Some Thing Called Myself (Complete)

I: something common

Ch. 1: Something Common

WARNING: This story contains depictions of violence and gore that may not be suitable for some readers.

Saint Lucretia – 21:47 h – July 17, 1990

Mara had been painting the same pair of striking black eyes ever since she'd woken up from her coma six months ago. Those eyes didn't belong to her missing mother, nor to her crushed father, and they definitely didn't belong to her little sister. The connection she had with those eyes felt deeper than any other, but maybe Mara would never have focused on them if she knew where they would lead her.

But she didn't know. So she did focus.

Those were eyes she knew well, from up close, for a long time, and even if she was never one to let the past take hold of her—in fact, Mara ran from it like Barbara ran from her zombie brother in Night of the Living Dead—there was something in those eyes she couldn't ignore. She knew the features around them, she knew the nose and the lips below them, and she needed to know who their owner was.

And...to be honest, focusing on them felt simpler and healthier than obsessing about Mom. Focusing on them muffled Amanda's shouts in her head. Focusing on them had kept her grounded for the past twenty-four weeks.

She loaded more turquoise on her brush and let it rest against the linen of the canvas. The brush slid down—its bristles bending—and ran lazy and sensuously to cover the person's chest. Almost on its own, the brush followed the thin line of Mara's sketch to paint the silk wrapped around the sitter's naked thighs and the small stretch of it hanging from their chair.

"Dashing. Very sexy," Cauê said. "Liked the colors too."

Rolling her eyes, Mara stepped back to look at her painting. She grimaced. Not because it was bad, but because Cauê was right—he was always right—the colors looked amazing.

"I guess they are pretty hot," Mara mumbled. "I'm glad you like this piece of crap, Cauê." She still had to convince him that these wouldn't sell. "But I have so much shading to do, I might become a sciophobic before the end of the week." She paused and looked over her shoulder, waiting. When Cauê didn't laugh, Mara huffed and turned to her painting again. "Cause...fear of shadows. Shading. C'mon, man, you're embarrassing yourself."

Mara clucked her tongue but couldn't hold back a smile. She loved painting and all the control her palette gave her. Painting felt simpler than anything else. It felt calmer. More rewarding than reality itself.

Cauê sighed. "Look, doll, this will be your best, no, your only chance to make it big at this point." He tossed yet another cigarette butt in an empty beer can. It hissed when it met the remaining drink. "You're not getting any younger, Mara. And"—with a lazy wave of his hand, he gestured at the room around him—"I'm pretty sure you could use the money."

In contrast, reality sucked. It was rancid like a pair of sweaty, rotting zombies in a B movie; reality was a wild cat in downtown São Paulo, a Boitatá in the Trianon park, a tax collector knocking on Mara's door at six in the afternoon on a Friday, just before she took her little sister to the ice cream parlor. Reality was the thin, worn mattress in the corner of her studio and her ripped pair of flip-flops.

And as a twenty-eight-year-old with no money in her bank account, no house, no relationship, no proper job—and no way to get one, thanks to her "pals" at the Military Police—Mara felt too old to try taming that beast.

Yeah. Mara felt old and done at twenty-eight. She put her brush down, her eyes lost in the yellow reflection that the hanging light bulb cast on her wet paint.