The Haunted Traveler Vol. 1 Issue 1

77
Flesh Color
Ranylt Richildis
She was painting bare-chested when the couple came over
the rise. Perched on her artist's stool, inches from the cemetery
gate, she dabbed at the canvas before her. The easel's
legs disappeared into a carpet of green. The grass was lush
at the moment. Beyond Yocelin’s promontory, the peaks and
troughs of low mountains were covered in trees that were
sun-limned on their western flanks. They spread a caper of
emeralds that wouldn't still, and their branches tickled the
belly of an enormous blue-and-white August sky.
There were trees at her back, as well, past the graveyard
where the remains of Lester Bowles Pearson counted the
seasons. Some of the tombstones were new and bland, but
many were early nineteenth-century. The older ones had
been pocked and tilted by weather, but their designs were
more charming. Yocelin had sketched several of them while
she bided her time, had even amused herself with tombstone
rubbings that charcoaled her fingers and fluttered nearby
birds.
These projects distracted her from harsh hunger, but not
from the strain straining every ion around her—a tension
that threatened to leach all color from her world. That tension
was outside of her, out of her power, about to flex and
suck and whitewash. So she swirled paint about her palette
and canvas. The act was anodyne. Her landscape in oils comforted
her and kept the pallor at bay.