The Denunciation

 

I was pleased to have my story "The Denuncation" chosen for publication by Short Story Town, an online journal which said it wanted stories "that evoke memories of when stories were wholly stories, with all or most of the elements (characters, setting, plot, conflict, and resolution) present, when the rules of grammar were understood by writers, and evocative images and minute details were important to painting a picture of words for the readers.  Short Story Town wants stories that sing; that rise off the page and lilt in the air long after they've been read."  It was further gratifying to be told by the editor upon acceptance "I look for stories that sing, and yours is a complete choir; The Mormon Tabernacle (the largest choir I could think of) of stories."

 

"The Denunciation" appeared online on 30 November 2021.  Just a couple of weeks later, though, the link no longer works, and the website is said to have expired.  Under the circumstances, I am going to "reprint" the story in full here, rather than let it vanish without trace.  And if you print it out, the strange colors will disappear, and it will be easier to read.  Sing, choirs of angels . . .

 

image:  Simone Martini, The Annunciation, 1333

_________________________________________

THE DENUNCIATION

 

            Lena was raised on violin lessons and minimal parental supervision.  Both were blessings in disguise as far as teenaged Lena was concerned.  Rollicking sheep in wolf's clothing, many-hued princes in the skin of frogs.  The Persian poet's "crowd of sorrows" knocking at the door, which should be welcomed in and entertained.

            Or, some might say, disasters waiting to happen.

___

 

            Every Thursday after P.E., Lena Kramer biked down Canyon Road past a quadrillion artists' galleries, with the Guarneri del Gesu riding with its seasoned blasé air on top of the schoolbooks and dirty gym shorts chucked into her basket.  Just beyond El Farol, Santa Fe's famous bar and club, and the woodyard started by Jesus (not the Jesus, she'd learned just recently), she'd turn with care onto the unpaved lane with its cluster of six bright turquoise mailboxes to get to the Riveras' house and studio.  

            She had to walk her bike from the turn on, not let the violin judder too terribly, though it was quick enough to give hergrief.  Her Aunt Ellsa had looked at violins all over Germany before she'd settled on this one, with its "sweetness, but unsurpassed depth and darkness of sound"—a special blend of qualities calling to mind the soul of her dead Maltese lover, Ellsa had been heard telling Lena's mother when she thought none of the children were in earshot.  But Saskie and Margita—several years older, and identical twins—were both annoyingly sharp-eared.  Lena not so much, which maybe didn't bode well for her musical career.

___

 

            Since ancient, high-strung Edna Pierce on the corner just up from the Kramers' had gone rather to pieces under the agonized and agonizing caterwauling of Lena's ill-tempered rendition of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," followed by baby Beethoven, and then her mostly inadvertent desecration of "Silent Night" just before her ninth Christmas, a new teacher had to be found.  Lena didn't mention the change to either of her parents.  She figured it wouldn't make any difference to them, since they always gave her $50 bills to pay with anyway, and hadn't been to either of her annual recitals.  Her father, Richard Kramer, commuted every day up to Los Alamos, and worked a ton of overtime doing important stuff on one of the proton accelerators, when he wasn't out of town at conferences; and her mother, Magda, was out of town and the country a lot as well, on buying trips and fashion weeks in the world's glamorous cities—stocking her trendy new boutique, Francisquita's on the Plaza.  

            The twins were theoretically in charge of Lena when either or both parents were away, but they were far too self-absorbed and wrapped up in their complicated goings-on with friends and boys, with field hockey and drama (both their own and that of better-versed playwrights) to pay her any mind, beyond making breakfast a living hell with taunts and slave-driving menace.

            "Get me another piece of toast, now, or you're grounded for the rest of your life.  And I want it golden, not blackened to a crisp."

            "Don't chew in that disgusting way, you cretinous changeling."

