“Rory!” Zoe, my curator’s voice comes bright before I even say hello. That’s her second talent; the first is matchmaking between artists and rooms with people who buy. “Please tell me you’re awake and not pretending not to be.”
“I’m working,” I say. “Close enough to awake.”
“Good. Don’t hate me. I moved your preview up.”
“You just said don’t hate you.”
“I know. But listen. The email I sent last night, the critic from the Ledger confirmed. He’s bringing a photographer. He asked for a press preview this week, not next. And someone at Mirrow Museum forwarded our packet internally. Their contemporary team requested a private viewing. This is exactly what we wanted.”
I look up at the stack of canvases leaning against the brick.
“It’s good,” I mutter, because it is. This is what months of interviews, and four a.m. starts are for. “Moving the preview means I lose two days of finishing time. Which is also fine,” I add, because Zoe can smell hesitation and mistake it for disagreement. “Just tell me when.”
“Thursday, four p.m. I’ll keep the guest list tight, I promise. A few press, a few collectors, and the museum team if they can make it. We’ll walk them through your process. We’ll highlight the ethics. We’ll control the room.”
I can hear her typing as she talks, a staccato under the words. She’s working the list while we speak, shaping the river so it runs where she wants. I appreciate it. I pay her to do exactly that. “Thursday at four,” I repeat, and look at the calendar taped to the wall, painted with coffee rings and little checkmarks that mean “done” and little dots that mean “don’t forget to do this part of done.”
“You sound… fine,” she says.
“I am. You just asked me to move a mountain two days early. I’m checking for the right shoes.”
She laughs. “That’s why I love you. You make it sound simple. Okay, I’ll push comms. Send me a progress shot of the anchor piece when you can. The Ledger will want a preview image for the online story.”
“Give me sixty minutes.”
“Thirty.”
“Chapter-five.”
She sighs dramatically. “Fine. Forty-five. You’re a monster. Go paint. Oh, and check your email when we hang up. You got a nibble from the Karael Foundation. Grants team. I forwarded it. Call me after you read. We’ll play it smart.”
The line clicks. She never says goodbye, as if ending the call would end the momentum. I put the phone down and don’t check my email yet. If the foundation wrote, it will still be there in five minutes. Paint dries faster than money.
I tuck the earbud back in. The nurse on the tape explains how she learned to make her hands steady even when her heart wasn’t. “You can’t shake in front of people,” she says. “They look at your face to know if they’re safe. So, you give them safe.”
I think about that for a second and change the mouth on the canvas. I lift the corners a millimeter. Not a smile. A set of muscles that says,I am here and I will get you through.
My brushwork is practiced, and it’s still work. The heat in the studio climbs; the space heater in the back does too good a job. I take off my overshirt and toss it on the stool. My T-shirt has four paint fingerprints near the hem. I keep meaning to buy shirts I don’t care about, so I’ll stop ruining the ones I do, but the ruin is part of my day now. It doesn’t bother me enough to change the system.
Twenty minutes later, the left eye is the right kind of heavy. The cheekbone has the clean, unflattering truth I’m after. I step back, and the portrait reads the way I wanted: a woman built from muscle and refusal, not apology. I take out my phone to snap a progress shot and pause because the screen is full of red badges.
The top email is from my curator with a subject line full of exclamation points. Below it is: Karael Foundation—Preliminary Inquiry. Below that is: Ledger—Press Preview Confirmation. An Instagram DM from a blue-check account I don’t recognize. Another email from a name I do; he buys work that looks like mine and flips it at auction two years later for a price I never see. I ignore the DM and the flipper. I open the foundation email.
Dear Ms. Hale,
On behalf of the Karael Foundation’s Arts & Equity program, we extend preliminary support for your upcoming exhibition, “Witness.” Our grants team would like to schedule an exploratory call to discuss alignment with our mission, including but not limited to:
• Production support for artist fees and materials
• Public programming centered on trauma-informed art
• Travel stipends for community partners (as applicable)
• Matching funds for a published catalog
We understand and respect the sensitivity of survivor-centered work. Our grants carry no creative oversight, and we are committed to allowing artists to define the terms of theirown projects. Pending our conversation, we anticipate issuing a letter of intent within the week.
Please let us know availability for a twenty-minute call tomorrow.
