Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain ©2018 Elder Road Books, Serialized edition ISBN 978-1-939275-83-7
Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain
43
Flight
THERE WERE LOGISTICS that needed to be handled at the airport. Warning signs were posted indicating that the wing we were working in may include nude models working on the new mural. There was a red rope pulled across the entrance to our hall and down the left side so people were guided into the performance area but couldn’t come into the area where we were painting or modeling. Char had the primary responsibility of monitoring the entrance so she could warn parents with their children in tow about what was happening. Jas monitored the other end of the hall. Both girls had buckets for donations.
Rania ran errands, spelled other workers, and brought us food and drink. She was also the number one escort of our nude model when she took breaks, though she was often accompanied by one or more of the other girls. Ariel played music whenever anyone was painting and it filled the hall. Her mother, father, and little brother all came out to see the project on Saturday. I’d only met her father a few times. He was devoted to his family from a financial and support perspective but I found him rather aloof unless he was talking to people he considered his peers. The children weren’t. The Dragon Lady, on the other hand, managed to get under the rope and investigate what we were painting as closely as she had investigated the various art I’d painted on Ariel.
“When will you paint my daughter again?” she demanded.
“Um… not sure. I think I’ll do a painting of her with her girlfriend this summer.” Having just been introduced to Rania, Dragon Lady glanced over to the two of them. Eva stepped down off the platform and Rania rushed over to give her a robe and escort her to the restroom.
“Paint them as a fierce Chinese dragon. I can see it in them and want to see it in person.”
Sarah Lynn and Kelly were operating cameras. We were collecting a terabyte per day of images. Kelly was going to edit the whole thing into a PG-13 acceptable DVD and offer it for sale at the airport counter.
On day one, Mary worked on more background detail while I sprayed the outline of Eva in the positions she would take as I painted her. The shadow painting on the wall would show her rising from a rendition of her Earthbound drawing at the right, running toward the left, and leaping into the sky. In some ways, it would look like those pictures that show multiple frames of a person in motion by using stop action photography. I think it’s called a Marey-wheel. We had a series of steps we could move in to give her height in the various stages.
The worst part on Friday was the fact that Eva really looked a mess. I was using colors that were tones of the background as it changed. So, in the first outline, she was nearly all green. In the last one she was all sky blue. We had to pause for fifteen minutes between each pair of poses to let the paint dry, both on the wall and on Eva. As I had done with Rania when I sprayed Liberty and Death, Eva wore goggles and a breathing mask for all the spray work.
“I’M SUCH A MESS!” she said when she finally got a look in the mirror. We knocked off at dinner time and went home after picking up food at a Taco Delight I was glad that with Eva, Rania, and me we had three cars since there were now nine of us to be transported.
“Jett, is all this necessary to keep?” Char asked. She held Eva and stroked the line where her wig had shielded her hair from the spray.
“No. I will probably have to blank her all out tomorrow with a fresh coat of white and start painting from that,” I sighed. The splotchy, multicolored spray job was an unintended side-effect. I should have used water paint for this.
“That’s not fair,” Mary said. “You don’t really want her all sprayed white. Her natural flesh should show through. Let’s remove all this from her tonight. Do you mind, Eva?”
“Mind? Oh, hell, no. But it sounds like so much work. I volunteered to wear the paint all weekend.”
“But this isn’t really part of the paint I want you wearing,” I said. I liked Mary’s idea. “Let us take care of it, if you’re okay with all of us touching you.”
Before long, we had Eva stretched out on the floor and were working through the process of oiling and wiping her body and then using alcohol to clean up the remnants. With eight pair of hands on her—even Rania participated in this—the work went more quickly and there was a little touching that wasn’t strictly necessary to get something clean. Eva was writhing on the towels we’d spread out by the time we were finished.
“Come with me, my little substrate,” I whispered in her ear. “Now I want to bathe your beautiful body and enjoy it in the shower.” Eva shuddered and followed me to the shower.
I scrubbed the oil from her body with Dawn dish detergent and then a gentle cleanser in my tiny shower. It kept us pressed together as I worked. When Eva started to wash me, I pushed her hands away.