            The two of them took full advantage of the ongoing parental absences—having friends over day and night, tinting their hair strange toxic colors and lengthening their nails into talons, pincers, like Cruella de Ville about to snatch dalmatian puppies.  They vacuumed and straightened and scrubbed maniacally after parties, and kept mercifully mum about their younger sister's ever longer time away from home on Thursday afternoons and evenings, and Saturdays too, not wanting any censure or mandates about keeping a closer eye on her in future.  

___

 

            Long story short, now Lena's lessons were with Leandro Rivera.  A student at Santa Fe's University of Art and Design, hair down to his shoulders (much like Ottmar Liebert's when he came out with Nouveau Flamenco), the L of Santa Fe's beloved Lynx Quartet—more flamenco than classical, with variations on 60s rock classics thrown in too.  The other members were, in order, Yrsa (cheating a bit, since her real name was Anika and the Y name only the middle, though "it's mine, so who's to say it isn't fair?" she pointed out); Nikki, Leandro's incredible girlfriend, a sultry Irish blonde gypsy rather like Stevie Nicks; and Xue, an enigmatic short guy with no smile, who brought bags of shrimp chips (really?) to practice but despite his unadulterated lack of charm played the cello like an angel, even if Lena had been brought up firmly Humanist, with angels not allowed.  (But with big words encouraged, which she liked to look up in the elegant two-volume Oxford Thesaurus kept in the dining room with Magda's back issues of Vogue.  And she read the Bible sometimes secretly, wanting to see what she might be missing.)

            "I won't tell you otherwise," Leandro had said, studying her when she first turned up in his spacious practice room, nine and a half years old, in wayward pigtails (Atomic Tangerine in the Crayola spectrum, she had figured out), responding to an ad she'd circled twice with a Sharpie in The New Mexican.  "If it's traditional music you want to play, I'm not the man for you."  He'd placed the ad reluctantly, in any case, bemoaning the necessity to teach.

            "You are the man for me," Lena had said decisively, arms crossed, frowning at him.  "My sister Saskie has your Bobcat CD, and it's the greatest."  Other Lynx CDs, like the breeds of the animal, were Canada Lynx, Iberian Lynx, Eurasian Lynx.  Though interesting in their conception and tonality, not nearly as good, in Lena's opinion.

            "You're right," he had agreed, recognizing her potential, pocketing the cash.  "Okay—so let's do it."  

            A bargain had been struck.

            Over the next three years Leandro would guide Lena in his laid-back way (minimal supervision there, too, but like a big-brother's, far easier to be around than know-it-all sisters') through the solo violin versions of "La Bamba," "Tequila," "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," Paganini's "Caprice," Granados's "Andaluza" from 12 danzas españolas, several Piazzolla tangos, and most recently Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," which was the closest thing to religion or heaven Lena knew—except for her collection of calcite crystals, and slab of translucent green moss agate.

            Leandro was all rhythm and spice.  Leandro gave her flamenco- and zarzuela-tinged exercises, and often, afterwards, things like patatas bravas with paprika and cayenne aioli for pick-up suppers with the quartet and whoever else happened to be around—often his artist father, Almendro, whose hands from time to time were stained a magnificent parakeet green.  They ate salamis and chorizo with thick buttered bread.  Pan-seared fish with tomatoes and olives.  Studying with Leandro, and by extension Lynx, was like a serious whole-body makeover.  Whole-being.  Learning to play the violin was the least part of it.

___

 

            Arriving at her lesson the Thursday before Easter, Lena let down the kickstand and then quickly braced herself and bike and violin against the headlong onrush of the Riveras' sheepdog, a massive unkempt creature named Bathsheba, like the wife of Uriah the Hittite.  Bathsheba's unfaltering enthusiasm was old hat by now, but there were new and hidden dangers in the day that Lena didn't know would upend her erratic musical pursuits once and for all.

