Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

She’d painted tenements and alleys on the back and side walls of the box and placed a small sculpture of a homeless man, huddled under a rough blanket of newspapers, up against the painted buildings. Moody interior lighting completed the installation, and it had all worked out rather well—for what it said, as well as how it said it—only it wasn’t clay. It wasn’t a sculpture, but some odd hybrid, and the dancing confetti didn’t come close to capturing the snow the way she’d wanted it to. Snow, such as was falling outside her window today, had both delicate presence and weight, a wonderful tension between the two that played them against each other.

She watched the storm a while longer, then finally turned back to her sculpture, thinking that at least the latest cold snap had broken. The street people would still have drifts of wet snow to deal with, but they would be spared the bitter cold of the past few nights for now.

The businessman whose commission she was working on wasn’t available today, so she was stuck working from her sketches and the photographs she’d taken during earlier sittings. She collected them from the long worktable set against the back wall with its peanut gallery of drying busts, all looking at her. One, a self-portrait, her long hair pulled back into a loose bun at the nape of the neck, was almost dry enough to make its trip to the kiln. The others had all been hollowed out, but weren’t nearly dry enough yet. Three were commissions of rather stodgy businessmen like the one she planned to work on today, the sort of portrait work that helped pay the bills. The last few were of friends—hopefully to be part of a show if she could ever get the money together to have them cast.

Returning to the modeling stand, she spread out her reference material and gave the bust a spray of water from a plastic plant mister. Then she began to work on the detailing, constantly referring to her sketches and photographs as she shaped the clay with her fingers and modeling tools.

When her doorbell rang, she sat up, startled to realize that three hours had simply slipped away unnoticed while she’d been working. She rolled her shoulder muscles and stretched her hands over her head before standing up. It didn’t help much. Her back and shoulder muscles still felt far too tight. The doorbell rang again. Giving the bust another spray of water, she draped the damp cloth back over it. She wiped her hands on her jeans as she crossed the loft, adding new streaks of wet clay to the build-up of dried clay already there, stiffening the denim.

Opening the door, she found her friend Donal Greer standing in the hallway, the shoulders of his wool pea jacket white with snow. He was a little shorter than her five-ten—the discrepancy evened out by the heels of his boots—and a few years older. At the moment, the snow on his full beard and long dark ponytail made him seem gray-haired and far older. As the snow melted, it dripped to the floor where his boots had already started a pair of puddles. He gave her such a mournful, woe-bedraggled look that she wanted to laugh.

“It’s snowing,” Donal told her The pronouncement was uttered in an Eeyore-like voice made stranger by the slightest burr of an Irish accent.

Most people didn’t see through the moroseness he liked to affect. Ellie wasn’t one of them, though it had taken her a while to catch on. They’d met at one of Jilly Coppercorn’s parties, each of them having known Jilly for ages on their own, but never quite connecting with each other until that night. They’d talked straight through the party, all the way through the night until the dawn found them in the Dear Mouse Diner, still talking. From there it seemed inevitable that they’d become a couple, and they had for a while—even living together for a few months—but eventually they realized that they were much better suited as friends.

Donal gave a heavy sigh. “Truly snowing,” he went on. “Great bloody mounds of the stuff are being dumped from the sky.”

She smiled. “So I see. Come on in.”

“I was beginning to think you weren’t home,” Donal added as he stepped inside. He looked over to the studio area. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“I needed to come up for air,” Ellie said. “How’d you know I needed a break?”

Donal shrugged and toed off his boots, one by one. They immediately began to work at forming a new puddle around themselves.

“You know me,” he said. “I know all and see all, like the wild-eyed Gaelic fortune-teller that I am. It’s bloody depressing, I tell you. Takes all the mystery out of life.”

Ellie rolled her shoulder muscles again. “I’d much prefer it if you’d suddenly decide to become a masseur,” she told him. “One who desperately needs someone to practice on.”

“It’ll never happen,” he said, passing over a paper bag with grease stains on the bottom. “Mostly because it’d take far more energy than I could ever muster.” He shed his pea jacket and dropped it against the wall by the door. “Instead, I’ve got these chocolate croissants and I was hoping to find someone to help me eat them. Would you have any coffee?”

Ellie glanced at her coffee maker and pulled a face. “Let me put on a fresh pot. That stuff’s been sitting there all day now.”

Donal followed her to the kitchen area, marked off from the rest of the loft by a kitchen table and chairs set up close to a large industrial steel sink, a long counter and the pair of old appliances that had come with the place: a bulky fridge and an equally stout stove, both dating back to the sixties. He settled in one of the chairs by the table while Ellie ground some fresh beans for the coffee maker.

“So I heard you were a bit of the hero last night,” he said.

Ellie turned to look at him. “Who told you that?”

“Tommy. I ran into him at the Dear Mouse Diner when I was having breakfast this morning with Sophie and Jilly.”

“God, what was he doing up at that time? We didn’t get the van back to Angel’s until six-thirty.”

“I don’t think he’d been to bed yet,” Donal said.

Ellie shook her head. “We have such weird schedules. It’s a wonder we can still function.”

“And you’re avoiding the subject. That was a good thing you did. Take the compliment, woman. We’re all proud of you.”

Ellie finished pouring water into the coffee maker. Turning it on, she joined Donal at the table.

“It was pretty yucky,” she said. “I don’t know what he’d choked on but it took me forever to get the taste of his vomit out of my mouth.” She looked at the bag of croissants that he’d brought. “And doesn’t that little thought do wonders for the appetite.”

“Sorry I mentioned it.”

“Don’t be.”

But she still wanted to go rinse her mouth out with mouthwash again.

“So your man’s doing fine?” Donal asked.

Ellie nodded. “I called the hospital to check on him before I went to bed this morning.” She paused, then added, “It’s weird. When Angel had us all taking that CPR course, I didn’t think I’d remember any of it. But when it was actually happening, it was like I went into automatic. I didn’t even have to think about it.”

Donal slipped into a broader Irish accent. It was easy for him to do, seeing how he’d been born and lived half his life over there. “Sure, and wouldn’t that be the whole point of the course?”

“I guess.”

Thinking about last night made Ellie remember the man who was actually a woman with her silver flask filled with Welsh whiskey.

“Have you ever tried metheglin?” she asked. “It’s this—”

“Oh, I know what it is. Miki has a friend who makes it. Not quite Guinness, mind you, but it’ll do. Bloody strong bit of the gargle. Sneaks up and gives you a kick like poteen.”