“Don’t get in the way. I need to fully prepare my canvas for tomorrow’s painting. People just don’t realize how much work it is to prepare a surface like this. It’s not enough for it to be clean. It needs to be stimulated so it is receptive. And I need to be completely familiar with what I am going to paint. I need to touch it—all of it. I need to see how it responds.” As I continued to whisper all about how she was simply my canvas and I needed to prepare her, I touched her all over. I rubbed and lightly pinched her nipples until they were solid peaks on her breasts. I kissed her. I probed her depths. And finally…, “I need to see now if she is truly as receptive as I want her to be,” I said as I bent her forward and slid my cock into her wet pussy. For the past two hours, Eva’s body had been handled and stimulated to the point of climax repeatedly. When I pushed my cock into her, she went off like a skyrocket. The screaming went on so long as I plundered her pussy that Sarah Lynn opened the bathroom door to make sure we were all right. I just kept fucking and Eva kept coming.
Eventually, so did I.
SARAH LYNN, Jas, and Mary rode with me in the morning. Eva had succumbed to the attention of all my girlfriends after our shower last night and it was a miracle any of us were out of bed in time to get to the airport in the morning. But Eva rose this morning simply glowing. We were all excited about the work we’d be doing today.
“Can I ask… Well, I guess I am asking,” Mary said. “With Ariel moving in with Rania, does that mean there might be room for one more in your house?”
I looked over at Mary, riding shotgun, and grinned. In the mirror, I could see Sarah Lynn and Jasmine with smiles splitting their pretty faces.
“So many things to consider,” Jas sighed.
“Yes. I suppose we should try to fill the empty space in our nest,” Sarah Lynn added. “But where would we ever find someone compatible with our mostly naked, free-loving community?”
“Someone who’s beautiful and fun and loving…” Jas said.
“And willing,” I concluded. “Willing to be loved and to love. Willing to contribute. Willing to cook on occasion.”
“Willing to be fucked by four horny girls and our boyfriend on a regular basis.”
“Willing to sit on my face while Jett pounds me.”
“Willing to paint pictures of us.”
“Where will we ever find a roommate that meets all those requirements? We’re so hard to live with.”
I glanced over at Mary and she was trying to keep from grinning as she raised a hand and wiggled her fingers.
“Yes, Mary?”
“Me?”
“We love you, Mary. Will you come live with us this year?”
“How soon can I move in?”
ONE OF THE THINGS about taking two semesters of Literature and the Arts with Merck, Foundations of Contemporary Art, and Current Directions in Art, was that I looked at a lot of art. From the earliest times, art has shown mythical creatures. When we studied the Egyptians of Akhenaten, we saw various paintings of part human, part animal gods. The Greeks were constantly turning men or women into animals. Like Artemis changing Actaeon into a deer. And their own combined beasts like the sphinx and centaurs. I’d painted a monster emerging from Char. Char had a little shrine to elephant-headed Ganesha. Michelangelo painted angels on the Sistine Chapel. And angels continued to populate both religious and secular art well into the 1700s. And even then, we took an eagle as our national symbol. Harry Potter’s house was symbolized by a Griffin. Hagrid had all manner of mythical beasts in his menagerie.
With Eva, I was creating my own mythical creature. She wasn’t a bird, but a colorful and fully feathered angel.
In preparing for this, I’d studied birds and how their feathers laid on different parts of their bodies. I learned which feathers were for protection and which were for flight. I’d looked at every rendition of an angel with wings to see how the artists portrayed the feathers on the wings of cherubs and seraphim. It would take me the better part of two days to feather Eva.
And both for the performance and my own entertainment, I wanted Eva naked all the time. As an excuse, I started by painting her tail feathers.
I’d gotten pretty good with my airbrush over the past few months of experimenting on my girlfriends and models. I laid in a mottled brown from her mid-back down, even spreading her cheeks a bit so I could spray into her crack and right around her little hole. She moaned when I sort of accidentally pressed against it with my knuckle to hold my hand steady while I sprayed. Then I switched nozzles on the airbrush for finer detail of the shadow and highlights of the individual feathers. Finally, I used a fine brush to define edges and make the feathers pop into three dimensions.
As I worked, we also took frequent breaks so we could walk around and keep our blood circulating. I was using a small platform for Eva to stand on while I painted her lower body and would eventually stand on it myself when I needed to be a little higher than her for the shoulders and face. When we were on break, she always put a robe on, but when she was posing, she was naked whether the part I was painting required it or not.
I noticed a guy who flew in early in the afternoon hanging around with a cup of coffee. Eva noticed, too, and ran to meet him as soon as I’d draped her robe over her shoulders for a break.
“Steve! You flew in for the festival!” she shouted as she hugged him across the rope barrier. I couldn’t help but notice that she hadn’t belted her robe together.
