June
Following is an excerpt from my short story, June.
When they first met, George sketched her like crazy. She’d sit for him in his small Fleet Street apartment where he’d dash off sketch after sketch, going until his hands were cramped, his fingernails rimmed with charcoal. From those sketches, he produced a single plaster relief, a nude, which has hung over their bed for the last 20 years, dust settling into the lines and dips that made her left breast, hip and thigh. They were a long way from those first, heady months of intimacy, but he could still sketch her with his eyes closed. Or so he liked to think. Since her diagnosis, he wasn’t sure. She was changing so much now, every day becoming something new. He was afraid she’d go to bed his wife and wake up an old woman. Or, worse: go to bed an old woman, and not wake up at all.
“June,” he said to her one morning once he had fed her breakfast and made her tea. “I don’t have a full-sized sculpture of you.”
“I don’t have a full-sized sculpture of you, either,” she said slowly, eager to make the joke but pained to do it. There were sores in her mouth now, an effect of the chemotherapy that ravaged her body, but left the tumor that swelled out of her hippocampus tucked neatly in place.
George folded a tea towel two and three times and placed it near the sink before turning to her. “I’m serious, June. Would you sit for me?”
He was ready for resistance. Ready for her to say that she did not want to be remembered as old and ugly and ruined. That she didn’t have the energy, or patience, to sit. Instead, she said, “OK.”
When they first met, George sketched her like crazy. She’d sit for him in his small Fleet Street apartment where he’d dash off sketch after sketch, going until his hands were cramped, his fingernails rimmed with charcoal. From those sketches, he produced a single plaster relief, a nude, which has hung over their bed for the last 20 years, dust settling into the lines and dips that made her left breast, hip and thigh. They were a long way from those first, heady months of intimacy, but he could still sketch her with his eyes closed. Or so he liked to think. Since her diagnosis, he wasn’t sure. She was changing so much now, every day becoming something new. He was afraid she’d go to bed his wife and wake up an old woman. Or, worse: go to bed an old woman, and not wake up at all.
“June,” he said to her one morning once he had fed her breakfast and made her tea. “I don’t have a full-sized sculpture of you.”
“I don’t have a full-sized sculpture of you, either,” she said slowly, eager to make the joke but pained to do it. There were sores in her mouth now, an effect of the chemotherapy that ravaged her body, but left the tumor that swelled out of her hippocampus tucked neatly in place.
George folded a tea towel two and three times and placed it near the sink before turning to her. “I’m serious, June. Would you sit for me?”
He was ready for resistance. Ready for her to say that she did not want to be remembered as old and ugly and ruined. That she didn’t have the energy, or patience, to sit. Instead, she said, “OK.”