10/27/2019, 9:32 PM
A guest in an empty house, he sits down at his hostess’s table to write.
The laptop is open before.
The mouse is resting to the left.
The glasses case and the eye patch are laid out to the right.
The knife, bane or servant of paranoia, rests like the cross of a T above the sight aids to the right.
To the left, beyond the mouse, framed like a sheltering curtain, folded along the line of the painter’s own image, light of hair and wrapped in a dress, stands the picture. In broad watercolor, on beige paper, the female figure is flanked by a brown-trunked, green-topped tree and a green-trunked yellow-topped shrub, the sun shining offset above and a circle of purple proclaiming to the lonely man that God has not forgotten him.
As his hands open the device, the thought that little Lydia has painted him a reminder that God has not forsaken him warms his chest, even as the very same thought chills his spine, innocence and omniscience tugging like two puppeteers upon a marionette.
