Felicia Strangeways
Felicia Strangeways lives in Riverside, Connecticut with her partner and two rescue buddies, Charlie the English cocker and Sky the mini-Aussie. In a previous life she uncovered human interest narratives in Big Data; now her passion project employs similar techniques to uncover the hidden story behind haunted New York City. You'll find Felicia's recent short fiction in the Summer, 2024 issue of Hotch Potch Literature & Art magazine https://tinyurl.com/HotchPotchVol3Issue1
Easy read of the story in the images above:
Life Drawing
I step naked from behind the privacy screen, thrusting the affronts of raw middle-age into the buzzing white atelier. A ceiling fan pushes cross currents over easels, art students, and me, Forgettable Stacey, the life drawing model whom none of these artists would recognize in clothes.
The guy with one arm sits left of the semi-circle’s center, the end of his sleeve pinned to the swell of his chest at the spot where Fred Astaire would have worn a silk pocket square. He deliberates over the side table he shares with this scrawny, fussbudget red-haired girl, placing his chamois, tortillons, and kneaded eraser on his good side, his brushes on Velcro, affixing the vise that clamps his charcoal sticks against a sandpaper block. Everything just so. Everything thought through the way the others don’t need to.
I flex into the Discus Thrower. Charcoal strokes swish over the fan’s mechanical hum and the breeze that brushes my skin like a phantom hand, a hand that had mastered extraordinary techniques before parting ways with the artist. The invisible hand shakes hands with my ghosts: the child I aborted at sixteen, the daughter who only comes back between men who’ve promised not to drink or hit her again, the ginger tom who warmed his fur on my porch rail before I moved to the one-bedroom above the barber shop. The hand makes a deal: as long as I stand still it will turn me into something fresh, something extraordinary, something more than Forgettable Stacey.
The one-armed man applies his charcoal stick to the paper taped to his easel, his face the crinkled mug of a bear that once knew how to draw but forgot. I once saw a video short of a bear that knew how to play catch, ride a unicycle, and dance, and imagined him going back to the forest, and trying to teach these arts to his cousins, and withstanding their incomprehension, their inability, their ridicule, and then his acceptance that being a bear meant surrendering a once-easy life. That man wears the face of this bear. I break my pose and the bear swings from the paper to me. Its inkjet eyes hold a disconsolate glint as if the bear questions why it needs to draw at all.
I shift into Sun Worshiper: feet planted wide, chest back, arms uplifted. In the gilt-framed chevalier mirror a headless Stacey stands on offer for art, her belly snail tracked with stretch marks and pooched over her still-sturdy thighs. Sinewy arms rise over tits like a prize fighter’s speed punching bag, tipped with a motherly nipple, enormous and peach-colored. Six months ago I couldn’t bear such graphic proximity without my limbs growing cold, chest tight, mouth dry. Am I all right, do I move well, do I occupy space in an interesting way? A caged bear on exhibit. Every hair magnified, every twitch eyeballed, every scar set on paper. By the end of the day my natural state became natural. I forgot about my scars and began to see those of the artists, beasts roused from hibernation, roaring with hunger, devoured by unattainable visions, their terror of dying unnoticed. My cage bars fell away. I move easily now, with the breeze, fanned by the skilled phantom hand.
The one-armed artist scowls and scrapes his untenanted right shoulder on his chin. Beneath a thicket of hair he fixes Forgettable Stacy with aggrieved bewilderment, the look of a yearling cub whose mother chased him off from their den. I know, I know. The phantom hand fans us both but can’t cool him. He sets the charcoal on the table and squinches, rubbing the empty sleeve, consumed with an itch he can’t scratch.
When break comes I stroll through the artists’ stations, draped in a prizefighter’s robe. When my shadow crosses the bear’s back, he twitches, shielding the sheet on his easel. I move on. I have already seen his version of me, every edge blended, every wrong line lifted, every smudge perfect.
