They were quiet.

 

At one AM, Anna went home.

 

Tom bent and began to soak up the wine, its darkness staining his fingers.

 

-

 

He didn't understand what he'd done to her, but he would by the time she was finished.

 

He stood in the doorway of that studio, no longer empty, no longer a hold where time didn't move.

The two coffees steamed in his wine-stained hands. He cried as he watched her.

 

She was dancing all red with her eyebrows drawn in concentration. There were buckets everywhere, each one a new and brighter shade of crimson. The whole room was red and Anna was red and there on the floor on a starchy sheet which he recognized from her bed, she was dancing an image of his face into the world.

 

With her hands she painted the warmth of his eyes.

With her knees the curve of his nose arose.

With her whole soul she painted all of him at once.

And she painted

And she painted

And she loved him

And he had brought her back to life.

 

 

And when she was finished and the coffee was cold and she was gasping in awe of what had happened and what she saw in that red, red, lovely face, only then did she look up.

And she saw him, and he saw her. 

And they knew.

Author's Note

This is my first foray into fiction writing in five years or more.

Wondering if the story makes sense in the end - if the weight of using a breakup in a previously unbalanced relationship is enough to re-inspire.
Is the style of speech distracting?