The Instructor

Secretly, instructor lets down his rigging to examine a drying canvas. She was still inside the fence, he thought, circling the edges for a way out. And she was close to jumping it, he saw by the assailants of color that licked the surface. A dosh of red aligned with streaking brown edges left raw, a slice through anyone who looked; he knew what she was doing. He traced it down to where it ended, a tranquil rift of blue where the painting seemed to sigh, and it was clearly the most difficult sentence. Sliding his focus further between layers, he picked at her process and the whole work came untied all around him. He balked at the naïveté of it; blushing at her bare use of gesture, remembering what it was like when he, too, would fervently daub at answers ragging the galloping drips, deep into nights in love, with an over-zealous use of Crimson. He had felt that way about everything, would finger even the red velvet of his dreams.