Drawing — Series

Elias shook his head. "I don't know. I was hoping you'd help me open it."

The series ended on Day 63. Not because he ran out of things to draw, but because he drew something he could not explain. He was in the living room, trying to capture the silence. He drew the ticking of the grandfather clock. He drew the creak of the house settling. He drew the sound of his own breathing. drawing series

"Professor Voss?" said a girl named Lena, his most talented student. "We haven't seen you in two weeks." Elias shook his head

He took a new sheet of paper. He picked up his charcoal. And he began to draw her. Not the absence of her, not the memory of her, but her. Right now. Standing in his studio, a little tired, a little wary, but there. The light from the desk lamp caught the silver in her hair and the soft, uncertain smile on her lips. Not because he ran out of things to

The next day, he drew his own hands resting on the kitchen table. They looked older than he remembered. The knuckles were thick, the veins like river deltas. He drew them with a desperate accuracy, and in the space between the fingers, he saw the ghost of her hand, the one that used to lace through his.

It was not the front door, or the back door, or any door in the house. It was a narrow, arched door, like something from an old church or a storybook. It stood in the middle of the living room wall, between the bookshelf and the window. The perspective was perfect. The light falling on it was the same afternoon light that fell on the rest of the room. It looked utterly real.

He had drawn more than the pillow. He had drawn the air above it. And in that air, rendered in a whisper of graphite dust and erased highlights, was the suggestion of a face. Not Mira's face as it was now, but as it had been twenty years ago, laughing at something he'd said, her eyes full of a future they both believed in.