The Craft of Wonder
The first time it happened she was placing the final brush strokes of a train running through a deep gorge, when thick white steam had risen from the locomotive and filled the studio. It had only lasted a moment and she’d blamed the illusion on turpentine fumes.
The second time, while painting a dramatic stormy sky, icy winds had blown through the room, stirring her hair and setting the candle flames quivering. A scatter of wings had lifted from the third painting, thick impasto moths painted in a twilight garden had flickered like bits of moonlit paper through the studio. The unmistakable salt-breath of deep water, clean and sharp and wild had risen from the seascape on her fourth painting.
The magic had been brief, and each time, afterwards, Magera had doubted herself.
But doubt was getting harder to hold.
Now, Magera entered the studio with Elmer at her heels and a strange lightness in her chest. The room smelled of linseed oil and turpentine, of beeswax candles burned low the night before. Elmer, gray and beautiful in his long Persian fur, leapt onto his usual stool and looked at her with grave approval.
“Well,” she said, smiling as she set out her brushes. “If I have gone mad, at least I have an audience.”
Elmer gave a courteous mrrow.
Magera sketched lightly at first, a seated violinist, head bent over the instrument, the curve of the bow as delicate as a drawn breath. Then she began laying in color, the warm amber of varnished wood, deep plum shadows in the folds of the gown, the soft glow at the woman’s throat and cheek.
As she painted, a quiet expectancy gathered in the room.
The brush whispered over canvas. Sunlight shifted across the floorboards. Elmer’s tail twitched. Magera placed a ribbon of gold into the dark of the violin and touched the tip of her brush to the strings.
She froze when a note rang out.
It was faint, no louder than a breath across glass, but pure and unmistakable. Elmer sat up straight, ears pricked.
Magera’s heart began to pound, not with fear, but with a joy that felt more like laughter rising in her blood. She painted the bow next, long and slender, and as she shaped the fine angle of its descent, another note sounded, then another.
Music began to gather in the studio, so clear she could follow the melody as it formed. The painted violinist did not move, yet beautiful strands of music unfurled into the air, and with them came illuminated silver notes, small, luminous symbols floating off the canvas, drifting upward like golden-black fireflies, rising and circling above the easel.
Magera laughed aloud, one hand pressed to her mouth.
“It’s real,” she told Elmer, who looked as astonished as any cat could.
And still smiling, trembling with delight, she lifted her brush and painted on.
