The Pestle

by Erwin Monk

Her career spanned a moment of 18 years. She had begun, at first, a child prodigy. A young girl stained by the streets of Brooklyn's disease. She had been discovered they say, in an alleyway, painting on the back of cardboard boxes nailed to the side of a building.

Her early pieces were donned with the term "haunting pastoral images on a torturing verge". She, in those early years, had called it escape. Later as her career drove higher, she had gained more control of her colors, which had challenged to break free of her earlier works. While the critics saw them as more constrained, there was a longing to them. One wrote, "A look backwards into a dream that allowed the viewer to hover between the nether and the near." She would explain it as an absence of disease, and the longing for return.

The latter years had left her jaded. The critics were kind to her works. Her aggression used up, the moment of escape already captured on an easel frame. Her final painting was subsequent time entering color. "Faded pasts melding into faded future." She, on the other hand, claimed simply that she had lost the talent, and her inspiration. She was content to remain in her studio, high above the alleyway where she had painted on cardboard mediums.

It was in the last pasts of her days, after her black circular phone had turned white from dust, after the critics stopped eyeing her as a prospect for biographies and columns. When she had allowed her name to fade into what was, instead of what is, she found herself gravitating to the floor. There she moved her legs so that she sat cross-legged with bare feet and what some might term a rag dress.

The dress was one she had worn when she was 18 and the critics had found her, raised her up and out of that place pressed to the hard concrete. Only a small trickle of blood remained to stain the soiled blue of what the dress once was. Color the critics had always praised her for. Hours alone she would sit. At first aiming to mix together the perfect oils, the perfect chalks, the perfect blend of berries for her works. The day she sat cross-legged was like those days. Between her legs her mortar was full of color. Through a mixture of oils, chalk, and nature she strained with her pestle to crush into existence something wonderful. And she had. It sat there in front of her, a refracted shaded light that drew epiphany on the soul. It lay with desire to be stained upon a surface, its presence emitting a pulsing light of its own. This was it, she remembered. This is my color. First she ran to the unused phone. Her critics, she remembered, were still out there. Still haunting the same press that had dragged her up. Come, she called to them. Come and see the color. It is here. It is all, she had yelled this to them. Friends, come. People come ,you will see.

Shocked, they said they would come. Indeed they would come. They would bring their pens, their papers, thier cameras on stilts. In the offices some who sat behind thier flashing computer screens protested the story. Their superiors, however, whipped their objections from their lips. "Washed up or not. She is something you will never be."

Thirty minutes, an hour, and they were on their way. So she sat back down with her color between her legs. It was still there asking for something. Her hand reached over then. I can make it better she had thought. I see it longs. Her fingertips extended and fell on a rock of shade, this she added. With her pestle she crushed and added, placing more and more. Churning, rolling, and battering the color. Black and blue, she added, and red. Still she added and crushed and churned. All the while her eyes grew larger. It is real she said. It is vibrant. It is expression. It was not done, she thought, when the first knock came to the door.

My friends and she called to them to open. "It is locked," one yelled, "you must come and let us in." "Beneath the mat," she called, for she could not stop manipulating the icor. The lock turned and they began to funnel in. Old dried men, some bent, some wrinkled, some young with shining machines. They apologized for their tardiness, some for their absence and lack of connection. "It is alright," she explained, "it has been long since I wanted to see you." An old man, the one who had written her first review said, "We have come to see."

Her answer came as they had hoped, an arm extended towards her masterpiece. They huddled around, light flashing from behind in preliminary expectation. They crowded so close they could not see into the mortar at first. Each pushing the other with his hand or fist. At first there was a round of ahs, followed by oohs, then a young man typing quickly on his blinking machine roared, "Why it's nothing but Grey." It was true, she knew. Her color had changed. No longer did it remain fluorescently lit, glowing in diaphanic shine. She looked up to reveal between heavy lips a voice, "It is perfect," she said. Reaching with her small hand to add green, she pressed hard with the pestle, and crushed it in.