Seeking Inspiration

The rain was the only sound she could hear in her studio, its light pattering forming a bubble of calm around her little room. As her brush moved lazily across the canvas, Lilah realised her eyes had drooped so far as to have stolen her vision completely; with a small jolt, she jerked herself awake once more. A glance at the painting confirmed what she had been begrudgingly expecting: its essence had mutated halfway through, and the action-packed dragon fight scene was now choked with a layer of tangible sleepiness. The reds and blacks, where before they had clashed loudly to formed jagged scales running down the creature’s back, seemed less texture and more blur. The faces of the brave adventuring party had warped slightly to give their expressions a heavier gravity – their very features seemed to be fighting sleep in the same way that Lilah had tried and failed to win. Even looking at the canvas, half-finished though it may have been, spurred a second wave of the same tranquillity that had soothed her into a defeat once already.

              With a shake of her head and a growl of frustration, Lilah pushed her project aside and buried it under a pile of general desk debris: paintbrushes, tattered sketchbooks, expired biros and broken rulers – that sort of thing. She crossed her arms and dropped her head down into their comforting embrace, then thought better of it and forced her spine to stand straight. Rain always did this to her.

              When Lilah’s client had commissioned her this piece over Twitter, Lilah had assured them that the image would be ready and shipped within two weeks’ time, if not earlier. What she hadn’t anticipated was the incessant downpour that pervaded the brickwork of her studio and whispered its calming lullabies against the skylight. This was the third time she had lost focus on her work, and the prospect of starting all over again was so daunting that she was tempted to accept her failure and slip willingly into the rain’s calming arms.

              No! Abruptly, Lilah stood up in a movement so decided that her chair seemed to run away a few inches behind her, its wheels squeaking in protest. Her client had requested a landscape painting of an epic battle: five brave adventurers against one gargantuan dragon, fighting to the death amidst craggy rocks and jagged mountain silhouettes, to be revealed during their final session of a 2-year-long DnD campaign. Not a peaceful scene depicting a party so passive and apathetic that the dragon barely noticed their existence, obscured by a sheet of blue-grey rain that Lilah had subconsciously smeared over the entire canvas. Guilt racked her body, but she knew that emotion was no better. She would have to fight this artist’s block, one way or another.

***

              Rain, she thought. Peaceful when tapping politely on the skylight, or when suspended lightly as mist in the air, but downright aggressive once you were out in it. And this rain was proper rain – none of that pathetic drizzle that you barely notice until your skin and eyelashes are coated in a layer of fuzzy moisture. This rain had weight and intention, its droplets impressively spherical, like being pelted with tiny fishbowls that shattered on impact.

              Lilah, after a long but hurried half-jog down twisting streets and over glistening cobblestones, finally found herself outside that familiar red door. Paint cracked, wood peeling, she eyed its jagged shape from underneath a rain-splattered hood. In seeing it, her mind almost seemed to take the door’s outline and remould it into the crooked, half-formed silhouette of a person.

              She remembered leaving this door behind several years ago – how many had it been now? Three? Four? The faded red barricade still stood strong, obscuring the movement she knew lurked behind it. His car was parked in the driveway, and he never walked anywhere if he could help it. Especially not to visit his daughter.

              The most difficult part was trying to make her hand cooperate, but once she had managed to actually knock on the door, she found the waiting inspired a surge of determination that was full of intoxicating adrenaline. More rain collected on her coat and her skin, but she hardly noticed as the sound of grumbling and shuffling gradually became apparent from behind that red front door. As it swung open, she watched with a sense of morbid pride the grey eyes that widened slightly from irritation into surprise.

              “Hi, Dad.”

              “Lilah.”

              She had almost forgotten how similar they looked, and now realised that in the years they had spent apart, she had grown even further into a mutation of the man, her jaw set in exactly the same way as his was at this very moment. Scraggly grey hair clung to his jaw, though, a feature she was glad she hadn’t inherited.

              “What do you want?”

              His voice was as grating as ever, and though not a demand as such, the threat of it becoming one already lurked beneath the surface like a shark circling.

              “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

              He grunted derisively. “Car broke down last week.”

              She shot a glance over at the battered old Toyota.

              “That’s a shame.”

Another grunt. “How’s your mother?”

“She’s doing really well, actually. She’s started her own business. Making jewellery and things like that.”

“Hm. She was nuts about those necklaces she always made.”

“Yeah, well, now she’s making money from them,” Lilah remarked pointedly, staring at his glinting grey eyes that had admittedly dimmed a little over the years. “On Etsy. She’s doing custom-made emotion-infused charm necklaces, kind of like my painting thing.”

“Started an online business,” her father grunted again. “Won’t last. The economy’s going to shit. She’s deluded if she thinks that’s a good investment.”

That old wave of anger pooled in Lilah’s stomach, and lapped pleadingly at her ribs.

“Well, it’s going great so far. I’ve never seen her so happy before.”

Impressively, her father managed to switch up his trademark grunt into an identically sceptical snort. “You’d better tell her to quit while she’s ahead. Crypto is where she should be investing. Tell her to take a leaf out of your dad’s book, save her the disappointment of a failed business. God, how did I end up with a family of hippies? You selling your drawings, her selling her arts and crafts, why couldn’t you have just gone to business school like your old man?”

Biting back a retort about the state of his car, of his door, of the clutter she could see behind him, Lilah instead lowered her defences against the flood of fury that now frothed within her. Allowing the colossal surge to crash upwards, spattering sea spray around her violently pulsating heart, the anger bubbled into words that finally, finally erupted, a tsunami drenching the house where she had grown up.

***

The rain lashed against the skylight, pounding to be let in, but Lilah was already soaked through. Sat at her desk, the remains of the rain dripping metronomically onto the wooden floor, the painting flowed like a riptide out of her brush as she squinted at the canvas. Aware of the cold water drying onto her hot skin, aware of the rain beating its song to fill her studio with war drums, Lilah gripped that image of her father’s frozen face tightly in her mind, feeling the thrill of victory burn in her chest. It took hardly any effort to coerce it through her arteries; the smallest nudge was enough to send the emotion racing down her arms, through her wrists, and out of her fingers to the paintbrush.

His eyes, wide and shocked, less like a predator’s and more like a child’s. His lack of creativity, of passion, of love. His jaw, slackened until it was no longer a cruel reflection of her own.

As she added the last highlights to the artwork – small glints of grey in the dragon’s narrowed eyes – she no longer attributed the slate and sharkskin colour to her father’s eyes. They had become her own.