Free A Good and Useful Hurt by Aric Davis

as the perspectives of the paintings shifted.
    While Deb was out in the living room hanging the four pieces, Mike retreated to the kitchen to draw at the table. It had taken Deb better than three hours to get the wall marked to her liking, and Mike had withdrawn to maintain sanity.
    “I’m done. You can come back in now.”
    Mike went in to see the pictures and found them hung just as he would have hung them, only perhaps a bit slower.
    “They look good.”
    “Good answer. You want to watch a movie?”
    “I’d love to, but I need to get this finished.”
    “Alright.”
    The piece he was working on was going to be covering a new client’s lower leg. It was to be a tall ship in the moments before a giant squid dragged it down. It wasn’t exactly giving Mike fits, but there were a number of little details the customer wanted incorporated that presented challenges.
    The ship was to be of French make, and Mike had photocopies of ancient sketches to copy the number of portholes and masts from. The ropes that hung from the sails needed to be rendered accurately, as did the anchor and everything else that was to be visible. The ship was one thing, the squid another. Where the ship was to be presented with precise historical realism, the squid was to be an amalgamation of a real squid and some sort of steam-punk revisionist beastie.
    Mike had drawn the squid in quick thumbnail sketches but had been unhappy with all of them. Now, with his tattered copy of Watchmen held open with a stone next to him, he felt he had a reference he could work with.
    The version in Alan Moore’s graphic novel wasn’t perfect, either—it too was more squid than he needed—but it did start to bridge the gap of fantasy and reality. Mike had earlier tried to use some old wood cuttings and sea monster sketches off of maps, but the creatures weren’t nearly squid enough. With the new reference next to him, he began to draw. Thin, weak lines at first, which thickened as certainty came to him, bold lines that foretold the form that was now on the paper.
    The squid took shape under wispy apertures, uncertainty birthing something that could never exist. A squid with thicker than normal arms, enormous bright green suckers covering them. The monster’s parrot-like beak looked large enough to devour one of the sailors in a single bite. The squid’s head itself was huge, the point of it sharper than an actual animal’s. The water under the ship Mike imagined, and subsequently drew, as murky, mottled with blood and broken lifeboats. The last detail, for him the one that settled the matter of the squid, was a legion of its progeny in the water and on the boat, attacking and devouring the sailors.
    When he was ready to combine the sketch of the squid with that of the boat, he took a break. Hunger pangs roiled his stomach, and he called to the living room.
    “You hungry?”
    “I think so.”
    “We’ve got leftover Thai.”
    “Nuke it up.”
    Mike took one last look at the squid and smiled. Not too bad.

    Before Deb, Mike had never eaten Thai food. He’d never eaten Indian food, or Japanese, or Ethiopian, either. His diet had consisted mainly of sandwiches, hamburgers, and on an ethnic day, Chinese food from the awful buffet a few doors from the shop. Had Mike been told that a myriad of other, better cuisine surrounded him like a wall he would have laughed in disbelief.
    Sushi had been first. He’d refused and Deb had said please, and he’d followed her in. They sat at the counter where a Japanese woman gave them towels and a sushi chef waited for their order. Mike had been trying to figure out the menu when Deb said something to the man in Japanese. He’d nodded and shouted a curt response before setting to work. Troubled, Mike asked, “What just happened?”
    “I told him what we wanted.”
    “How could you know what I want to eat when I don’t even know yet?”
    Two steaming cups of sake appeared before them along with a carafe of the drink.