Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [74]
Eli forced the door open for me with both hands.
“You all right?” he asked.
I shook leaves from my coat. “The traffic lights are out.”
He took my bag and ran up the stairs ahead of me. “Everything’s out. We had to close The Brewery—Kevin says the whole downtown has shut down.” He returned from Zoë’s bedroom cradling the flame of a cinnamon candle. “Do you have any more of these? It’ll be pitch-black in half an hour.”
We found one flashlight, three jar candles, and twelve tea lights I’d kept stashed away in the closet with the Christmas decorations. We lit them all. The many flickering lights cast the living room in soft shadow.
I shone the flashlight into the almost empty kitchen cupboards, wishing I hadn’t skipped lunch to work. “I’m assuming all the restaurants are closed.”
“We have hot dogs,” Eli said optimistically.
We cut the hog dogs into half-inch slices and laid them on white bread, smothered in mustard and ketchup. We ate at the table facing the open screen door so we could enjoy the show. Heat lightning had begun. The cold hot dogs tasted good. They reminded me of home, of Friday nights with my brother playing Monopoly. We’d eat box macaroni and rubbery, cold hot dogs dipped in ketchup packets snatched from McDonald’s.We loved hot dog night and were oblivious to the guilt our mother felt serving us dinner on paper towels, how she’d stood in the grocery aisle an hour before doing math, thinking of the electric bill and the rent.
After dinner, Eli and I worked together at the dining room table, sharing the glow of the single flashlight. Eli was finishing a drawing he wanted to eventually commit to lithograph. I wrote in an old notebook, something I hadn’t done since before graduate school when I’d had time to leisurely draft the edges of a story on paper, take my time working toward a cohesive center.
“Do you always write in such pretty rows?” he asked.
“Do you always draw in such ugly lines?” I asked back. I watched his hand skittishly jump here and there on the page. “What’s it like in your head when you’re drawing? I’ve always wanted to know what it’s like to be able to draw.”
“I don’t know. I don’t really think about it. I just make something and keep making it until a pattern or a figure or something emerges. And it becomes pleasing to me.”
“You love it, don’t you?”
“I don’t work when it’s not enjoyable.”
This struck me as somehow profound. “Can you call it work then?”
A smile tugged at the corner of his lips.
I said, “I doubt there are very many things I hate more than writing.” “Then why do you do it?”
I chewed on the end of my pen. “For that one moment of inspiration,” I decided.
He stopped drawing, leaned his chair back on two legs in that way that so exasperates junior high teachers. “So it’s one moment for you—the light bulb going off over the head?”
I considered the image. “More like a million light bulbs going off at the same time. Like paparazzi. Then nothing—silence for weeks. It only ever comes in bursts for me. The rest is pure drudgery.”
“Sounds daunting.”
I gathered my courage and asked what I’d been meaning to ask for days. “You never said what you thought of my stories.”
He let the chair fall back on all fours. “I liked them.”
“We’re not allowed to say ‘like’ in our critiques.”
He continued drawing. “Can I say I really liked them?”
“Much worse. Really is an empty modifier.”
I imitated his expression, eyebrows raised in theatrical alarm.
He worked silently, feverishly, at the corner of his notebook for a full five minutes without speaking. When he’d finished he showed me the drawing: cartoon me being pulled into the sky by a dozen light bulbs like helium balloons. Cartoon me looking desperately down at the ground as if unsure the sky is where she wants to be.
“Your characters seemed real to me,” he said finally, setting the sketchbook back on the table. “Can I say real ? Is real an emptying or whatever modifier?”
I laughed. “You can say real.”
I pulled my hair into a loose knot at the top of my head. Eli watched the careful operation, and I pretended