Some stories demand to be told. I have been keeping this to myself for a long time, thinking that I’d forget what happened. But every so often, a song or the smell of an old man’s aftershave reminds me that the memory is still inside me, and won’t go away.
I was young and had found a man, though now I know that he had found me. He was a painter with a desire to paint me. He’d arrange a setting, a large cloth like a bedspread draped on a couch, and put some pillows there, a vase of flowers here and sketch me. I’d lie there, feeling his eyes on me, the center of his attention for hours. The light slanting in through the window cast the shadow of his chair, and it would crawl along the floor, and a breeze would lift the sheer curtains, then suck them out.