            The Lynx members were all at hand, after an all-night session preparing for a concert in Taos on Saturday, which would include some jazzed up versions of religious favorites—"Amazing Grace" and "Nearer My God to Thee," the Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem, their own much shortened version of the Misa Criolla, and some klezmer.  They were all running on empty and espresso fumes, taking a break to fool around briefly just when Lena poked her head in.  Leandro was playing some Tantz klezmer, at a furious pace, and Nikki and Anika whirling around the room barefoot, throw rugs rolled up.

            "Come dance," Nikki commanded.  And though Lena wanted just to stand under the drenching spray of music, notes flying about like water drops, mesmerized (or klezmerized) by Leandro's jetés and flying spicatto, he stopped and waved his bow at her like a conductor's wand to indicate her cue, seconding the directive.

            "It's a vacation day for you—might as well have some fun." 

            So, face a study in bemusement, she joined in.  But unbalanced by the breakneck dizzying rhythm, she tripped over Anika's lifted foot and in slow motion suddenly, seeing the whole thing happening clearly as it took shape, fell down and down onto her wrist—her bowing wrist, of course—intent on not falling over Xue's cello which was right there where she hadn't noticed it.  Until.  Almost too late.

            The wrist wasn't broken, it was determined, but was probably sprained.  And since she had completely flattened his bag of shrimp chips (and so very nearly the cello), Xue was even less sympathetic than usual.  Leandro, prompted by Nikki, went to look for an elastic bandage somewhere in the house, and when he'd found one Nikki attempted to wrap it, acting the whole while like a bossy mother hen.  Anika, testy from lack of sleep and this ill-timed interruption when they needed to get back to rehearsing, made some caustic remarks about all of the fuss.  And Lena finally realized, humiliated, that she was just in the way.  They had their own important things to do, and she was certainly not one of them.  She stuttered out excuses, thanks, apologies, cheeks flushed in shame, and backed out of the room.

            Feeling bad and bruised already, she couldn't bear the thought of going home.  Her mother was out of town until Tuesday, off in L.A. for some fashion event.  The twins would only add insult to injury.  She sat forlornly on the blue padded porch-swing on the Riveras' latticed portico, her violin beside her on the seat, wondering among those other hurts how in the world she'd get her bike wheeled back.  It felt beyond her, utterly.  Maybe she could just stay here forever without anyone noticing. 

            "What's up, chica?"  Leandro's father, Almendro, had come out the kitchen door with a mug of something smelling of cinnamon.

            "All down," she answered automatically, brightly, a kind of code she had perfected with her friend Tricia back in grade school.

            "A little company might help?" he offered, seeing through her brave facade.

            She was relieved to follow him out to his freestanding studio in the old tumbledown garage.  He'd fixed it up inside, and added skylights, and there in leaf dapple from the outside cottonwoods painted and painted, losing track of time, an unhappy divorce, and old Vietnam war wounds, whenever he was able.  When not painting at home he taught at the community college—continuing education.

            "A tautology of course, since education is always continuing.  It never stops!"

            He saw the humor in things, she'd discover, and maintained a healthy relationship with the absurd.  He wore a shapeless cap like that of Raffaello Sanzio, the painter Raphael, in the portrait he'd copied once—calling it "Self Portrait, If Not Mine."  She agreed that he didn't look much like the young Raphael, more like an older Javier Bardem, maybe.

            But Almendro was reverent, in a funny, easy-going way.  And Lena was used to neither reverence nor humor, in her normal life.  He kept a hand-carved wooden statue on the wide white-plastered windowsill—Saint Catherine de' Vigri, he told her, patron saint of artists—"and against temptations, more important still."  He'd draped a long strand of glow-in-the-dark Mardi Gras beads around the statue, twice around, loopy.  And against another window, this grimy, on the end wall, bottles of liquids with various things steeping in them—basil leaves and lemons, Earl Grey teabags, a sprig of juniper, with berries—"elixirs of love or health or confidence, all easily confused.  Especially when the vodka or the grappa part kicks in."  His favorite, he said, had been a homemade Frangelico, with hazelnuts and a vanilla bean, in honor of the other patron saint of artists, the divine painter of angels, Fra Angelico.

