Day 110 - Restoration Story

Restoration Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Jane sat on the floor drawing pictures in a notebook. She always carried a notebook with her. Somewhere, stacked up in storage, she had nearly a hundred such notebooks. She drew something nearly everyday. She wasn’t social, didn’t have any friends and had on occasion been known to go weeks at a time without communicating at all. Except for the notebooks. If you knew how to look for the answers, she would communicate though the notebooks. But her father seldom asked. He was far too busy a businessman, always buying and selling something or shipping it or receiving it. He had his own notebooks, but those had numbers written in them. He had very little time for arts and crafts, but he loved his daughter and supplied her with as many notebooks as she wanted. She didn’t want much else.

The world was crumbling, but there was no time for panic. There was work to be done. Jane’s father oversaw movers who sorted and packed mementos into boxes. Jane didn’t pay any attention to what they were doing. She believed him when her father told her that they would be moving. She didn’t listen to the ‘how’ or ‘why’ but she knew it was happening. She didn’t think about it, she didn’t talk about it, and she didn’t make herself available to be talked to about it. She just drew another picture.

Jane sat and imagined and drew grass. She was afraid she would never see grass again. She understood that she was going to live in a box and that sounded all too much like a trap. She had no interest in small spaces and being constricted. But no one had asked her what she wanted.

Jane worried about what would happen to the people she knew. She worried about her father and about the fate of the world. She worried about the future and where they would end up. She didn’t like to worry. It was too scary. It was much easier to draw in her notebooks and not think about such things.

The Sistine Chapel was gone, but she had preserved Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam’ in one of her notebooks.

She was cuter than she knew.