R is for Raymond

Raymond blocks out the oak first. He wants it to look like the one that grew in the yard of his elementary school. The trunk is okay, but the oak’s branches look like arms that broke and didn’t set right.

Raymond lets his pen drop. This is a bad idea, as the bad branches testify. This mistake can end right here, with a small, inconspicuous, poorly-drawn oak in one corner of the muslin, with Raymond putting away his pen and walking out of Luke’s apartment.

If only the muslin weren’t so large. If only the oak weren’t naked and awkward and also alone, the only tree in a forest broken into farmland.

Raymond lifts his pen again. He inks in furrowed ridges on the trunk and a dozen leaves on the branches to conceal their angles. He doesn’t draw every leaf in its canopy, but enough to pretty it up. When Raymond is done, the oak’s crown is bushy and flamboyant, a nature god’s wig, and the oak is decent. Good, in fact. So is the maple he adds, young and thin, partnered with the oak while also fighting it for light. In the inch or so between them, Raymond doodles a collection of poisonous mushrooms. Next he draws a toad that stares flatly back at him. Three tiny flowers. Raymond imagines they are yellow.

Behind Raymond and his drawing, the housewarming grows louder, livelier with each tick of the clock, each new sip of liquor, snort of laughter, slurp of smoked salmon canapé. Each new attendee—they  call out for Luke, presenting him with a bottle of wine or chocolates the shade of topsoil—increases Raymond’s camouflage.

There has to be more wildlife here than a single lethargic toad. There ought to be deer, rabbit, raccoon, fox. Birds. Raymond hasn’t drawn a bird since he pitched his illustrations for a children’s dictionary years back, but Raymond’s robin is miraculously proportionate.

R is for Robin. R is for Raymond, too.

More birds. Raymond’s pen scurries out a small, greedy mass of sparrows, warring over berries in a holly tree. On the armless trunk of a dead hickory, he draws a hawk, profile imperious, beak curved, one enormous pupil. It watches a family of doves bumble in the dirt, oblivious.

Raymond hadn’t decided on a season before kneeling in front of this canvas, but the addition of a sprawling raspberry bush declares that it is the first day of true summer, like the first sips of Champagne, all flowering expectation before the heat dehydrates, leaving the forest gasping and hungover. Inside Luke’s apartment, it feels like summer, warm and whiskey-sour. Someone should open a window and let in a trickle of winter, but not Raymond. He is busy conducting a creek through the middle of the muslin, curling it through the forest in a lowercase cursive r, which Raymond adds with a sense of childish giddiness, like he is embedding a secret message in his art, like he is doodling his crush’s name in his diary.

He forgot the raccoon. He draws its face, masked eyes and sharp snout, then its hunched and running body on a log that spans the creek. He transforms the streaks of movement he meant to suggest water into the log’s bark.

At five foot eight, Raymond must stretch to reach the top of the muslin. Over three unoccupied feet, he adds a cluster of skinny saplings, a drooping willow, knots of invasive English ivy coating the ground and snaking up the trunks. Snakes! He adds two garden snakes, entwined together in a mating braid, then a pair of squirrels, cuddling on a low branch.

At the party’s epicenter, Luke is in command. He is taller than the spectral twenty-somethings that encircle him, who are drawn to him like blue jays to unshelled peanuts because Luke is small f famous. His beauty reels have sprouted fruit, ad buys and freebie promotions, and these contoured hopefuls want to know his secrets.

Raymond can’t hear Luke tonight, not over Taylor Swift and the tinkle of toasts, but he’s heard the speech before. Luke is saying that beauty influencers must balance flaw with finesse. Flaw shows you’re human. For Luke, this means the reels’ audio quality is so-so, and that he doesn’t follow a script. The finesse is in Luke’s impeccable skin, the ring light that maximizes it, and the white muslin backdrop against which he films himself. It is clean and bare and devoid of distraction. No one, Luke declares, wants to see pictures of your family or your tired poster of some dead guy’s waterlilies in the background. You must be the most interesting part of the shot.

On the party’s outskirts, Raymond rolls the kinks out of his neck and leans against Luke’s desk. He cocks his head at the final bare patch of muslin, a square foot in the top right corner. He could fill it in with more forest, but decides that this must be left to the sky. A cloudless break from the busyness of Raymond’s creation, which is as cluttered as a Bruegel, minus the suffering.

Contrary to what Luke will later say, Raymond’s drawing is not about suffering. It is the product of an introvert with a pen who has a memory the shape of an oak that grew in the yard of an elementary school, and of other things, of making love outside and of tracing a name in the soft banks of a creek. There is no suffering in it, just as there is no finesse. It is a quiet declaration made on the thirty-eighth floor of a glass-walled building downtown, on a six-by-ten roll of muslin, in the new home of an old love. It is a sentence that says, I am not a flaw.

Joanna Theiss (she/her) is a writer living in Washington, DC, though she used to call Florida home. Her short stories and flash fiction often feature birds, cats or cars (or all three) and have appeared in journals such as Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, Bending Genres, The Dribble Drabble Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Fictive Dream. One of her stories was selected as a winner of Best Microfiction 2022, and her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions. Before devoting herself to writing full time, Joanna worked as a lawyer, practicing criminal defense and international trade law, and as a health care researcher. You can find book reviews, links to her published works, and images of the collages she makes from tiny squares at www.joannatheiss.com, on Twitter @joannavtheiss and Instagram @joannatheisswrites.

Published April 15 2023