Childish Surrealism

There was something about the boy that she just couldn’t put into drawing.

At first it was just childish surrealism; constantly moving hands and how the boy looked at her inquisitively, noticing the charcoal in her hand and the canvas before her. But then she caught a glimpse of the boy’s eyes; they were swimming in feverish green, dismal and deep, such melancholic sanguine she couldn’t comprehend in her head, let alone to be understood by her hand. And then there was the boy’s charm; it seeped out like sour cream around his thick overworn mini-Levi’s, torn here and there, and his big black sweater, most likely stolen from his father from the looks of it. It gave him a sparkle of delightful youth mess despite his looking only 9. His complexion baffled her; she couldn’t see it the first time, but when he neared him on his skates she could see the deep small scar above his bushy eyebrow. His nose was that of an eagle’s beak, beautifully and proportionally curved, matching itself perfectly to his smooth jawline.

As she tried to concentrate on his emotion – which was flat as a brick wall – he skated away, wheels running smoothly on the pavement. She gasped from her illusions, and stood up out of consciousness, hand reaching. “Hey, wait!” It came right out of her mouth, something she just couldn’t halt, the words slid like ice cubes on a glass table. A few people watched as she sat right back down in humiliation and awe when the child looked back and found her wanting to have him back as an art subject. He didn’t decline; instead he went up closer, and, from the corner of her canvas-fixed eyes, he was deliberately posing for her. Standing there, hands inside his jeans pockets, gazing at the top of the maple trees.

She gripped her charcoal tight, positioned herself comfortably while trying not to think of how the boy looked at her, and began to draw. The first scratch of lines were like viewing the insides of the boy; she was stripping him off his skin and flesh, she wanted to capture his insides, his thoughts, that absent-minded handsomeness, why he’s looking everything the way he did. The less rougher sketches that came after gave the boy his identity; she loved his fashion sense, if it were what it had been, and how he moved, how he smiled that cunning, been-there-done-that smile she always saw on adults, how mature he looked for his age. She slithered the charcoal across the canvas in honor of the boy’s blazing charisma. He was a falcon aiming for prey, a stallion prancing in his territory. The last finishing touches added some sense to the boy, something she felt the boy lacked. He looked at her, eyes filled with curiosity, as if questioning if he looked good, and then turned his head away arrogantly, mist billowing from his breath like cigarette smoke.

She suddenly felt played. There was something she wasn’t able to capture from the moment, and that filled her head with steam. There was something about the picture that was not quite right; it wasn’t the position, the emotion, or the details. She tapped her forefinger on the boy’s face, but she still couldn’t feel it. The scene and the boy were unreachable to her. Droplets of mockery fell and bounced on her canvas, on her forehead, on the image she saw from her eyes of the boy in his skates.

People stopped and stared as she scratched the canvas ferociously with her charcoal, then her fingers, then the whole palms of her hands until the middle part, right where the boy’s face was, ripped apart. She threw the canvas onto the asphalt road, picked up her stool and bag, and walked away in raging anger. The exasperated stomps of her leather boots flew with the wind into the boy’s ears, who watched as she picked up her bicycle and paddled away. He couldn’t see the anger in her eyes, but he could feel from the tension emitted by the watching crowd and the turbulence she gave off as she was hustling everything up so she could move away and never see the boy’s face again. After she was out of sight, her bicycle eaten by the thick shadows of trees, he skated close to the fallen canvas, lying broken on the ground. He skated through a couple enjoying ice cream from the same cone, he skated through a lawyer-looking yuppie who was too busy talking on the phone to notice the spectral wind caressing his coat, he skated through a cat who hissed from his skates’ gliding through its belly. On the pavement, he balanced himself as he lowered to get a better look. He blew off some dirt and charcoal debris, and as he danced his finger on the canvas, trying to remove some unnecessary lines to reveal more of the person in the picture, found himself staring at a face of a young boy, about his age, dumbfounded and lonely from the looks of him. He looked a little high-nosed from the way he stared at the high maple trees instead of turning his face to the artists – or was he just shy?

Hard to tell. But what he liked best from the boy was that he looked like a young man instead of a young child, that he had a dignified and courteous look about him, that he was staring back like he was his equal, as though they were brothers. Indeed, he had the smile of a prince, a smile that could get you a thousand miles out into the open blue of the ocean. The tear across his dark face gave him a spark of adolescent freedom and hurt, and the wound above his eyebrow made him look archaic beneath his dark hair.

All in all, it was perfection upon a canvas. Something inhuman. He tilted his head, judging the picture, and then slipped it beneath his arm as he skated away exuberantly, with his new found self safe in his possession.