            "Could you maybe show me some of those?" Lena wanted to know, feeling the forbidden angels tugging at her, like Joey Martinez who sat behind her radiating masculine mystique during first period Geometry, arcane as hyperbolic space.  Almendro pulled a book down from a recessed shelf, saying

            "Why don't you borrow this?" 

            "Thanks so much!  We aren't allowed angels—or saints—at home."

            There was a painting of Klimt's Music on the wall next to the bookshelves.  A flower-crowned musician (muse?) intent on her golden lyre, on a starry background of royal blue.

            "That's not really by Klimt, is it?"  She frowned.  Aunt Ellsa had a real Klimt drawing in her sitting room in Freiburg, but she knew this one was famous, in the books.

            "You could say we collaborated," Almendro laughed.

            He had at one time painted knock-off Klimts, he said, and sold them to hotels in the Four Corners area, Durango, Colorado Springs, to make the conference rooms feel more like upper-class hotels in Chicago, New York.  But slowly he'd begun painting compositions of his own, interesting takes on famous paintings by famous artists, in his own style and colors.

            "Would you mind if I sketch you while we talk?" he asked.  He'd gestured to the comfy armchair under St. Catherine's kindly eye, inviting her to sit, saying "my girlfriend, Tanya, likes to read out here; she's into Ursula Le Guin."  He gave Lena a Dr. Pepper from the little fridge beside the door, and when he saw she couldn't open it with her hurt wrist, popped the pull-tab.

            Though he was soon focused on Lena's copper hair, her unknowingly expressive face—skeptical, awed, amused, aggrieved in turn—he listened to her, too, kept up the give-and-take of revelations while he worked.

            "I'm not all that crazy about playing," Lena admitted sheepishly.  "I'm really bad, I know; I mostly didn't want to disappoint my aunt.  But I love all the jazzy things Lynx does, the catchy stuff Leandro lets me mangle.  It's nice when he plays it."

            "I fear Leandro's not all that crazy about teaching, either, so maybe it isn't all you."  

            Lena shrugged and made a face, knowing the depth of her ineptitude.  Though it was true that Leandro's teaching style was definitely hands-off, sink or swim—or grab a pool tube and dogpaddle best you could.  That was, after all, part of the bargain they had struck.  After awhile the artist observed further,

            "You're here a lot—so not just for the violin?"

            "Oh, no—it's everything."  Her face bloomed like the desert after rain.  Things were so wonderfully interesting here, she told him.  Listening to the others talk, and make music.  Sitting at the far end of the practice room, with Bathsheba sprawled across her feet as she struggled over arpeggios and double stops and Leandro wandered over from time to time to correct her, then wandered back to golden Nikki in the beanbag chair, or chatted on his cellphone with Lynx's manager—a tubby guy called Ralph she'd met a few times who wore a cool turquoise ear cuff.  They didn't mind her hanging out, because they scarcely noticed she was there.  

            "It's lots friendlier being ignored by the quartet than being made to fetch and carry and be chided all the time, the way things are with my sisters."

            "Where in tarnation have you been?" Saskie or Margita asked suspiciously these days if one of them happened to be around when she got home, and caught a whiff of strange spices on her—an air of something happy, could it be?  Something was different, anyway.  But they never waited around to hear what she might have to say.

            "At home I'm pretty much what they call 'surplus to requirements.'  So it's fantastic being here.  It makes me feel like I'm in the right place for once, you know?  Like when I'm in Earth Science.  Or inside a book."

            "What do you like to read?"  The easiest of all too many questions.

            "Books about woman scientists.  Lab Girl, Radioactive, the Em Hansen mysteries about a forensic geologist, stuff like that."

