Room

“Perfect,” he muttered to himself as he walked out of the room, “just perfect”.

And then there were none.

Nobody saw the magic that engulfed the room as it came to life. Like a sleepy bear coming out from under a long hibernation, the room began to wake from its lengthy slumber. The engine began to hum, the lights began to flicker, and the walls began to shift and creak. And, if someone had been there to hear it, a slight but palpable sigh came from the beneath the sun-drenched floorboards. The gentle balance had shifted.

The house would show the way.

Robert returned minutes later carrying a small wooden stand he’d found a few days prior when rummaging in the basement. He’d been looking for old photographs, and other snapshots of the past to bring some meaning to his experience of the present. He’d found the wooden easel lodged behind the furnace. It was built for a child but, with little in the way of compromise, could be used successfully by an adult.

He dragged the side table from where it had long rested and positioned it in the center of the room. He gently placed the easel on top of the table perpendicular to the window so that he would not cast a shadow over his work.

Work.

He had not thought about painting as work for some time. But there, in a room that itself was just waking up, Robert began to feel the knot in his stomach loosen. The sun was shining on his map of New Zealand and the easel that stood before him. He looked to the southern wall and examined the shadow he cast against it. There, a half red, half velvet man stood before him and, in one of those moments of contradiction that we all stumble upon from moment to moment, he was both aroused and afraid at the same time. Like the opposing sides of his face there was contrast. Warmth and coolness, red and velvet, sunlight and shadow.

Something and nothing.

Robert closed his eyes and allowed the sun to warm the left side of his face, he reached forward and took a firm hold of the easel in front of him. Perfection is for idealists he thought to himself, as he swayed in the motion of the room. He could reach out and touch something far better.