Thank You for Ten: Short Fiction About a Little Theater

  *

  "I got the internship," she declared to the painting a week later as she parted the curtains that covered it. "Came down between me and two other people. I didn't ask why I was selected. Seems like bad luck to do that, you know?"

  Today she worked on a few spots on the boulder against which Dionysus leaned.

  "Not the most exciting section of the panting," she said later, tapping the brush gently over a few peeling spots within the gray-blackness of the paint, "but we have to take pride in the mundane details too, I think. Don't you?"

  The partial grin seemed to agree with her as she looked up into the face of the painting. She made mental notes as to how to go about tackling the eyes in a future session. "Those are going to be a headache," she said, looking into the eyes more intently. "But I've got time to think on that later."

  Returning her full attention to restoring the boulder, Alicia didn't speak again for half an hour. The blending of colors into the otherwise mundane section of the painting proved trickier than she thought it would. There were some difficult shadows down near the bottom of the painting. After several failed attempts she perfected the color, and began applying it in short, even strokes.

  "I haven't told Jack yet," she said at last. "About getting the internship. Like I said, he didn't like me applying for it in the first place. Doesn't believe in long-distance relationships." She leaned in and squinted at an unsightly glob of paint. Upon closer examination she spotted a tiny hair, (probably her own) caught in the fresh paint.

  She grabbed tweezers from her worktable and held her breath. Feeling like a surgeon she guided the tweezers right up to the edge of the canvass, clamped down on the wayward follicle and extracted it from the paint. She breathed again and placed the tweezers back on the table.

  "Jack's touchy sometimes," she went on. "Not angry, but touchy. He gets in these moods and you have to handle him just right. Otherwise it's like wearing a wet towel on your shoulders all day." She began to repair the blob of paint on the canvass. "That's why I didn't tell him about the internship yet. It's wrong I know, but I wanted a few days to just enjoy it, you know?"

  She looked up at the face again. It expressed agreement.

  "I'll tell him tonight. Or tomorrow."

  That was the last she said to the painting that morning, other than to bid it goodbye for the day before shutting the curtain at the end of her session. She grabbed her equipment and walked back into the house. It still smelled of lumber, and as far as she could tell, no progress had been made with the set since her session the previous week.

  She made a note to herself to come see whatever this show was when it opened. With one last glance at the stage she descended the aisle, clicked on her cell phone, and went through the creepy dark hallway to the waiting room on her way out.