Illustrated fiction post: Fisherman.

Hey it's Wednesday...
Here's the illustrated fiction post all around a piece of my new work on fishermen!
This is a cracker!























"He wants you to dress up as what?"

Like a bored child dragged out shopping by her mother, I stood idly behind Chase as she flipped through the dresses. I considered crawling into the middle of the rack and playing hide and seek with myself.

"A fisherman?" I said, more of a question than a statement.

"So what you’re telling me is Ray -- cooks-dinner, cleans-the-bathtub, wants-three-kids Ray -- gets off on fishermen?"

"I guess he’s not as boring and predictable as you’re painting him to be," I said, though I wasn’t mad at Chase. I had been a little surprised when Ray had brought out the slick yellow jumpsuit, but he was sheepishly ecstatic and turned on, which, like everything else about him, I found adorable. I would have dressed up like a school bus if he’d asked me to.

"Does he want to lick fish oil off your belly? Or do you have to reel him in?"

I smiled. "I really don’t know. All I saw were the pants." This was true. He was too afraid to go into details, which was the only thing still making me reluctant about this new development. It had taken him six months to even tell me about this, and I wondered why, when it was so obvious I was gaga for him, he was so afraid to share these things with me and if he was hiding anything else.

"So what are you going to do?"

I shrugged. "I’ll try anything once." I wasn’t sure why I was being so circumspect with Chase; I was ready for anything with Ray. I’d bought my ticket, sold the house, signed my name -- or whatever it is that they say. I was in it to win it with Ray, but it seemed more delicious if I kept that between me and him.

Chase held a dress against her body and squinted at herself in the mirror for a second. Then she looked up and caught my blank expression in the mirror. "Thar she blows."

We erupted into giggles, our faces flashing maniacally in the mirror.

A fiction drawing project.

Here’s Wednesdays story post: the highlight of my week created in partnership with Julia Green, fiction writer extraordinaire. We will be posting fiction and drawing together inspired by each others work, I draw, she writes, I draw in response so on and so forth. Enjoy.

While her grandmother slept, Martina stood out on the balcony and peered at the fruit stand below. Even from three floors up, she could see that the pears and apples were pockmarked and bruised. The melons were beginning to ooze and the bananas were the wrong shade of brown. She wondered who would pay for such things.

The man who ran the fruit stand always sat to its left, in a brown folding chair she saw him unfold very early in the morning when he arrived. Every day he left by mid-afternoon, so Martina, who was only able to get out for a few hours in the evening when Mrs. Dax, the next-door neighbor, could watch Nana, had never seen his face. She knew only the top of his head, the tawny circle of bare freckled scalp and the black and gray halo of hair surrounding it. And she saw his hands, also freckled, which held the newspaper at the beginning of the day and rested calmly in his lap afterward, their stasis interrupted occasionally, when some passerby pressed money into his hand in exchange for a bag of fruit.

When the fruit man sold nothing, did nothing, moved so little she wondered if he’d expired, Martina had to shift her gaze to the traffic light on the corner, staring at the green, yellow, red till her vision was splotchy and dizzying. But on the day that he looked up, searching the clouds for some definitive sign that the rain was on its way, Martina was staring right at him, right at the bald head she’d been secretly watching for three months. When he waved, she stared for a second, seeing from the corner of her eye that the light was red, and then ran back into the apartment where Nana was lightly snoring on the sofa, her nightgown bunched up, revealing her wrinkled knees.

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