Why hello again, everyone! It's been a while since I posted last. I'd like to introduce this work by saying that I wrote this tonight, at one in the morning in just about twenty minutes. It is actually based on a personal expirience of mine. I have not yet edited it. Your feedback is infinately valued.
Thank you all! ~E.A. Raines
The one thing that Rachel actually liked about working at the Potterville Museum was when she got to sweep the Art Gallery. She’d put off her duties for hours on end, just to gawk at the vast works of art that surrounded her, getting lost in each one. She was in awe of them.
The fact that a person created these life-like images brush stroke by brush stroke amazed her. As she swept, she imagined that she, too, was an artist, painting a breathtaking image of the way she saw the world. How she wished that she actually possessed the talent to do so…
One cold, winter day, she’d been assigned to sweep the largest room in the gallery, her favorite. Before she began her assignment, she studied a one-hundred-and-fifty year old view of a canyon---a tradition she always upheld whenever she happened to get a chance to marvel at this work.
She heard footsteps, traveling toward her, and scrambled back to her broom and dustpan which lay lifeless against the opposite wall, beside an image of a bear on its hind legs, ready to attack. She held her breath. When she connected two middle-aged women with the footsteps, she let out a sigh of relief, and began to sweep slowly, watching them afar as they approached the wall where Rachel’s favorite painting hung proudly.
“Oh Moira!” The woman with falsely blonde hair uttered in dismay to her friend who eyed her blankly in response from where she stood, idly observing another painting a few feet to the right. “Look at this,” She ordered, and with resentment, Moira trudged over and stood next to her friend, fixing her eyes on the vast canyon.
Rachel stopped sweeping. The woman on the left pulled out a bony finger, and jabbed it at the piece. She groaned and shook her head. “I don’t know about you, Moira, but as an artist, if I made a line like that one, I would have trashed the whole thing and started over.”
Moira did not move a muscle, she just stood silently, still staring at the painting.
The woman shook her head once again, “My God, Moira, can you believe that someone would actually hang this in a Gallery? I wouldn’t even buy it for five dollars at a tag sale.” Moira stood still, but Rachel on the other hand, shifted her weight impatiently, and coughed.
The woman stiffened. She must have forgotten that I was standing here, Rachel thought. Rachel wanted to believe that the lady was intimidated by her, because suddenly, the blonde snapped her body around, pushed by Moira, who stood there, and left the room in a hurry.
Moira slowly padded out behind her, tossing Rachel an apologetic smile on her way. Rachel grinned artificially in reply.
Once the coast was clear, she threw down her broom and dustpan, and rushed back over to the painting.
She must have stood there studying it for hours---or at least that’s what she thought. She could not see the errors that the pseudo-blonde lady despised so much. At times she had stood so close, that her nose was mere inches away from the canvas. Still, she could not see what the lady had seen. Frustrated, she began to sweep again, this time pretending that she was whacking this lady in the shin.
She heard footsteps once more.
“Are you done yet?” Rachel’s pot-bellied supervisor, Frank, snapped at her when he saw that she had been polishing off the same room for quite some time.
“Yes,” Rachel replied in a small voice.
Frank began to pace around the room, his hands behind his back, and his nose stuck in the air. “You call this finished?” He bellowed, making Rachel stiffen, uncomfortably. She did not reply. From a distance, it looked fine. Tonight, Rachel actually made an effort, checking and double checking to make sure that this was a job well done.
But apparently Frank thought otherwise. He stared her in the face, fire in his eyes. “All of the time you wasted…” He muttered dejectedly.
Rachel disregarded his last statement, and looked down at her feet. When she looked back up, Frank had already turned his back to leave. She could tell he was disappointed in her.
“Hey, Frank?” She asked him, and he turned around to face her.
“What now?” He snapped rigidly.
“Have you seen a lady with artificially blonde hair milling around the gallery tonight?”
Frank narrowed his eyes, and cocked his head to the side, confused. “No,” He replied, “I have not.”
Rachel sighed. “Oh,” She replied, “That’s a shame. I think you would have liked her."