            As she watched the sketches of herself take form, an alloy of paper and charcoal, she could almost feel her substance taking form as well, strangely, becoming manifest like ectoplasm at a seance.  Someone was really seeing her, long crooked nose and bony shoulder-blades and all.  Was paying honest to Jehoshaphat attention to her quirky personality and sassy take on things, besides.  To what she liked, and what she hated worse than eggs in aspic.  Treating her as pretty much worthwhile.  

            Lena exulted inwardly at this unfamiliar state.  Rejoiced at the vertiginous feeling of—what?—hatching, somehow, of shucking off the fractured shell and emerging as a full-fledged, fine-feathered chick—maybe one of those Crèvecœur chickens she'd gotten such a kick out of when Margita printed their pictures out during the project she had done on Normandy for Advanced French.  She wanted to exult out loud, to crow in full delight—when just an hour earlier she'd been at her lowest, the lowest of the low.

            "What you eat, here, is very cool as well!" she temporized, since her latest excitement was too personal, too new.

            Almendro paused his drawing, looked surprised.

            "Nothing special, really, is it?" he laughed.

            "It is if you subsist on frozen meals—recycled paper towels with a slathering of library paste—the way we do, besides my twin sisters' food substitutes.  Low-fat zero-appeal rubbish like cottage cheese and celery sticks."

            Lena explained how things were, chez Kramer.  She made another funny face, beaming but cringing for her silliness at the same time, and told Almendro about the more diverting comfort food she'd learned to make herself—"dill pickle soup, dill pickle hamburger pizza with those little bags of pizza dough I buy at Trader Joe's and roll out with a peanut butter jar, and cheddar sandwiches with grainy mustard—and pickle slices for crunch."

            "What's in the pickle soup?" he asked, intrigued.

            "Potatoes, carrots . . . things like sour cream to make it creamy."

            Later he and tawny Tanya drove her home, bike and Guarneri in the back of Tanya's Subaru, the Fra Angelico book in Lena's good hand, and a Mason jar of paella tucked into her daypack as a charm against the anti-foods.

___

 

            Lena played the afternoon's occurrences over again at home, wrapped up in a cozy down comforter, mollycoddling her arm.

            Saskie and Margita had always been twinned and inseparable, heads together (once auburn, now neon), finishing each other's sentences, each other's celery sticks, and patently ignoring their little sister.  At school Lena had no close friends or champions, either—being considered too disparaging, too assertive, too weird.  And in the end, however much she loved eavesdropping and being suffered (if not gladly) at the Riveras', in the lair of Lynx, she couldn't deny that her visits in the guise of music lessons had kept her the odd one out.

            So Leandro's kind and funny father was a clap of thunder presaging tremendous change.  His focused curiosity, his talking to her one on one . . . that strange feeling of being paid attention to.  The painter who had studied early Renaissance angels and recreated Klimt's showers of gold, looked at Lena, too.  And saw her, as she was, without judging.  The way a friend—or normal parent—would.  Not patronizing and vaguely amused, like her father's scientist colleagues from Los Alamos, her mother's stylish opera patron clientele.

            The thought of having a new friend cheered her through the lonely Easter weekend.  She sat paging through the Fra Angelico for hours in the sunny springtime garden on Sunday morning, in quiet rapture.  And later, unnoticed, she rewarmed the gift of paella for her own special dinner, cheered still more by spears of fresh asparagus, while the twins and her father ate Tofurky and boring mashed cauliflower, all in the gloomy dining room.

___

 

            Lena was drawn back to the Riveras' on Thursday, though her wrist would take weeks yet to heal.  She had a good excuse—returning the wonderful art book Almendro had loaned her.

            The artist, mixing paints, seemed pleased to see her, and asked if she would mind his painting her.

            "I'm always glad to have a model.  And you're exactly the colors of my palette."  He showed her, not kidding.  "Too bright to be let go."

