Brushstrokes and Blushes

With a giant stretch towards the heavens, Amelia wriggles her fingers and slowly lowers them to the plate before her. The pillow-like touch of the burger and the gentle scrape of sesame seeds brush against her skin. There, from the contact alone, she could feel her magic flow from her core to the burger resting on the porcelain plate. Her golden eyes flutter shut and her lips mov out of instinct, a familiar pattern of magic and art as she threw intention toward the food before her.

It leaves with a final zap, visible in a golden arch of light, and the group surrounding her gasps in childish delight. Amelia, with a flourish, waves her arm across the plate, opens her eyes and stares down at the recipient of her power before turning to the customer with a practiced grin she's mastered over the years. "Voila," she says, and watches as the kid grabs his plate, quickly mutters his thank you, and scurries away with his friends from her booth.

Amelia slumps into her plastic lawn chair with a sigh, hardly paying attention to the group of friends as they hurry toward a bench to try their “magic-a-fied” burger and fries. It’s a pathetic spell, but the middle schoolers will practically worship her after their crush presses a kiss to their cheek during their lunch break next week. Perhaps the results will bring her more customers to the following farmer’s market.

Was this what it had come to? Placing weak intimacy spells on a child's burger? Amelia looks towards the glittering paintings beside her, hours of work embedded in the acrylic and canvas, magic seeping from the colors and rolling off the fabric in gentle waves. She thought they'd at least be a little bit enticing. With the hours of work, cost of materials, energy expended on the magic, and general eye for the artist market’s prices, she set their tags for the cost of $400…  and then proceeded to mark them down to less than $65.

The canvases each have their own magical aspects to them – but people are often afraid of what they represent. Her favorite is the black oil painting. She’d painted a faceless, androgynous person that would shape itself to who the buyer perceives themselves as. The painting would reveal their true desires, and the intention in which they need to set on their journey of self-discovery.

She sold countless nachos with spells of minor grandeur instead.

Amelia knows what the people want – they want instant gratification. They didn’t want to put any of the work in, even if the lowly spells she grants them in their meager lunches - hardly a good vessel for the types of magic she wishes to share with her community - would be brief. The people want results and a journey in art, for self-transformation specifically, is a long-lasting quest that nobody wants to pay toward.

Defeated, Amelia pulls out her cellphone to scroll through her Instagram, planning to fester in her depression by viewing the success of others. She’s gotten in three posts and the lightest burn of envy in her chest when a new customer walked up to her booth, a bag of fresh fruit and vegetables in her market bag. Amelia plasters an ingenuine smile on her face and clicks her phone off before rising from her chair. “Good afternoon,” she says politely, carefully avoiding eye contact with the bag of food at the woman’s hip. She’d hopes they’ll ask about her paintings, not about what she can do for them in this instant.

Unfortunately, her intuition is proven right as the customer pulls an orange from her bag and places it on the table. “Could you enrich this please? I’ve got a doctor’s appointment and I need to be in tip-top shape so they’ll let me off my meds.” A second person comes up behind her, a grimace on their features, but provides no follow up. They’re clearly together, and the latter seems to be supervising the girl with the orange. The person has on a brown leather vest with a stark white, long-sleeved t-shirt beneath. Their sleeves are rolled up just above their elbows, and their hair, short at the sides, long at the top, is curly and draped over their gray eyes. They have their hands in the pockets of their dark gray slacks, and though they were obviously paying close attention to this girl with an orange, their eyes seem to draw toward Amelia’s paintings. Hope swells in her chest, but Amelia quickly shoves it down and focuses on the orange before her.

“Unfortunately,” she begins with a croak. Amelia clears her throat, looking up at the customer dawned in pink, a matching leapord-print scarf tied around her head. Pity pinches at her insides, but the ferocious look of determination from the girl stops Amelia short. She sighs. “Unfortunately, magic won’t make you better in such a short amount of time, and even if it could it would be temporary-“

“That’d be fine. I just need to be off this stupid medication. I’m over it.”

A quick glance toward their friend tells Amelia that this is not the first time she sought this particular answer for her problem. Amelia grabs the orange and examines it, shaking her head gently. “The most I can do for you is grant you luck. Good fortune, if you will. It would be fleeting, and it’s possible you might miss what it has granted you, but it would come nevertheless.”

The girl in pink thinks for a moment, then turns to her friend. “What do you think, Charlie?” They shrug in response and the girl slumps her shoulders and nods. “Okay,” she says reluctantly. “How much?”

“Tell you what, I’ll give you a discount for it.”

“If it’s ‘cause I have cancer then I don’t want it. I’ll take my orange back and walk away.”

Surprise fills Amelia’s expression, and she can’t help but look at the girl’s friend, Charlie, who looks back with apology. Amelia turns back to the girl in pink and gives her a witty grin, “No, it’s because you’re a good walking advertisement if something extraordinary happens, and if it doesn’t then I can’t be held responsible for the lackluster results since you’d bought it at a bargain.” The girl scoffs, and for a moment Amelia wonders if she screwed up, but a quick glance Charlie’s expression - filled with approval - has Amelia straightening her spine.

“Fine,” says the girl in pink. “What’s the price then?”

“Let’s say twenty.”

“Twenty is a discount?!”

Amelia nods her head toward the group of boys over at the water fountain, each taking turns eating a French fry at a time. She shook her head because she warned them the magic would hardly work if spread out like that, then turns back to the girl. “I charged those kids fifty-five,” Amelia leans across the table a little bit and whispers conspiratorially “But between you and I, there was a bit of an upcharge for the smell of too much Axe body spray.” This drags an amused snort from the girl and a gentle laugh from her friend behind her. They complete their transaction and Amelia does the spell but performs with pizazz than she’d done with the kids, and the girl in pink scurries away, exclaiming to her friend that she’ll be at the bakery booth. Amelia expects the friend to follow, but they linger.

