He’d shown talent, but had never taken the time to develop it, never truly focusing on the work as a craft. The activity was perfect for him, inexpensive and solo. This one will be perfect.Īrt had been a hobby of John’s while growing up on the island. He found the portrait and mimicked the technique onto the page laid across the table. There were twenty-five in total, and John counted for the eighteenth-it was the one with the shading he’d been proudest of, drawn lightly against her left cheekbone, pitting the smooth landscape of her face against the invisible light source he’d created for it. The portrait was similar to the others he’d drawn, now stuck orderly to the back wall with a thick, blue gummy substance he’d found in a drawer. He dropped the pencil and looked down at Ronika’s face, unfinished but present. Her smile came after, an easy task, which he drew as thick and as wide as he’d seen it so many times before, during those welcome breaks between his voyages.
He finished the other the same, letting the pencil naturally dip down from its inside corner to form the bridge of her nose. He brought the still-sharp tip in past the edge and outlined an eye. He drew the hair next, carefully arcing the graphite a few inches above the scalp, lifting the lines high before crashing them down past the sides of her cheeks to the unseen shoulders beneath the page. He brought the line up the other side of the sheet, finishing the contour of her face and closing the shape at its top. John sat quietly at the lab’s workstation and drew a thick black line down the side of the white page, closing his eyes as he slid the pencil’s tip against the curvature he saw in his mind.
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