Picture This
By David Castlewitz


Rita stretched her long white legs under the table and lifted her hand in a “go on, get outahere” gesture. And watched Bernie, afraid he’d try to touch her. Letting him close that night two weeks ago had been mistake. She didn’t want his kisses, didn’t yearn to be in his arms.
But she needed someone to talk to about what had happened, what continued to happen, and Bernie was better than no one.
“Are you working at all?” Bernie asked.
She watched the barista fashion fancy coffee drinks. Outside, tourists strolled Canal Walk, where artists, sculptors and craftsmen set up tables and cloth-and-pipe display walls. She’d come to this town to escape the city and flee the art world, which she found cruel, its critics fickle, her erstwhile friends disloyal. One failed exhibition tarred her. Two sent her into oblivion, into exile.
“What’re you doing here, Bernie?”
“You called. Last night.”
“To talk.”
“I wanted to see you.”
She hated how he whined. Hated his milky gray eyes and furrowed brow, the dark spots on his cheeks and the moles and skin-tags on his fleshy neck.
“Did you bring the sketch?” he asked.
Rita reached for the cloth bag at her feet and extracted the sketchbook sheet she’d found in her lap when she woke that morning, sitting in a rocking chair, naked and sweaty, a pencil in her hand, the sketchbook on her lap. She didn’t remember moving from her bed to the chair.
“I keep doing this in my sleep.” She handed the rolled-up sketch to Bernie. “It’s just like the others.”
Bernie unrolled the paper to view the sketch: faint lines suggesting hands holding something thin and breakable, the curve of a leg, the hint of a breast, a face in outline, all bending away from a snarling mouth. In the five weeks since moving to this community, she’d drawn various versions of this same vision dozens of times.
“Do you think there’s s ghost or something trying to tell me something?” Rita asked.
“It’s like the others. Except….” Bernie turned the sketch for Rita to see. “I bet, if we put all the pictures side-by-side, there’d be a progression of detail.” He drained the last of his coffee. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” Rita asked, though she knew where Bernie wanted to go.
They strolled with the tourists on Canal Walk, past the artists and sculptors and craftsmen, some with colorful paintings to grace a living room, their colors matching the drapes, the sofa, or the rug; some with spindly forms spun from cheap copper, sculpted from soft driftwood, crafted from aluminum tubing.
They walked into an alley and then up the back stairs to Rita’s one-room apartment. She’d left the city with some clothes, sketchbooks, a box of enamel paint, and a small easel. She took none of her art, preferring to leave it with her dealer, though some went into a storage locker.
She pulled open the drapes to let in the sun. Natural light. She reveled in it during the late morning in front of her north facing windows.
Bernie hovered over the metal kitchen table. Rita gave him the sketches she’d saved. They weren’t dated. She didn’t know if she’d kept them in order, but Bernie arranged them on the table in five rows of four drawings each.
“There’s definitely added detail,” he announced.
She stood opposite him at the table. Some of the sketches possessed very faint and feeble lines she barely discerned; others – presumably the most recent – suggested a definitive event.
“He’s strangling her,” Rita whispered when the victim’s face came into focus. The features of the attacker were indistinct, but she sensed a thick, cruel mouth.
“Something must’ve happened here,” Bernie said.
Rita touched one of the sketches. It suggested a lonely woman. The next showed gnarled fingers and thick hair combed back from a high forehead.
“Or is going to happen,” Rita mused. Bernie slipped to her side of the table. He stood beside her. His rough hands touched her bare arm. She shivered.
“Maybe you need protection.” His hot breath swept across her cheek.
Rita faced him. She bent backwards. Tears welled in her eyes when Bernie’s hands went to her neck.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Bernie whispered. He glanced at the sketches arrayed across the tabletop. “Do you think that’s me? Hurting you?”
Rita nodded.
Bernie didn’t slam the door when he left. He shut it gently, leaving Rita to sit at the table, alone with her sketches, which fell to the floor when she slapped at them, her hands scrambling across the table top until every token of her nighttime visions lay scattered.
If not Bernie, she wondered, then who stalked her dreams?
In the days that followed, she drew no pictures in her sleep, no faint herald of a future event, no harbinger of doom.
She missed whatever guiding spirit or ghost lurked in the night. She missed Bernie’s visits, too. But when she called him, he didn’t answer the phone. He didn’t return messages. Soon, she let him disappear like all the friends she’d left behind.
She still frequented the same coffeehouse. She still looked askance at the artists along Canal Walk and the tourists admiring their wares.
When a tall stranger stood across from her one morning and introduced himself as Tom and explained that he’d seen her alone so many mornings that he summoned the courage to talk to her, Rita couldn’t stop herself from smiling. She invited Tom to sit. She walked with him alongside the canal.
And that night she drew a picture. A faint line here. A bit of shade there. Something taking shape for the future. Again.


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