FadeOut
three of them sleeping in the guest bed. In the morning they left, and their names had not come up again. I try to remember if I ever knew the name of that boy. I never found the courage to speak to him directly. Instead, we took turns picking up and staring at the different colors of crayons that had been scattered across the floor. My back grew stiff against the cabinets and the ice in my glass melted, thinning my drink out of sight. I watched him as he colored-his two wrists clamped together, holding the paper down with his knees. In the right light, I could see a thin layer of hair lapping against the scarred edges. The way his arms tapered off made it look like he was slowly being erased. I tried not to look at the melted ends of skin. Maybe it's his eyes, like little fingernails, that are floating up in memory. I feel like I saw the same look last night from that nude model, Deborah. I wonder what it takes to be an art model-if this is one of the few jobs everyone in the world is born into with the proper requirements. Maybe they save those models with the twisted, deformed bodies for the advanced classes-when you have learned that nature does not play by the rules of proportion and perspective. Deborah looked like she spent all of her modeling proceeds on hair dye and cigarettes, but something in the way she stared out into the room made me think back to that night on the kitchen floor. The half-moon eyes (hers had a mirrored reflection of semi-circle bags), that look of soured innocence. Looking down at my sketch last night, I realized that my drawing was simply a collection of Deborah's flaws. Her mole, the dark shadows under her eyes, the black triangle of hair that gave me a sick feeling of hungered arousal. These were the only things I was recording. The whiteness of the page was the desired form. Her body emerged from between the shadows-everything that I couldn't capture. Kate has cried almost every night since we found out. She twists about in the sheets like she's drowning. She was the one who suggested abortion, but I pushed her into it by refusing all the other options. Regardless, I've been scared to death by the signs of it happening. I've seen her body change. I look at her skin when she gets in and out of bed, and imagine the soft folds of cells dividing. Last night I dreamt about Deborah. Kate and I slept without touching. Regardless, she said, I still want to sleep on my back; I don't want to crush it. I ended up scrapping my light-painting project. It wasn't going to amount to much anyway. The whole method is a gimmick, trick photography. In my photos, I kept finding that little traces of light were getting in. Either I would accidentally shine the light on myself while setting up the shot, or a street light would suddenly flicker on in the background. Even in the dead of night, my frame was filled with tiny spots of light. Kate liked the photos. She said the light reminded her of fairies. I told her that fairies would never make the cover of a photo journal.} was ready to dump the whole thing, but Winter路 Spring 2008
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