Free The Earth Painter by Melissa Turner Lee Page B

crossed before he continued. “I’m not a painter like people mean when they say it. When a person says it, he means he is a human who paints not some other type of being other than human. On the other hand, I am not human at all. I am a painter.”
    “But what does that mean? What’s a painter? Are you aliens or…?” I couldn’t think of anything else supernatural to ask about.
    Theo looked away then back at me. “I’m not honestly sure if this is against the rules—me telling you all this. I’m not supposed to draw attention to myself. Painters are not invisible, but we are unnoticeable and are not allowed to do anything to alter that. We register, in the mind, in the same way those silly pictures and messages they used to stick in movies to make people buy popcorn do. Humans are aware of us on some level but not on the conscious level. We are forbidden to seek attention from the humans. I’ve sat on the stage through every drama, choir, band and orchestra practice for decades. I’ve been there through assemblies and pageants, and no one has noticed me there until you.”
    He looked more directly into my eyes. “I don’t think I did anything unusual to get your attention. I’m still not sure why you noticed me.” He looked at me for several minutes, as if he could figure it out if he stared at me long enough before he continued.
    “But since you noticed me on your own, I didn’t think just talking to you was breaking the rule. Now, I’m not so sure about this.”
    I thought back to our first meeting on the stage below. “You just sat there the first day, and I saw you.” I couldn’t think of anything odd he did. “And today, I followed you up here, you didn’t invite me.”
    He hesitated just a moment before standing and walking away. Then he turned back to me to speak. “Long ago, before there was Earth or a solar system, there was the Sculptor. He got the idea to sculpt a giant sphere, but it was plain, lifeless and uninteresting. He wanted to make something new, unlike anything he’d ever made before. So he sculpted three beings called painters and gave us each an assistant called a Khai-Ree . Each painter was animated along with his Khai-Ree . Painters were granted high levels of creativity and visions of things that were not yet and the desire to paint them and make them real.
    “ Khai-Ree were given the ability to organize. They can also paint copies of existing work, but they have no inner creativity. They see only lines, shadows and shapes and replicate it. I was assigned the land and all that would live on it. Fritz was assigned water and Walden—the sky.”
    I looked around. “Do the other painters live up here with you?”
    Theo came back to sit down. “No, Fritz fell out of favor with the Sculptor for some gross violations. Some say he’s gone mad. Walden is a bit of a mystery. There is a chance she’s working again, but she can’t tell us. She and her Khai-Ree hang out in space with Physics and Astronomy. The four of them go back and forth between deep space and Earth acting like a bunch of human girls running back and forth to the restroom together.” He rolled his eyes. “All the shushing, giggling and inside jokes get a bit annoying. We think the invention of telescopes and space exploration brought Walden out of retirement, but like I said, she can’t say yes or no about it…Sculptor’s orders.”
    I sat there for a second processing what he had just said. He was a painter—one of three who painted the world. One named Fritz was kind of in trouble and one named Walden… “Walden’s a girl and she’s hanging out with who ?”
    Theo smiled. “Yeah, Walden’s a female painter. She hangs out with Physics and Astronomy. They are a couple of the sciences. The Sculptor created and granted the sciences the job of giving the work of the painters function through logical, predictable laws and processes. The sciences are the engineers of Earth while the painters were the