            Lena's hair was copper, now, with highlights from the high desert sun.  She most always wore pink suede high tops, with serious laces, with Gudrun Sjödén leggings and a woven cotton dress or tunic, hibiscus or turmeric, from Magda's trips to Sweden—returning with suitcases full of samples for all of the girls, quite wonderfully mix-and-match, though the twins scorned them.   

            With his brush Almendro copied down the adolescent lines of her curled up in the armchair under the bright window, reading, head up at first, then down.  Then somehow caught in curve and color the quintessence of a hug—out on the little lawn with Bathsheba, the generous body and spirit of the sheepdog complementing the girl's eager and more pliant one. Harmony and counterpoint in russets, greens.  

            They talked about the book she was reading, The Naming of Names—a quest into botanical history, and about names themselves.  Hers, Lena, was a short form of Magdalena, or Magdala, a town on the Sea of Galilee.  The name of the Siberian river in Russia.  The name of Lena Horne, the wonderful jazz singer who had made her namesake wish she had a voice, a shred of musicality.  His, Almendro, was almond, from the San Joaquin or Sacramento Valley where his family had been almond farmers in past generations.  His grandfather, uncles.  He'd grown up there, come to New Mexico when he was seventeen with his wife-to-be, Leandro's mother, Loretta, who'd since moved on to San Antonio.

            "One of Ursula Le Guin's novels that Tanya made me read is set in a world with word-magic, where if you speak the true name of a thing, you can influence it.  I do believe that names matter."

            Lena went on to tell him the names of minerals she loved.  Alexandrite, Corundum (like conundrum), Devilline, Galina (evoking the goddess of calm seas) and Galaxite (with galaxies in it), Heliotrope, Leopard Skin, Meerschaum (used in making pipes, like Sherlock Holmes's), Ringwoodite, Serpentine, Smoky Quartz, Sunstone.

            "And of course the 'sardine stone' mentioned in Revelations—our Carnelian."           

            When the sheepdog would lie still no longer, Almendro stretched and stopped painting and rooted out a small book on the pigments, earth and mineral, used by artists over the years.  Ochers (used by the Australian aborigines to decorate their bodies and for celebrations), umbers, sienna, ultramarines (used by Raphael as well as da Vinci and Michelangelo).

            Later, at home, she paged through it, drank in the colors and the wonderful notion of grinding up the minerals she loved to create something new and just as wonderful.  This was something of her, in her.  She couldn't make music or art herself, but back up a few steps and she was suddenly stellar.  She could star at pigments, she knew in her bones.  Minerals spoke to her; the elemental essence of the earth was where she felt enduringly at home.  Earth Science was where she belonged, Geology her element, her "magic," as they said.

___

 

            The next week when she visited the studio among the cottonwoods, the artist painted Lena in all of her weird, unique glory—a rough sketch for the best painting he'd ever done.

            He hadn't forgotten that she'd told him, wistful, yearning, while looking at the copies of some Fra Angelicos he'd made, "We're not allowed angels."  So when she found the pair of costume wings in the old mango wood armoire among years of costumes and masks from Christmas pageants, drama classes, painting sessions, he laughed, and looked at them for a long time as if he had been struck.  And made her into an angel.  

            Fine as the Archangel Gabriel, but carrying her own message, not something others would have known or shared.  He painted her with angel wings and violin and little else—a fabulous painting he'd call with tongue in cheek "The Denunciation."  In it, Lena was wrapped loosely (well, hardly, really, but she'd after all had her back turned, and had insisted her shoulders stay bare when he'd sounded doubtful) in a soft teal and copper pashmina she found in the wardrobe, matching her copper hair which he'd looped up and pinned into a grown-up kind of loosely braided bun.  She was transformed, yet not, looking wonderfully fretful, peeved, one of those looks she had perfected as the youngest, the ignored, the much maligned.

            And inside that, somehow wistful, and lonesome too, so very much alone, knowing that whatever she said would just fall on deaf ears.  Knowing the world she lived in didn't much value angels, and that Mary would have had no time for her.