“No, I flew in to see the artwork taking shape. God! You’re even more beautiful than last summer, girl.”
“Being a model and a… uh… substrate has given me motivation to stay in shape.”
“A great shape from what I can see. And I see most of it.”
“Steve, I want you to meet Jett,” she said calling me over to her. “Jett is my ma… artist. He tells me what I need to do to make beautiful art. Jett, this is my dear friend, Steve. He was my first flying instructor. You know what they say. You never forget your first.”
Rania looked over Eva’s shoulder at me and cocked an eyebrow. I’d caught both references as well.
“SO,” I WHISPERED as I worked my way up Eva’s back later in the day, “your first?”
“Um… Well… um…”
“Listen to me, my little substrate,” I said as close to her ear as I could get. I casually touched her breast as I turned her so her back was fully to the viewing area. “You are a free bird. You needn’t be worried about any relationship you have. If you come home with me tonight, I am going to eat you to orgasm and fuck you to another. I’m not painting your pussy lips today. But if you choose to spend the night elsewhere, I’m still not painting your pussy lips today.”
“Jett… I love you. Thank you.”
“Now, little substrate, I am going to give you wings.”
And that was what I spent the last part of the day painting.
AS IT HAPPENED, it was never an issue. I didn’t see Steve around when we finished the day but Eva never hesitated about gathering up her things and bringing them home with us. She’d spoken with her old lover at every break. I was sure they’d worked something out.
“You chose to come home with us,” I said as we finished dinner. Eva had spent a good bit of time using a hand mirror to look over her shoulder into the hall mirror as she examined the golden wings, mottled brown tail feathers, and tan feathering over her butt and legs.
“How could I resist my artist offering his substrate such pleasure?” she whispered to me. “But… um… tomorrow night, I might go flying.”
“For now, why don’t you come to my nest and let me ruffle your feathers?”
I PAINTED soft downy feathers that faded to her skin at about mid-thigh. I brushed the softness of her mound and pussy lips in such a way that they nearly disappeared. I completed the plumage on her arms from the flight feathers on the back to the pinion feathers of the front. Then I proceeded to the brilliant red plumage of her chest and stomach. This plumage pressed up the sides of her breasts a bit, but not up as far as her nipples that I left bare and exposed.
Under her chin, the feathers subtly blended to her own skin tone and disappeared. Finally, I began the process of sculpting her face. I was not turning her into a bird. Eva has good bone structure in her face that only needed accenting a bit to bring out the strength and beauty of the angel I was creating. When the paint and makeup were applied, Kelly helped me put on the new blonde wig and style it in a heavenly manner.
Quite a crowd had gathered for the finale of our performance. An announcement had been made throughout the terminal and outside by the hangars. The recreational pilots all came in to watch Eva’s transformation completed. I led her once again to the little platform we’d used for much of the painting and people applauded as I turned her in a pivot on the stand.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to the conclusion of our performance. This is flight!”
I led Eva to the background and she took her position lying at the right edge. She held each pose for about thirty to forty-five seconds and then moved to the next of the stations we’d outlined on the wall. Each time she moved, it looked like she’d left her shadow behind. We had the different height platforms moved into position and she seemed to take off into the sky by the time she hit the last one, balancing on one foot as the other stretched out behind and her winged arms stretched forward. We held that position for longer as Kelly moved in with the DSLR and photographed the concluding scene of Flight.
The applause was as thunderous as a hundred people in an enclosed space could make it. I led Eva again to the small platform in the center and had her pirouette and bow. Ariel approached from the side and received her round of applause. All my girlfriends and Rania gathered around us.
Jefferson Wright, the airport facilities manager, joined us to shake our hands and make an announcement.
“The performance this weekend of this artistic crew and our own young pilot, Eva Rice, has helped make this year’s fly-in festival one of the most successful we’ve ever had. Over a thousand people in six hundred eighty aircraft flew in this weekend. Another five hundred visited from the ground to watch the planes and the art. We are happy to give this angel Eva a certificate for ten hours of flying time and instruction for her participation this weekend.”
That got a good round of applause. Eva was beaming.
“Jett Blackburn and his crew volunteered to do this painting and performance for just tips. I want to tell you he and members of his team have been out here every weekend for a month preparing the wall, painting much of the background, helping us with promotion, graphics, and general inspiration. I hope you have all been generous in placing tips in the canisters at the entrances. The Airport Association has decided to also tip Jett and his crew with this check for five hundred dollars. The mural behind us will stand as a major part of the character and charm of our airport for years to come.”
