Art Something
1
First Words
THAT’S ME. ART. People point at me and say, “That’s Art Something.” Nobody knows my last name, I guess. Nobody cares.
But Art is the important part. Art is my name. Art is my life.
“Art! You have to get ready for school! Come on, honey. The bus will be here in ten minutes.”
“In a minute. I’m almost done.”
It was a normal exchange between my mother and me. Almost every morning. It’s been that way for years. When I wake up in the morning, I have to get out my sketchbook and draw. I often go straight to the easel in the corner and paint, but then it’s hard to get to school. I used colored pencils to capture my latest dream. Lately, I’d been using a lot of red and my pencil was just a stub. I needed to go to the art supply store this weekend.
I paint dreamscapes.
“Hey, Pen. We’ve really got to go. I’ll drive. Mom’s got food for you that you can eat in the car,” my sister said over my shoulder. I sighed and laid my supplies down. I wasn’t allowed to take art supplies to school. All I’d do all day is draw and for some reason the teachers didn’t like that. We’d had some serious negotiations when I was a freshman.
“Thanks, Fay,” I said. “Sorry I’m such a pain.”
“Not to me. Don’t worry, we’ll get to class on time.”
Fay had only had a car for a few days—since her eighteenth birthday. I got a new easel. Not for my eighteenth. For my seventeenth. I was exactly a year younger than my sweet sister. We went downstairs and I took the sack breakfast from Mom and dutifully kissed her on the cheek. I opened the bag in the car and wolfed down the scrambled egg sandwich with crisp bacon. She’d packed a thermos cup of spicy vegetable juice cocktail. My favorite.
“What are you going to do when I go to college next year?” Fay asked.
“Flunk out.”
“Pen, you can’t just give up. You need to keep your grades up so you can go to school. It will be better in college, I promise.”
Oh. My nickname. Only my sister uses it and I’m the only one who calls her Fay. That’s only when it’s just the two of us. Arthur and Morgan. Pendragon and le Fay. Our dad teaches English literature at the University. He sneaked the names in on Mom without telling her where they came from.
“It’s getting worse, Fay,” I whispered.
“I’m here for you, Pen. I’ll always be here for you.”
You see, art—painting dreamscapes—isn’t about making pretty pictures for me. It’s about staying sane.
I have very vivid dreams. But I’ve never been able to describe one. My language skills aren’t the greatest. I didn’t talk at all until I was four. And I’m not that brilliant kid who started talking in whole sentences out of the encyclopedia when I did start to talk. It was the normal gaga dada kind of talk that most kids start with. Gaga, for me, was the best imitation I could do of ‘Morgan’. I said it the day we left her at her first day of kindergarten.
I screamed it most of the day.
I couldn’t tell my mother and father what was wrong, but I sat for hours with crayons and paper trying to express the heart-rending loneliness I felt when my sister left for school.
The good part was that crayons and paper settled me down. I got used to Morgan leaving me and going to school each day. And each afternoon when Morgan returned, she brought me treasures.
“Look what I did today, Arder. I made letters. Soon I be able to read books!” We both liked books and being read to. The idea that my sister would be able to read the mysterious things to me was exciting enough to forgive her absence during the day. As soon as she’d shown me her letters, I pulled out my crayon scribbles. She looked at them like they were serious art. “Oh, Arder. You were scared I wouldn’t come back,” she said as she ran a finger over a particularly angry purple line. “Don’t worry, Arder. I won’t ever leave you. But I have to go to school. Next year, Arder go to school. We’ll always come home together.”
And we have.
But that was when the dreams started, too. And like every other time in my life, when I needed her, Morgan was there. When I woke up crying, it was Morgan who was first in my room to crawl in bed with me and comfort me.
“Arder had a bad dream,” Morgan said to our mother and father. “I help.”
“You can tell us about it in the morning, son,” Dad said. “Both of you go to sleep now.”
I asked Morgan if I should call this next part a caveat and she said it sounded more like a disclaimer. So, I’ll go with that.
- 1. I’m not mentally challenged. I get good grades in school. I know stuff. I know words, but I have a hard time saying things.
- 2. Dreamscapes are not the same as fantasy art. Sometimes I don’t recognize anything in them. There are no dragons or bare-breasted damsels in distress in them. I’d like there to be bare-breasted damsels. I’m seventeen.
- 3. I don’t always have nightmares. Sometimes the dreams are funny or happy or sexy. The first time I woke up covered in my own semen, I just had to go paint right away. There still weren’t any bare-breasted damsels.
- 4. This isn’t a high fantasy story. Neither my art nor my dreams are a gateway into some alternate reality. I don’t foretell the future. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing special about my dreams at all. Which seems to be the only problem: I can’t tell them. Words just don’t form around my dreams. All I can do is paint them and because they don’t have words, they are just that much more intense.
- 5. My sister doesn’t sleep with me every night. But she always seems to know when I need her and will hold me until I settle down.
End disclaimer. Unless I think of something else later on.
When I told Fay the dreams were getting worse, I didn’t mean the dreams were all bad. Dammit! It’s the words. I meant that I couldn’t control them and they were getting more intense. If I didn’t get to a place where I could draw or paint as soon as I woke up, I couldn’t think all day long. That night, the dream would be back twice as intense as it was the night before.
The drawings—and paintings—were getting more and more complex. They were taking longer for me to put in details. When I was little, all I could do was throw color and scribbles at the page. Gradually, actual images had taken shape, and then people. My teachers said I had artistic talent and needed to develop it. But it was so painful. I think that for a good night’s dreamless sleep, I’d gladly give up being an artist.
