The Sickroom: A Novella by Shayna Krishnasamy

Author:Shayna Krishnasamy [Krishnasamy, Shayna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC019000
ISBN: 9780981335223
Publisher: Shayna Krishnasamy
Published: 2010-10-12T05:00:00+00:00

Part 3

In the brilliant late summer days that followed I lead a double life. Aunt Vera had accepted that my full week of sleep had essentially cured me (which, surprisingly, it had, though with all the plotting I’d hardly noticed) and so long as I “took it easy” and napped in the afternoons, allowed me to venture outside.

With my house arrest lifted, Macon and I abandoned any pretense that we weren’t friends. Freedom of movement became, to us, freedom in everything, and we wouldn’t be constrained by sneaking, by whispers. From that day on we were inseparable. It was Macon and I at our prime. Any rules Aunt Vera tried to impose, bellowed after us as we zipped through the yard (no father than the corner store, no swimming, no running), were thwarted the moment we were out of sight of the house with little or no remorse. It was summer, after all, and we were kids and delirious from months of being cooped up. We took off on our bicycles after breakfast and did as we pleased until dinner. We gorged ourselves on wild strawberries in the fields behind the house; we played games, built forts, played shark in the community pool; we linked arms and ran about the house shrieking, louder sometimes than the boys. We ran wild.

There wasn’t much painting going on. Macon finished Boy (which she’d done, strangely, in her own room, away from me—maybe she’d finally sensed the tension surrounding the piece, or maybe she’d feared Collin coming across it by accident. I didn’t know. She showed it to me only once. It was perfect. She stowed it under my bed and we didn’t speak of it again) and from then on she seemed more interested in sketching, looking for new inspiration.

On “artistic days”, and to be honest there weren’t many, we took to doing out of the ordinary things like climbing to the roof of an abandoned building at the edge of town and having a picnic of bananas and barbecue chips, or searching for the blackened firepits left behind by the teenagers who got high in the woods. Macon would settle down to draw and I would sit placidly beside her, but her art wasn’t the focus anymore, and as the days wore on I paid less and less attention to what she was drawing, falling instead into heavy daydreams and awakening startled, disoriented. Once, still fuzzy from a undisguised snooze, I couldn’t focus my eyes to see what she’d sketched and asked her repeatedly what it was (a rabbit, she insisted, though no matter how long I stared at the pad I could only make out a dragon, its jaw drawn open, readying to take its first awful bite).

I don’t know how Macon felt or what she thought during this end of summer time. To me, Macon seemed entirely happy. Sure, she wasn’t making as much art, but she had a great alternative—a real live friend—and she seemed glad to trade up for a while, to be out in the world instead of holed up in the attic with a paintbrush in her hand.

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