The road taken

[Author's note: This story is about rules — and what it means to break them. Unfortunately, the Reedsy prompt editor removes all paragraph spacing upon saving. The pacing, silences, and structure were carefully designed, but the interface doesn't allow deviation this week. Consider it a frustrating collaboration: a story about conformity, forced to conform.]

Some people believe humans are sophisticated versions of apes. But we didn’t evolve from them. We evolved with them. We share a common ancestor. Along the way, we chose our own path. Equally successful, but incomprehensible to one another.

During an arts course I attended, Mrs. Lasche, a lady with pearls in her ears and glasses that she’d click loose in the middle and hang around her neck whenever she had something important to say, gave us an assignment to draw “towards the horizon.” I was a freshman back then, and hadn’t drawn anything but a stick figure when I was eight. After that, I drew Pokémon, which I couldn’t draw either, so I used thin paper, traced the lines of the Pokémon, and then colored them in. My grandmother glanced at them and thought I was actually gifted. I showed her the book and the lines I’d copied. She continued her day, relieved I wasn’t much of an artist.

There’s a hassle that comes with being an artist. Life, for example. Very problematic to be good at life and be an artist.

I assumed Mrs. Lasche would disagree. As she talked about the horizon and how to draw a simple road, trees, or shadows, she taught us to sketch so lightly that it could be wiped out with a sneeze. She’d often frown at my drawings as she passed by, studied through her glasses, clicked them in the middle, and pointed out what was “off.”

Mrs. Lasche complimented Paul’s extraordinary talent, fed by her close friendship with his charming and wealthy stepfather. We all knew.

During the second semester, Mrs. Lasche walked in with a book titled “Notable Art.” She handed everyone vague black-and-white copies of the pages, except for Paul. Paul was an artist who could break the rules, because he’d studied them carefully enough. He could interpret the rules as he pleased. The rest of us, she said, should study the rules before one dared to break them.

I longed for Mr. Peller from English, who cheered for any interpretation possible when reading Sylvia Plath or Kafka. Paul’s explanation that both Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Plath’s Metaphors were an ode to the extraordinary work of great painters was met with a curious but careful frown by Mr. Peller. “Elaborate,” he’d say, letting Paul talk for ten minutes. Peller explained art was very personal indeed, and that its interpretation depends on the receiver. I couldn’t agree more.

The relationship between Mrs. Lasche and me went from dislike to plain irritability as the year went on. Sunny landscapes, snowy landscapes, even a small hut in an open field: I was always off. On a particular day, she asked me to stay for a while after class as the other students made their way to History: A political discussion. I sat impatiently to join them.

“Any idea why I’ve asked you to stay?” Mrs. Lasche asked. I answered I didn’t. She turned to face a large window and readjusted her hair as she kept talking to me. “You haven’t studied the rules of true art.” I wanted to raise my middle finger at her back, but worried she might catch my reflection in the window. “Take van Gogh—horrible work. Any art lover knows. He wasn’t famous in his time because he didn’t learn the basic rules. I, for one, don’t bring him up during my classes, because it is not in service of my work. I am here to teach you how to achieve the extraordinary by starting with the ordinary.” She turned around. “You have no concern for the ordinary.”

I thought about flat bread and wondered whether it was the start of bread or the evolution of years and years of bread making. Did someone make bread and decide it had to be large, round, and full of bread before someone else decided it could simultaneously be flat and airy?

“It’s your horizon.” Mrs. Lasche explained as she pulled out pieces of paper from a binder. “Here,” she laid the papers on my desk. “This assignment asked for some depth, just straight through the middle. A road of any sort, slowly fading in the distance.

I looked at my drawing and was quite pleased with it. It’d been my first attempt.

“And this one,” she pulled a recent drawing from the stack. “I asked for a vanishing point at the intersection. You’ve not given me an intersection, or a vanishing point for that matter. You’ve suggested an intersection, right at the front, as if the viewer has already come a long way and is looking back. The intersection is incomplete—it only shows the road taken.”

I thought about this for a while. “So what would you say about the road taken, as a viewer?” I asked.

“As a viewer, I know it wasn’t the assignment. It was the road to choose or take, not the road taken. It didn’t follow the rules, making it redundant to think about further.”

Mrs. Lasche sighed. “I believe it is also redundant to explain further, as you seem to play with the idea of art itself. You’re mocking it, making the vanishing points, the start of a journey.”

I looked into her eyes, fairly close to mine, and wondered if she’d go home, cook dinner, and complain about my inability to understand basic art to her husband. I wondered what she’d have for dinner that evening and what she’d look like while grocery shopping. If she’d hold a zucchini in both hands, examining its properties before choosing the right one to cut up. Then I wondered if there’s a right way to cut zucchini: rounds, half moons, squares.

I didn’t pass my art class. Whenever we ran into each other in the corridors, Mrs. Lasche wouldn’t acknowledge that we’d spent a year together, and that I’d been important enough not only to judge in every art class, but also to take aside and explain the unimportance of my work.

I now study the origins of human evolution, tool making, and the influence of imagination on hominid success throughout the centuries. The innovators of that time imagined some beautiful points of view that made us move forward. And I’m sure Mrs. Lasche’s lineage stood there. Arms crossed. Wondering why some idiot spent months reshaping a stone that – we could all agree – was just a stone.