Free The Painted Kiss by Elizabeth Hickey Page B

one has any gasoline now and if anyone’s going on picnics I don’t know about it. Everyone’s walking, or riding a bicycle. Occasionally a farm cart rattles past, or a cow bellows to another, but the loudest sounds are my own breath and my anxious fingers tapping against stone.
    There are ghosts everywhere here, not the kind that fill the pages of sensationalist magazines or terrify schoolboy campfires, but the kind we use to simultaneously torment and comfort ourselves. Gustav is sitting on the bench next to me, drawing on my wrist with a charcoal pencil. He is calling to me from under the black cape of the unwieldy wooden camera he had back then. Stand still, he says, though he knows I know what to do. My mother is reading letters out loud from under one of the larch trees. Pauline is spraying the rose leaves with a red pepper mixture while Helene practices her vocal scales. My father is standing quietly in the woods beyond, observing birds and marking down his observations in a red leather journal.
    Worst of all is the ghost of myself, weak with longing as I’m drawn upon, swelled with pride as I model my own designs, teasing my mother about her proper accent, digging slugs in the garden, running to give my father a kiss, and scaring all the birds away.
    At the end of the garden is the greenhouse that Gustav used as a studio when he stayed with us. Some of the glass panes are broken. All of them are opaque with grime. Maybe Heitzmann could give the place a thorough washing. I’m afraid to go inside. It’s like a jar you find in the back of the icebox. You can no longer remember what’s inside, and you know it can’t be anything good. However, it must be faced. Waiting will not get rid of it.
    I circle a few times, ripping the seeds from some wheatlike grasses as I go. It burns my hand in a satisfying way. The door sticks, of course. I lean on it and step inside. It’s damp and cool, like a potato cellar. My eyes are slow to adjust to the close dimness. Then my heart stops for a moment.
    There are three people standing on the other side of the room. Thin, wasted people: refugees? Ghosts? They are looking out toward the back of the studio, toward the woods. They are standing at attention, in some sort of formation, like soldiers. They don’t seem to notice me. I start to back out, trying to catch my breath.
    Then with a blink I see that they are easels, skeletal and wooden. My heart resumes pumping and I have a laugh at myself. I used to be braver.
    Some chipmunks and squirrels have clearly made their home in the corners, dragging in leaves and grass for their dens. There’s an old table that used to be my grandmother’s. It began in the kitchen, then moved to the porch, and finally, when even my father admitted it was too scratched and marred for the house, was banished to the studio. Now the finish is cracking and peeling away, damaged further by rain leaking in from the holes in the ceiling.
    There is a row of galvanized buckets and a shelf of watering cans, thick gloves, rubber boots of various sizes, spades. Two shovels are lying crossed on the floor like a coat of arms. It still smells as it always did, like modeling clay and gasoline, though we never kept gas in here. Paint solvents, perhaps.
    On the shelf next to the spades I find packets of seeds. The labels have faded away entirely. I pour one packet into my hand: sunflower or pumpkin, I think. The seeds in the next packet are moldy and half-eaten. The next batch, though, are tiny and brown. They’ll never grow, it’s been too long. Nevertheless, I pour these seeds back into their envelope and pull on some gloves. I take one of the shovels and go back to the garden. It feels good to hack at the grass as tightly woven as a burlap bag, to break the soil and flip it like a pancake, but it’s hard work and my shoulders burn almost immediately. I’m gasping for breath and I know I’ve turned an unlovely shade of purple.
    After about half an hour I’ve