And I knew where to hide her now. It could work. I was very sure of this. I told her how it could, and this time she didn’t cry.
I drew myself first, getting everything just right because this was the trick that mattered most of all. Then I waited while we looked at each other, because I knew now that I loved her, even if I didn’t know as what, and there was nothing more to say, just listening for the voices and footsteps to get closer, until the keys began to click in the door, and Roni closed her eyes and nodded.
Back to the paper, concentrating very hard, blocking out everything else.
I drew her inside me.
And when I looked up again she was gone.
That was a long time ago, in a house I hardly remember, except for every square inch of the top floor, and the views. The house isn’t standing anymore.
But we’d pulled it off, waiting there innocent while they looked for her. It wasn’t as if they had to tear the place apart. Even with an entire third floor to search, there are only so many places something the size of a person can hide. I think they were a little afraid of me by this time, too. There’s what you know, and what you suspect, and what you don’t know, and they realized what they didn’t know was the biggest part of it, and so they must have decided it would be safer not to grill me too hard.
Inside, I could feel her moving, but later on she went to sleep, the way you can sleep when you’re with someone you trust.
We waited a long time, weeks and then months, for the search and suspicions to die down.
“Aren’t you ready to come out now?” I’d ask every so often.
“Just a little longer,” she’d tell me. “This is nice. This is really, really nice.”
Never in a hurry. So I asked less and less often.
Until there was no point asking anymore.
Of all the things my parents were wrong about when it came to me, why did they have to be right about this one: that the thing with the paper was something I’d grow out of someday. I don’t even know when it happened. It just did, and while whatever I put down on paper looked better than ever, it just sat there doing nothing, empty and lifeless and inert.
By now I must have gone through forests of trees, trying to remember what it was like, to recapture what once seemed so easy, so I could draw her back out of me again. But the results are always the same. One more crumpled wad of paper, one more curl of ash.
Yet still, she’s close, so close I can almost touch her.
But now her voice comes from so far away.
Called “a spectacularly unflinching writer” by Peter Straub, Brian Hodge is the author of ten novels, close to 100 short stories, and three collections of short fiction. Recent books include his second crime novel,
He lives in Colorado, where he’s at work on a gigantic new novel that doesn’t seem to want to end, and distracts himself with music and sound design, photography, Krav Maga, and organic gardening.
He used to think his drawings had mysterious powers, and still wonders if he might have once knocked a teacher flat just by thinking it.
Connect with him online at his web site (www.brianhodge.net), his new blog (www.warriorpoetblog.com), or on Facebook.