I was pretty blown away to receive the extra contribution.
“Would you like to fly, Angel Eva?” Steve asked as the rope came down and people began to mill about to get a closer look at the art on the wall and, surreptitiously at Eva’s feathers.
“May I be excused, sir?” she turned to ask me. The rest of us were getting our supplies put away and things cleaned up. I guessed the remaining eight of us could make it in two cars.
“Yes, my substrate,” I said as I petted the feathers on her butt. “But you’ll probably want to put some clothes on—for at least a while. These feathers look good on you, but they won’t keep you warm.”
“Thank you, Jett. I love you,” she said. She gave me a deep kiss and grabbed her robe to head to the bathroom and change. “See you guys later in the week!”
“I THINK YOUR LITTLE BIRD has flown,” Sarah Lynn said as she took my left hand to walk to the car.
“Like the swallows to Capistrano, she’ll return,” Mary said. “Not forever and not all the time, but she’s got two more years of school left now that she’s been accepted on the BFA program. She’s got wings but she knows she can fly both directions.”
“And we have a new roommate!” Jas said as she pushed Mary into the tiny back seat of the Mini with her. The two girls clasped each other in a passionate kiss.
I LOOKED AT MY BANK BALANCE and no matter how hard I worked, it was always getting smaller. I looked at my work from the past year and only saw three or four potential pieces that I could sell. Of course, we had the videos of each performance piece, but they weren’t getting a lot of hits on our YouTube station. We didn’t have as many subscriptions for that as we had hits on Baroque Porn. We’d made thirteen hundred on tips from Flight, but after Char deducted materials cost, we put the remaining seven-fifty directly into the household account since everyone contributed.
Our landlord tried to raise the rent on the house when we went to renew our lease because it was a much nicer place to live now than it had been when we rented it. Char was prepared and showed the before and after possession pictures of the property and the condition it was in when we started. She then pulled out a copy of our lease that said the property must be left in the same condition in which it was acquired.
“We will be happy to restore this property to the condition it was in when we took possession last summer,” she said primly. “If we do not have a lease at the same rate as this one, we will do exactly that.”
The agent we’d talked to last year smiled.
“I told him he’d lose money if he tried this. He might have gotten away with a cost-of-living increase that matched other rents in the area but he had to get greedy. I prepared the alternative lease already. This one is identical to the one you signed last spring.”
Char read it anyway, comparing it line by line to the previous lease. Once she was satisfied, we signed it. We were on the hook for another twelve months.
AS THE ANNIVERSARY of Lonnie’s death approached, I couldn’t see any appreciable change in the world. The five, six, seven, or eight of us who had made this extended family had found a way to insulate ourselves a little, creating our own little bubble. No charges had been brought against the police for shooting Lonnie. Two officers, a supervisor, and a medical tech were dismissed from their jobs for attempting a sloppy cover-up. I guess if it hadn’t been sloppy, they wouldn’t have been caught.
It was like Derek and Dee’s little blanket fort in the basement. They’d sent out pictures of the two of them with their little baby, still in that blanket fort. In her parents’ basement. Where they lived. And probably would for the next ten years.
I’d voted in the last election because I was eighteen and I wasn’t going to let some idiot get in office just because I didn’t vote. But the world seemed to be stuck in a time loop somewhere between stupid and insane. What did I know? I guessed I’d just ignore it for another year if I could. I’d hold the ones I loved close at night and pray they came home each day.
I had only three more courses left for my meat cutting certification. College classes were out a month before high school, so I got in for the first summer term. If I started working full time at the grocery as a newly certified meat cutter, I could start at about twelve dollars an hour—better than minimum wage, at least. That was about $25,000 a year but I’d have to cut back on my class schedule. I thought I’d net about twenty after tax and social security. Maybe a little less. Well, I could make it half time this year as long as no emergencies came up. A thousand a month would cover expenses and a little of my tuition. I don’t know what I’d have done if I’d ended up continuing to support Char last fall.
The world was a crappy place and I wasn’t a great help. If Lonnie was alive today, I figured he’d still kill himself. I just hoped that somehow maybe my art could contribute to making it better. It didn’t seem I had much to show for it right now.
But Jas, Sarah Lynn, and Kelly promised a party to remember this weekend to celebrate a year together. With the amount of weed and alcohol they’ve managed to put in, I’m guessing it will be a party we won’t be able to remember. Right now, they’ve suggested I refresh my memory of their pussies. Time to party.
Until Next Semester
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
