Oran Warner
August, 2022
Oran chewed his nails, aiming for productivity, though he was too busy glancing through his bangs to get much done. He’d managed to tune out the paint, pens, and pencils scratching melodically – save for one.
He watched her hands rip holes in reality, each page a glimpse into another world.
He knew he shouldn’t have, but he couldn’t help himself.
Salty seas mirrored projections of brilliant, sunkissed skies. Water spilled over the edge of tropical falls; smiling faces swirling within bright blues flowing down into crystal pools below.
Each page dropped deeper into an alternate dimension – every sketch, painting, and drawing another peek through the portal.
He’d thumbed through the sketchbook, skipping to the bright red edge of a page that’d popped against the messy, cooler tones of the surrounding pages.
And that’s where it was.
“Can you pass me the eraser, please?”
Oran blinked, yanked from that stolen moment inside someone else’s head. The blonde all-American-looking dude to his right – Austen, he thought – looked at him expectantly.
“Uh,” he muttered smartly.
“Next to your elbow,” Lavender muttered. Today she was sporting jean shorts and a light green 70’s-esque graphic tee, hair held by a patterned bandanna.
“Right,” His ears turned red as he passed over the eraser. “Here.”
The quiet scratching settled back over them. Oran’s nerves didn’t fade with the noise as he started sketching. Moments passed, and soon he had a solid enough sketch to eye the grayscale palette of pastels lying gloomily at the other end of the table.
Oran absentmindedly added and erased details, clearing his throat, trying to loosen the lump that’d settled there. Wiping away eraser shavings, he glanced at the pastels, half-assedly attempting to blend.
The dry sound of cardboard sliding across the table suddenly overtook the silence. “Here.”
He glanced up. There, within his reach, were the pastels. Lavender retracted her arm, the Copic marker, with which she shoved the pallet forward, in her hand.
He glanced from her to the pallet. “Thank you.”
She hummed, the closest thing to a response he was going to get.
He reached for the pallets, accidentally knocking over an empty stool. It crashed to the floor with a metallic ‘bang’.
Lavender Andreas
Mid March, 2017
The alarm clock at her bedside shouted in bright red numbers: 2:58am.
She ignored it.
Ripping another piece of duct tape, she folded and pressed it onto the back of another sketch. Then, Lavender shoved it onto the wall above her bed.
She slipped off her strewn sheets, stepping as far back as her paper-covered floors would allow, watching the hastily taped mass of pages she’d torn from her sketchbook transform into a single picture.
Well, as single a picture as a map of the mind can get.
There it was: the place. The place she used to escape.
There was her safe place, spread out across her wall.
“There,” she laughed, aware and uncaring of welling tears. “There it is, Lavender.”
The waterfall of faces, vines flowing down the rocks around the misty spray. The crystal-clear pool at the bottom, filled with the slightly distorted outlines of ruby-red betta fish.
The pillars of cliffs jutted through the clouds, dense jungle vegetation hanging from steep ledges, the silhouettes of birds circling their respective rocky outposts.
The cave. The dark, foreboding hole in the rock pile: devoid of life, colour, soul. The cave, cliché, yet the perfect place for secrets to get lost, buried within the channels and caverns of underground systems, hidden by everything piled above.
“There.” She wrapped her arms around herself, fingernails digging into her shoulders, chest heaving as tears dripped onto the carpet. She stared at her painting of the beached whale, returned to the sea. “There you are.”
