The Small Crimes of Tiffany Templeton by Richard Fifield

Author:Richard Fifield [Fifield, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2020-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

FROM THE DESK OF TIFFANY TEMPLETON

The problem with spying on Lou Ann Holland was that she didn’t care if anybody was watching. She lived her whole life like that.

I started watching her in July, late at night, because the days were still so long. I leaned up against a concrete birdbath in her yard, hidden by hedges. Through her grimy living room window, I watched those canvases burst open like the damn peonies. I was mesmerized, and I hated that.

Lou Ann painted people, but I never saw her working from a photo, and there was never somebody reclining on her couch, trying to hold a pose. Maybe they were people she had known in her past, but made unrecognizable. Monstrous, skin improbable colors, lime green or tomato red. A woman talking on the phone, her face a nectarine. A child staring at a goldfish in a bowl, but the kid was orange and scaled, the fish painted with pale flesh. An elderly man painted like a zebra, cleaning his eyeglasses with a dirty cloth.

Lou Ann was fast, determined, occasionally frenzied. She could finish a painting in one night, and sometimes, I watched from start to finish. I’d climb back in through my bedroom window at three in the morning, exhausted, emptied, as if I’d been the one creating things. The colors swam behind my eyes when I tried to go to sleep.

For a month, I watched. One night in August, I sat down next to the birdbath, settled in with a box of raisins and a liter of Mountain Dew, ready for the show.

Dark blue, at the end of a brush, whisked across the canvas and left behind a box. Curved lines, the box became foreshortened, became an armchair. A note rang out in my heart, calling me. This was something familiar.

She continued with baby blue, and I watched her draw circles inside that chair, watched as she connected tiny circles to larger ones, until it was the shape of a man, made of marshmallows, the largest man you ever saw. I stopped breathing when the pose took shape, when the man leaned forward, chin in his hands, elbows propped up on the giant meat of his thighs. A man waiting in his beloved chair, waiting for his daughter to come home from school, waiting for the mail.

I went completely rigid, but I stopped myself from bursting through her door and slapping her face.

I jumped up and left my raisins and soda in her yard. Screw her, screw her, screw her. I ran home and crawled into bed. Shuddering breaths, eyes watering, I refused to acknowledge them as tears. I was tough, too tough for that.

The next day, I knew that Lou Ann volunteered at the food bank. I waited in the Laundromat until I saw her pass by, her purse under her arm, her shirt covered in brushstrokes that faded at the end, like tails of comets. Lou Ann cleaned her brushes, but as far as I was concerned, the rest of her was filthy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.