Donny tossed his phone on the couch and stood up, finishing his beer. He tossed the bottle in the trash on his way to the bedroom, turning off the lights as he went. Donny stripped down to his briefs and crawled into bed. He reached his arm out, feeling across the sheets for his full body pillow, and pulled it close, wrapping his arms and legs around it.
He closed his eyes and quickly fell asleep.
* * *
Donny woke earlythe next morning, the sun barely halfway through his window. He arms were still secure around his pillow. He buried his face against the pillowcase before stretching out and yawning. He’d just woken from a horrible dream he couldn’t make sense of. He’d been falling which wasn’t a new dream for him. Donny had looked that particular dream up years ago and knew it centered around his insecurities and anxieties. This time, though, he landed, and he landed in bush covered with thorns. It was such a vivid dream, he thought for sure he would wake up with gouges across the pads of his fingers and his palms from his struggle to escape.
But he looked at his hands, and they were whole— still capable of creating.
Sighing, he pulled a pair of underwear from his dresser and stumbled to the shower. He washed quickly, then dressed in clean clothes and set about getting Pete to the vet. Donny didn’t have a cat carrier, as he’d brought the cats home in a box with no top. When he’d gone to the pet store to get supplies for them, he hadn’t even thought about buying a cat carrier. He just assumed they would stay with him and it would be unnecessary. He needed to start thinking ahead if he wanted to do right by the felines.
As if on cue, Pete wandered into the room and wound his way around Donny’s ankles, meowing and rubbing against his jeans. Donny put his phone and wallet in his pocket and pulled his sweatshirt over his head, then looked down at Pete.
Pete looked up at him with his tiny little eyes and meowed again. Donny leaned over and picked him up, kissing the top of his head before tucking him easily into the warmth of the pocket on the front of his sweatshirt. Pete offered a muffled meow of acceptance, then burrowed into the pocket and settled.
Donny grabbed an iced coffee from his fridge, tossing the lid in the trash, before he snatched his keys from the counter and headed out.
Chapter 4
An Inspiring Fresh Start
Roland had beenup all night. He hadn’t slept more than twenty minutes. He hadn’t showered, shaved, or even changed out of his pajamas. He hadn’t eaten anything, and all he’d had to drink was the top quarter of another bottle of vodka.
His studio space was trashed. There were broken paintbrushes everywhere, splatters of colors he’d unsuccessfully mixed were dumped or spattered into piles on the floor. He’d broken more than one plate and one of his larger palettes in a fit of desperation at his inability to get what was in his mind onto the canvas.
Roland collapsed onto the floor and made a good-hearted attempt at ripping his hair out of his scalp as he let out an anguished scream of frustration. He kicked furiously at a stack of canvases he’d started and abandoned over the course of the night. None of them were right. He couldn’t get it fucking right.
Canvas after canvas ofblue, but bluewhat? Roland sure as shit didn’t know. He’d used through all his black and white paint and was quickly running out of all his blue. The stack of failures to his right revealed abstract stripes of color, mostly gray and blue, splattered with black lines and dots, and then larger blobs of ink as his despondency mounted and he’d resorted to throwing paint at the canvas with his bare hands.
He just wanted to cover up his failures. Hide the fact he wasn’t capable of creating something that didn’t look like shit anymore.
The only paint he hadn’t touched were the two containers of mixed blue he’d made before bed. He didn’t know why, but when he looked at the shade, it resonated inside of him. There was a hum in his chest, and he knew there was something important he was supposed to create with it but also knew what he’d done last night wasn’t it.
A small voice in his mind suggested if he opened the blue up, he’d be able to create what he was meant to, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it yet. Everything in his studio had faded to a dull gray-wash of misery, except those two containers of blue.
Roland took a large swallow from the vodka, blandly notating it was quickly sliding past the three-quarter line. He glanced down at his watch and found it to be nearly seven in the morning.
He stalked into his kitchen and pulled a knife from the butcher block and found his way back to the studio. With no pretense, he slammed the tip of the blade into the corner of the canvas and sliced. He tossed the canvas over his shoulder and repeated his assault on the next one, then the next, and the next, until he’d destroyed them all and the tip of the knife had snapped off somewhere in the mess.
He threw the knife across the room and let it bounce off the wall and land with a thud on the concrete floor. He needed to do something about this mess. Rather, he needed to find the energy, or the concern, to do something about this mess.
Roland was backsliding. He knew it. He saw the signs. What was the point of continuing this charade any longer? How could an artist make something worthwhile when they couldn’t even see color? Roland was as much of a failure as the paintings he’d just destroyed. Someone should stabhimwith a…
No.
Not that.
Roland took a drink of vodka then threw the bottle at the wall. It shattered gloriously. The vodka fanned out in a display so frenetically perfect it looked as if it had been planned. Shards of glass glittered on the floor, rocking back and forth in puddles of liquor as though they were little boats meant to keep him from drowning.
Roland reached out and collected the two containers of magic blue paint, tucking them under his arm. He stumbled to his bedroom and picked his phone up from the nightstand, unplugging it roughly from the charger before dialing down to the building concierge.
“Hello, Mr. Wilson. How can we assist you today?” The voice on the other end of the line sounded chipper and entirely too optimistic for Roland’s mood.
“Can you please send up a cleaning service?” His voice came out with more of a slur than he intended.
“What do you need attended to, Mr. Wilson?”
“The bedroom at the end of the east hall.” Roland kicked his pants down his legs, tripped on them, and fell against the side of his bed.
