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Canvas Blues, Fantasy, fantasy romance, Fiction, gay romance, LGBT, Love, M/M, microfiction, Mystery, Novel, prose, reading, Romance, Short Fiction, Writing
CANVAS BLUES
Vignettes Regarding the Artwork of Brendon Kotes
L: Present
That night, Brendon spent an hour peeling his bedroom walls. Photos and pictures and sketches going in piles in the living room and kitchen. Every single piece of art torn down, until the barrenness became oppressive, the blankness like a canvas daring him to start.
Then he opened the hall closet and flicked through history: Robbie perched on a fence post near the bay, Aunt Laurel in her flowing skirts at her wedding, Mom in the kitchen, flour on her apron and pecan bread dough being beaten within an inch of its life. In the far back, sticking to the old paint on the wall it’d been hidden for so long, Casey grinned, his head thrown back, his hair a wild, wild mess, and the straightaway outside St. Thomas’s soaring into the distance behind him.
Brendon pulled the painting out and held it in two hands, his vision going double, seeing into the past. He’d used pale ivories and peachy tones to capture Casey’s body. Dressed him in a tank and greased him with summer sweat. Like the way he’d look after they’d parked in the field in the growing development, hot hands against one another. Skin sticky, as if the humidity conspired to glue them together in the back seat of Casey’s car.
Their world had been tight and narrow and Casey never had seen the side streets. Brendon hadn’t either, too focused on the car in front of him, uncaring where it might be heading.
He hung Casey’s portrait in his bedroom, a singular point in the barrenness.
“If it’s true,” he whispered to Casey. Continue reading