Writing Resources from Fifteen Minutes of Fiction

The Guest

She has come through the fog to make the colors tango on my face.

She once wandered away into the unknown but returned to increase my luminosity, to teach me with paints and brushes what others failed to do.

She looks me in the eye, and speech eludes me. Still, I decide to show her my best skills. She smirks, then pries the brush from my hand, and I feel her exquisite touch as if I am the canvas myself. She moves to the swish of the brush and the swirl of bright colors, as her dark hair cascades and dances on her shoulders.

I can try to copy her strokes with the palette knife, but can I learn what I really need to master?

Impossible to reveal important things with paint like she can...

She ignores all who do not understand. "They are strays, better left to their own," she whispers.

Her face is rapt like an angel, but she smiles at me , even though I am still made of flesh. And she paints me on my canvas, not what hordes of people see on my surface as the likeness of me, but what is inside. She is ruthless. She exposes everything.

How difficult it is to capture a soul on canvas! But she has come to know me intimately with just a few perceptive splashes of paint.

I want to be a good hostess and offer her empanadas and wine, but she refuses with a frown, her bushy brows mounting up on her forehead. For all practical purposes, food is not on her menu. What she wants is to paint for one more time, before she leaves again.

I reach to lay my hands on her to make her mangled body whole again. This is what I can do. This is the least I can do, but I feel her fear and mine. Do we want this? She shakes her head in negation, and I place my hands on my sides.

She hands the brush to me, and a blazing glare voids the filtered light. I return her wave as she leaves. I'll try to feel her presence from afar, and I'll still be with her in my dreams to revel in her art.

Thank you for the visit, Frida Kahlo.

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