That night, I struggled against a bleak nightmare, begging for it to be something better. It improved. It was beautiful. I bathed in its images of joy and pleasure and knew that when I woke up, I would paint the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I was in heaven.
Until I woke up.
Fay moaned beside me. I clutched at her warmth and softness, joining her moan in my moment of ecstasy. Her eyes flicked open and stared into mine. Deep blue, like my own. Like my father’s. Like my mother’s. Shivers were running through my body.
“You know, Pen, this is why I don’t sleep with you as often as I used to. I just couldn’t stand the way you were struggling last night. And look at the mess you made. You’d better clean up quick before you paint.” She kissed my nose. “And don’t worry, Pen. I’m still here for you.” I dropped my eyes. It had happened twice before when Fay was in bed with me. Just as I awoke with that glorious feeling, I sprayed semen all over the two of us. I tucked my cock back through the fly in my pajamas and rushed to the bathroom.
I pulled my shirt off and started on the bottoms when I realized I hadn’t brought any clean underwear in with me and ran back to my bedroom. I just walked in to go to the bureau when Fay’s moan brought me up short. I looked and saw her arch her back as her hand moved rapidly in her shorts. She whined out loud and then dropped back onto the mattress. I was stunned. She was so beautiful. Her eyes flicked open and she saw me.
“What?” she asked. “I have dreams, too, you know.” I grabbed my underwear and ran back to the shower. When I returned my room, she was gone.
I went immediately to my easel and started preparing a palette.
If I only painted one picture a week, that would be fifty-two paintings a year. One on each Saturday and another on Sunday and you have 104 more. Add in the days of summer when there was no school to rush off to and I’d be up to 200. Vacations, holidays, sick days—well over 250 paintings a year. My family wasn’t poor, but we didn’t have that kind of money, or enough storage room for hundreds of oil paintings. And the truth was I created a painting or two a day, plus drawings and sketches. Five or six hundred a year.
That’s why I still used finger paints and paper.
I’d progressed from my childhood. There were times I still painted with my fingers because I liked the texture and personal contact. But after filling page after page of those paintings, I’d gradually moved to tempera poster paints and sturdier paper. Now I painted with casein tempera and gouache. It was water-based, cleaned up easily, used a heavy paper substrate, and had good color density. My teacher at school wanted me to use acrylics, and I was still learning the application and control. We were given all sorts of subjects to paint in art class, but painting something from life was more difficult than painting from my dreams. Still, it was getting better.
I set about painting the dreamscape I’d just emerged from.
“I know. I know. I love you, too, Pen,” Fay said as she hugged me from behind. “This is really intense. I don’t think you should show it to Mom and Dad.”
I looked at the sheet of Bristol in front of me and nodded. It was the most real of any dreamscape I’d painted. She lay back with a look of ecstasy on her face, her breasts lifted to the heavens. There was a decided lack of detail where her hand was between her legs, but I’d never really seen any of that, so I didn’t know what it looked like. There were splashes of color all around the area as if fireworks were going off.
“Did you dream this? Or is this what you saw when you came into the room?”
“Um… what I saw influenced it, but it was what I was dreaming about. About a girl I was pleasuring,” I said. “It looks too much like you, doesn’t it?”
“Well, my face is certainly recognizable. Um… I don’t actually look like the rest of it. I mean, it’s pretty. I love it. But it’s not me,” she said.
“I just imagine things,” I sighed. “When a dream like that catches up with me, I just can’t quite capture it. It’s better than what the dream started out as.” Fay looked a question at me and I pointed to where I’d clipped another painting on a line to dry. Fay went to look at it.
“Wow!” Fay breathed. She threw her head back to squint at it over her shoulder. “I’m glad I came to hold you. It was eating you. Your soul. Is this what you mean by getting worse?”
“Um… not exactly. Yes—the intensity and depth—but this is just as scary,” I said pointing at the image of my sister in her orgasm. “When you say ‘eating my soul,’ you’re right. Even the good dreams devour me.”
“I’ll be here, Pen. If you need me, I’ll be here.”
“You always seem to know when they are bad,” I whispered.
“Yeah. I’m your psychic sister,” she laughed. “You’ll be all right tonight, won’t you? I’m going out.”
“Big date?”
“Yeah, right. A bunch of us are going to see a movie. One guys would never be caught dead at.”
“Fay?” I asked. “Have you ever been on a date?”
“Sure. We go out all the time. A bunch of us hang out together. But the guys won’t want to see this movie.”
“I mean a date, Fay. Like you and a guy?” She looked at me and shifted around a little.
“Well, once Bert met me at the theater and no one else showed up. Turned out that he told me the wrong time and everyone else was coming to the second show. We sat together in the theater and he tried to hold my hand.”
“Tried?”
“I handed him the popcorn and left.”
“Do you want me to come with you to the movie tonight?”
“No!” Fay’s eyes popped wide open. “Trust me, Pen. If you went to this movie, all the girls would think you were gay. I don’t want them to write you off.”
“I don’t mind.”
“What? Why?”
“I’ve never been on a date, either. Girls… They interest me… generally. I’m curious. I want to know… what it’s like, you know? But I can’t put a face to any of the feelings. That part of them doesn’t interest me,” I explained. Poorly.
“Um… If you go with us, you have to sit between two of the other girls,” she said. I cocked my head to the side. Huh? “And you have to make a pass at one of them. Or both of them. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find out what some of it’s like.” She giggled. Well, if she said so. I pulled out the hair dryer and blew warm air across my painting so I could box it without showing Mom and Dad. The dark image on the line would suffice for their review.
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