___

 

            When the painting appeared on the cover of Pasatiempo, with an accompanying interview with Lena on page three inside, it was a sensation all over town, not just in art circles.  The fallout was immediate, extreme.  Retribution was swift as the sword of Damocles; or of St. George slaying the dragon, and Shinto god Susanoon the eight-headed and eight-tailed Orochi Serpent.

            The wrathful sword of Lancelot's father was maybe much more to the point.  Because oddly, her parents were all ears, all of a sudden, and those who had scarcely acknowledged her existence suddenly acted as if they cared a great deal.

            "You can't—"

            "You couldn't—"

            "That dreadful man had no right whatsoever!"

            "What were you thinking, Lena Louise?"

            "She wasn't . . . "

            "She had no idea . . . "

            "She's only twelve, for godsake."

            "Thirteen, actually—"

            "A child, Magda.  The details are irrelevant."

            Even Aunt Ellsa chimed in, from Freiburg, expressing not unreasonable concern about the Guarneri that figured front and center too in the sensational painting.

            "I can't help shuddering to think how my present has been treated . . .  Why was she there, in any case?  I just don't understand how this could have happened."  Mostly, of course, she wanted the Guarneri back.  The young son of her latest beau was begging to take lessons, and she thought it best.

            "At least Saskie and Margita have treated the Bösendorfer I gave them with due respect."  Except for setting whopping big vases of flowers on it, leaving water rings and ruining the wood, Lena thought best not to mention.

            They were all busy anyway with sudden scruples, sudden shame.  They were contrite.  They blamed themselves.  They blamed the twins.  But not nearly as much, really, as they blamed Lena, and "that freaky artist."  There was talk of doctors—in the main, psychologists.  Lawyers.  Even a priest, at one especially stressy point.  Probably for an exorcism, Lena thought crossly, furious at all the fuss for all the wrong reasons.  It wasn't as if she wasn't naked as a bluejay in the public showers every single week after PE.  It wasn't as if her scrawny adolescent shoulders were meant to be luring, for pity's sake.  They were just meant to hold up the wings.  To shrug, as if to say "get over it."

            They'd tried to have the painting destroyed, but a collector living near The Cloisters on the Hudson River in New York had tracked Almendro down through the gallery where he had occasional showings, and made an offer the artist guessed he shouldn't refuse.  But he'd called Lena first, to see if she minded.  She didn't mind at all.  She'd scanned the wonderful image into her phone already, and it would always be with her, in every important way. 

            It would see her through the barren months of being locked away at home, again persona non grata, studying art books, cookbooks, in despair, and the transformative The World of Fluorescent Minerals she'd bought with the last $50 bill.  Listening over and over to Bolero, Albéniz, and the new Lynx CD, Hot Lynx—spicy with soul, Cajun and Creole elements.  On the cover was another of Almendro's paintings of her, more abstract and in the drenched palette of Cajun spice, which her parents never got wind of though Saskie picked up the CD one day when she saw it on the dresser, and gave Lena a knowing look, smiling quickly at her with sisterly approval.

___

 

            Her sultry classmate Joey Martinez had become suddenly attentive too, passing notes to Lena during classes.  How things had changed!  But flattered though she was to begin with, she tired very soon of his ill-judged and ill-informed advances.  She gradually became close friends with studious Eric Landry, her lab partner in Earth Science—who she learned collected fossils on weekends with his scientist cousin Janine, and just before finals asked Lena if she'd like to come along.  

            That should be dull enough to slip past the censors, she smiled sardonically—though everyone was pretty much losing interest in her again, as time went by.  And as with Lena's favorite type of rock, the magical geode, she guessed her ventures from now on would seem perfectly unremarkable from the outside, while at their heart still bursting with splendorous crystals, a world of possibilities completely overlooked by inattentive eyes.