More Novel in a Paragraph

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No Emily Rabbit today. She is busy writing her guest column for Marion's blog. Meanwhile, book # 2 continues with fervent joy. Hopefully, these mini 'novels' are short and to the point. Or as you may know by now, you can also follow along to see how they fit together, more or less.

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Purr
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After twenty plus years and three near severings, they slept together like kittens.
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Moleskines and Paintings

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Which came first, the moleskines or the paintings? Casey couldn’t exactly remember, but she took that first moleskine everywhere, showed it to anyone with the faintest interest, all those Bic pen drawings scattered on random pages, especially The Best Friend Tree, Catherine and Casey standing there in their celestial pajamas, arms outstretched, looking pleasantly surprised that best friends could indeed grow on trees.
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“My best friend is an artist,” Casey would say. And she would beam.
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In her honor Catherine planned a series of five paintings and completed four. The first was of Casey and Maggie, early on, Catherine’s bold colors punctuated by the characteristic sharp angles of her faces and shoulders and hands.. The second was of Casey alone, ‘Casey The Writer,’ Catherine called it, Casey with pen in hand, surrounded by characters rising from the canvas, including Catherine herself, huddled in black, curled tight within the protective space of Casey’s arm.

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The third painting even afterwards would remain one of Catherine’s favorites. It was an exquisite rendering, a purple nude sitting on an orange velvet love seat, book in hand, perfect breasts, salacious smile. Even afterwards the painting still hung in Casey’s bedroom and sometimes she would stare at it, hoping for answers that could not be there. Catherine finished the fourth painting but only barely. Neither she nor Casey particularly liked it: a panicked woman buried in rubble, another woman extending a hand, ready to rescue.

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“My hand just flows when I have you in my mind,” Catherine would tell her. Casey would beam at that too.

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Catherine did not finish the fifth painting and later destroyed it, a colorful hopeful scene of Casey’s dog Stella Dora, her tail in midair, standing over and kissing a small content Asian woman lying in grass. Even afterwards, when Catherine went public with words like ‘dysfunctional’ and ‘the biggest mistake of my life,’ it was her objectified reference to “someone’s dog” that packed the worse sting.

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In the subsequent gallery of her paintings, Catherine would include only the Purple Nude. The others, she omitted and deleted with a firm finality consistent with her erasure of everything else, even the truth.