Black
He told himself it was the paint.
Hidden Tracks takes its titles from songs I heard when I was the right age to let them all the way in. Then it drags them somewhere darker than the lyrics were ever willing to go. You don’t need to know the songs to get the stories. But if you do, they’re going to sit differently after this.
See all Hidden Tracks stories →
By November, Jeremy had ruined every canvas in the house.
He kept buying more.
After a while the guy at the art supply place quit asking what he was working on. He just rang up the stretched linen, the oil sticks, the blocks of clay, the palette knives, and gave Jeremy the kind of look that said he didn’t want the answer. Same look you’d give a man buying rope and bleach at ten on a Tuesday.
At home Jeremy leaned the blank canvases against the dining room wall and laid the clay out on the table to soften. Every morning he told himself the same thing. He was going to make Sam right this time.
Younger he could fake. Prettier too. What he wanted was right.
The crease beside her mouth when she was tired. The dent in her left eyebrow from wrecking her bike at eleven. The notch in her front tooth.
He was good at hands. He’d taught Sam hers.
