The Secret World of Briar Rose(2)
“The shading on the girl’s face is excellent,” the woman murmured. “You’re very talented.”
Corin counted her breaths to keep from cursing at the stranger. She felt foolish for hoping Elly would be recognized, and angrier that the woman would waste her time by prattling compliments. She was not here to show off her technical skills in some pitiful act of panhandling. But why would anyone care? Even if people knew Elly had been missing for a full day, they would assume she was simply another street rat who faced the early mercy of death.
But Elly wasn’t dead. Corin knew this, because there was no body. She had checked the usual places her sister loitered: the soup kitchens filled with lines of gaunt figures, the root cellars they hid to shelter from rain, even the riverfront where their old friends had built their commune, a now-destroyed home that Corin swore she would never return to again.
No, it wasn’t that Elly was dead. It was that she was nowhere to be found. As if she had disappeared into thin air.
“You remind me of the artists that lived by the river,” the woman observed. “People only remember the insurrection, but before then, I used to see them paint and build. Tragic, really, what happened to them.”
Corin steeled herself to shut out the sound of bullets, the smell of burnt flesh, the muffled scream that burned in her throat whenever she imagined that day. It had been a year, and still the scene came to her in nightmares and woke her in sweat and tears. There was no point in picturing how even the autumn leaves died that night, crumpled like the bodies strewn over the debris. She had not been there, after all. She needed to focus on the opportunities in front of her, here and now.
“Are you an artist?” Corin asked.
“Yes. But it’s difficult now, as you can see.” The woman’s disfigured hand gestured to her cloudy eyes. “My husband used to describe a scene to me and I would draw it. Before he died, we drew so much together.”
Corin imagined the woman and her husband, hunched over an easel, splatters of paint dripping over the canvas edges. Their voices were soft murmurs, an echo of her own parents’. See this, Corin? Her mother’s hand steadying Corin’s fingers over a brush. A round smear of orange paint, bright like apricot, messy like juice. You just made the sun.
“My parents were artists too,” Corin said. “My mother was a painter. She taught me everything.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful. And your father?”
“A sculptor. He liked making pots, the tiny ones you grow plants from. I’m better with a brush, though, so sometimes I’d paint them after he finished.”
The woman cracked a smile.
“You must keep painting, then. Sometimes art can be the only refuge in this world. These soldiers take our loved ones, but they cannot take this. That’s how we keep a memory alive, even if it’s gone.”
Corin thought of patchwork quilts stained with paint, clay pots drying by the window, a tiny cottage made of lime-washed brick, and a roof so low she could kiss the thatch. Her father’s calloused palms, her mother’s belly pregnant with Elly, the low hum of a song they’d made up. She could paint the memory into permanence, proof that there was once a home where love overflowed.
She took the elderly woman’s hand. This was someone left with no family, just like her, searching for a way to bond with another human being. Corin would give her that connection. She would let the woman know that, despite their despair, at least they had crossed paths with one another.
“Thank you,” she said. “I won’t give up on my dreams.”
The woman crinkled her eyes and nodded with conviction, as if her heart turned a little softer from their brief connection with each other. They bid goodbye, and Corin watched the woman leave before dropping her smile. Her hands dug in her pocket, where the edge of a wedding ring pressed against her palm.
It was smaller than she would have liked to barter with, but she could still make some decent money from it.
Maybe it took a mind deteriorating with old age to fall for a trick like this, believing in the dreams of a starving artist. But the truth was that dreams were never enough. Her mother died when Corin was ten, her paintings and clothes discarded by leering men who wanted to put their own marks over her body. Corin’s father changed after that, stewing in liquor and regret until he finally gave in to his darkest desires and drowned himself a year later.
No, if Corin painted a memory, it would be this: A raging river that took three bodies. A baby wailing as the water drowned them. A girl who only had the strength to carry her sister, not the weeping man who brought them there.
It would be a portrait of survival, because in the end, that was what mattered. Not the fleeting love of a mother gone too soon, not the strength of a father who’d lost too much. Not even a makeshift home that once opened itself to an orphaned teenager, only to disintegrate before she turned eighteen.
Corin had no capacity to focus on something as meaningless as art. After the insurrection took her friends, there was no one else but Elly and her.
Now, there was only her.
Because even as she kept searching, Elly never returned.
? ? ?
CORIN WOKE TO the sound of soldiers seizing her home. It wasn’t much of a home to begin with, but she had depended on the deteriorated building as a roof over her head, even if that roof was composed of wooden boards and cobwebs.
Troops barged in clanking metal and heavy guns, stomping up a creaky stairwell that led to an alcove blocked by a rotting wood door. When they kicked it open, she barely made it out of bed. Their eyes fell upon the pile of burlap and moth-eaten sheets, their noses wrinkling at the rotting odor of trash and unwashed clothes. She felt naked under the gaze of these strangers, like a roach found belly-up in a sticky trap.