Jane Carey
May 20, 2012 10:54 PM
Avoiding the Quidditch game again by Jane Carey
Most of the school was at the Quidditch match, and by rights, Jane knew she should have been, too, supporting Teppenpaw. Instead, though, she had seized on the pretext that they were playing against her betrothed’s former House and so contrived to stay indoors once again, avoiding the game in favor of a visit to the art room.As she stepped inside, it looked almost as it usually did for her, except for one thing: there was a miniature fountain, no taller than the length from her longest finger to her elbow, on a table beside her easel. Apparently, she thought she needed water to inspire her today; she found that interesting, but, in the calm atmosphere of the room, not enough to really look into. She had always found painting to be a way to withdraw from interest and thought, at least of a certain kind, and so it was what she did to relax. Looking over the fountain, she decided it was as good a thing to use as her model as anything else, and so she began to paint it.
As she did, she noticed that it looked very like the one in the center of the Labyrinth Gardens, and paused for a moment, wondering if she should paint a background that suggested the room here or one that suggested the Gardens or if there was something she could do to combine the two – she had a sort of image that did that in her mind, but she wasn’t sure how well it would really work out, translated through her skills and the physical facts of the brushes and paint colors, onto the canvas.
Of course, if it didn’t, she reminded herself, she could always start over, and besides, she had to paint the fountain first. Perhaps this would be the painting she gave Jethro for a Christmas present, perhaps another would be, but there was no way to know until she finished the picture.
It was, she thought as she moved the brush along another line, still strange to never see Jethro here anymore. They had met here, really, and she had become accustomed to periodically running into him here. It was, in a way, almost stranger than not eating meals with her brother regularly; she had eaten with Edmond much more often than she had painted at school, so she supposed she had gotten used to that absence more quickly through repetition. She missed them both, anyway; Jethro she wrote to about once a week, maybe twice, lest she seem a little strange, but she and Edmond had been writing each other constantly at the beginning of the year and had not slowed down much since. Her brother was bored and lonely, she was just lonely, and they didn’t worry about strangeness between themselves.
She squinted closely at the canvas, now using a slightly darker gray for detail work, her attention so fixed on the picture that she never heard the door opening behind her.
0
Jane Carey
Avoiding the Quidditch game again
160
Jane Carey
1
5