An Empty Gallery

I met an old man who could draw. He was tall and cadaverous, and he always wore the same shabby brown suit and hat. He looked as though he slept in the suit and it had worn to the contours of his frame to the point that it no longer wrinkled. His hand was long and frail and it would tend to shake until he made a fist to steady it, and his eyes were milky and dim. But he could still weave together a picture in minutes like he was conjuring the image out of the air. It was amazing to watch him work, and I got the idea for the two of us to open a shop together. We rented out a space for the store, and I displayed some of his work in the front window on a couple of small easels with spotlights shining down on them.

I tried to find some angle, some specific type of drawing or merchandise that would become our stock and trade. I wanted to have some part in this. If the old man's gift was lightning in a bottle, I wanted to at least be the one that designed the bottle. I thought, for instance, of having the walls on either side of the store lined with racks of hand crafted greeting cards. I would concoct the sentiments and the old man would draw the illustrations, and we would be in the greeting card business. But it never worked out that way. We never settled on anything definite. I never knew what kind of store we had. The two of us would just stand there in the middle of the empty shop, the stone walls and the floor all completely bare, and we would wait for people to come in out of the rain.

And people would come. The pictures out front would catch their eye and they would wander in, looking all around. They all wanted something different. They put forward their requests uncertainly, not sure if such a thing could be done, or if it could be done right, or if it could be done by us. One woman wanted a simple family portrait of herself and her children, her hands resting on their shoulders. Another man wanted the face of his late wife drawn from memory. That is, he wanted his memory somehow conveyed to the old man's hand. People wanted landscapes that they had seen in their mind, or moments they had long since lost. The old man's supplies would materialize upon request, his pens and his pencils, and with broad curving strokes he would indelibly etch their vision onto the paper. I stood by with the customers and watched him work, and I never got tired of it. Afterwards, when the old man was packing his tools away in a small wooden case, the customers would always dab their eyes with a tissue and they would press the tissue into my hands as a token of gratitude and as payment for our services. I took the tissues and locked them away in the cash box in the back room of the shop, but I knew they weren't for me or for anything I'd done.

Penumbra

We found a shadow hiding in the corner of our back yard. It had come there weak and injured. My daughter and I first noticed it because it didn't belong to any of the other objects there in the yard, and we could see that it was out of place. The shape of it flinched as we approached, and we could tell that it was scared. I tried to coax it out. I spoke gently and beckoned it with my palm turned up and my fingers trying to draw it forward. But it just rattled about in the tall weeds and it refused to come out.

Late in the evening, we brought it out some food. Being a shadow, we had to bring it the shadows of food, and this was no easy thing to arrange. I laid the meal out on the dining room table in the dark. Then I placed a flashbulb at one end of the table. I popped the flash, and the tableaux of the bottle of wine and the block of cheese and the plate of fish were all briefly illuminated, the memory of the sight lingering far longer than the sight itself. The shadows of the wine, the fish, and the cheese had all been cast onto a tray that had been placed behind them, and I lifted the tray up in the dark and carried it carefully from the room.

We had to wait till evening to feed the shadow, because the other shadows were longer and deeper then, and it could blend in with them and creep out a little from its hiding place. It was a starlit night, and I crossed the yard shading the tray with my hand, trying not to let any of the starlight disturb the shadows of the food on the tray. My daughter tagged along beside me. She wanted to see the shadow come out to feed. I think she wanted to pet it or tickle it behind the ears. But I told her that she had to stay back. The shadow was wild and scared. We didn't know where it had come from or what it would do.

As we approached the corner of the yard, I realized that I had no idea if the shadow was still there. The shadow made no noises of it own, and there would be no sounds if it bumped against the other shadows and the other things in the dark. I had a flashlight with me, but that would do nothing but chase the shadow away, and I didn't want to hurt it or scare it. So, I just placed the tray on the ground and backed away. I whispered to my daughter and told her that we would come back in the morning and see if the shadows were gone.