“This is beautiful work,” they say, their voice rich and smooth. Amelia feels as if she could bathe in it. She shakes the rabid thought from her brain and turns to look at the painting the person has their eyes on. “There’s magic in them?”

Amelia, slightly mesmerized, forces herself to look at the painting beside her favorite oil medium. It was done in acrylic and wisps of purple power unfurl from the canvas. The painting itself is mostly dark, a body curled in on itself in the corner of the room, bits of purple crawling toward them, nearly wrapping its tentacles around their ankles. The silhouette seems to shift further away from the purple tendrils as Charlie leans closer to it. The painting responds to their nearness, and the purple snags the painting’s silhouette's ankle, tugging it, but the silhouette doesn’t cower, it remains stoic. Amelia’s mouth presses into a thin line. She suddenly isn’t sure if this was a smart painting to have out for sale. It represents a person’s fear and how they will face it, and what better way to drive away a potential customer than to make them face the depths of their own mind?

Amelia clears her throat, “Er, yeah. It’s.. It can be deeply personal, actually. They react to whomever is near.”

The person nods contemplatively as they look over the painting and how it responds to them. Their brows shift from focus to realization as the painting continues to form itself to them. “Ah, this one’s fear then.”

For whatever reason, a blush blooms on Amelia’s cheeks. “Yeah,” she mutters, as if she’s been caught causing trouble. The two share a brief look then Charlie returns their focus to the painting. Amelia silently hopes for them to either declare their painting a masterpiece or shun her for her work. She can’t particularly explain why that is at teetering in her mind, but still, she grows more anxious by the second.

Finally, they faced her as they reached into their leather vest and pulled out their wallet. “I’ll take it. How much?”

Amelia blinks. “What?”

“How much?” At Amelia’s dumbfounded face, the person leans forward and scans the price tag. “Forty-five!? You’re joking, right?”

“I m-mean,” Amelia clears her throat, her senses finally coming to her. “I can drop it to thirty if you’d like, if you really want it, that is.”

The person looks appalled.

“Twenty-five?” Amelia tries.

A scoff pulls from Charlie’s mouth, something Amelia has been trying to avoid looking at, and they begin digging through their wallet as a boulder sized lump forms and slams itself into the pit of Amelia’s stomach. Her first sale and she just severely undersold herself because, yeah, of course she did. She’ll be talking to her therapist about this later, but for now she puts on a brave face and holds her hand out for the… She gasps.

“Will four-hundred fifty do?” Asks the person, a wad of cash in their hand thicker than Amelia has ever seen in person.

“Sorry- Sorry, no it said forty-five, but, really, we can do twenty it’s okay.”

The person rolls their eyes, albeit playfully and grabs Amelia’s wrist and forces her palm upwards and flat. They place the wad of cash in her hand and reaches for the painting, holding it away from their body with a delighted grin. “Great, I’m so excited. If we’re really adamant on the price then I’ll take that one as well,” they nod to the second painting, the one about desires, and turns back to Amelia. “Our car is a bit full. Do you deliver?”

Amelia is practically running on autopilot, so the nod she gives them is more of a reflex than an answer.

“Great, let me give you my information,” they place a gentle hand on Amelia’s arm and guides her toward the register as if she was the one buying from them. “You should probably put that somewhere safe, right?” They nod to the cash still sitting haphazardly in Amelia’s palm.

Who was this person?

They laugh, “My name’s Charlie.”

“Oh shit, I said that out loud.”

They laugh again in response, plucking a pen from a cup beside her register and motioning to the chair where her bag rest. “Do you have any paper?”

Amelia scurries to her bag and digs around for something – anything – and manages to pull out a crumbled old receipt. She flinches, but has no other paper around, so she accepts her fate and goes back to this new customer – Charlie – and hands it to them. They scan the front side and Amelia crosses her fingers and begs to her Gods that she hadn’t bought anything embarrassing. They flip it around and start scribbling. Amelia slowly opens the register and starts putting the cash away as if waiting for them to ask for the money back.

“Here you go,” Charlie says, handing the old receipt back. “Thanks, and I’ll see you soon, yeah?” They squeeze her hand gently and offer her a flirtatious wink, then waves their final goodbye as they chase after their friend who was very busy with jewelry draped across their arms a few booths over, not, in fact, at the bakery booth where she said she’d be.

Amelia is still dumbstruck, standing still and staring into the void of nothingness, flustered and overwhelmed and grateful and proud and terrified and in love and scared and- wait, huh? Amelia rolls her eyes at herself, noting other booths beginning their packing up and moves automatically to start her own. When she’s about finished she reaches into her pocket for the receipt and notes that it was from an indie sex shop because, yeah of course it was, and she had bought a bottle of lube and a magazine, though, luckily, the name of said magazine was off the receipt. Color blooms deeply on her face, and she hardly double checks the straps around her closed tarp before hopping into her truck to hide her face from the public eye.

On the back of the receipt was their name, Charlie, written in neat and fancy script, their address, and on the bottom was their phone number with the words “Call me if you need anything” with a winky face beside it. She sunk down deeper in her seat and started her engine just to run the ac if only to slightly cool her heated face, and maybe, possibly, secretly watch for Charlie and their friend slip into their large, expensive car and drive off, likely to where Amelia would be hand delivering two paintings to the most attractive person she has ever met.